good grief

In case it isn't hitting your algorithm: there is (gestures widely) a LOT happening in the world right now. Multiple genocides, escalating civil tensions in the US, sentient AI, and allll the climate change things to name a few. Listen, I get it - turning away can feel like the only logical way to survive it. My nervous system is fried too, y’all.  

But that instinct to turn away is what my therapist calls backwards helping. It insulates and deludes me into believing that I can somehow extricate myself from the problems “out there” - like they are separate from what happens in my heart and mind.  

Dr. Gabor Mate says, “it’s impossible to have your eyes open and not have your heart broken.” I think we avert our eyes from the suffering of others because it doubly reminds us of our complex needs and our inability to control everything. We cling to our “me problems” like life rafts, as if they can save us from the finite business of being human. And sure, they can provide brief relief - but at a cost: a denial of our own vulnerable and foundational infrastructure.

There’s a toxic fiction in our collective subconscious that’s gone unchecked for far too long: it’s not your job to share the disproportionate load of suffering others carry. That some of us are exempt from the fundamental responsibilities of being citizens and caretakers of this planet is insane in the membrane, friends.

Just stop and absorb that for a minute.

Some folks in our human family are suffering a lot right now. The marginalized folks who suffer the most; the journalists and the activists who are pointing at the injustice with ardent fury - they’re calling us to awaken from this collective cultural fever dream and we’re missing it. Too resentful at the notion of taking on more; too detached from the outcomes of our apathy; too depleted and certain that nothing we do matters anyway.

It’s not working. We can’t live on those life rafts as people everywhere are drowning and deep down, we know this. It’s why our deflection is so obstinate. We cling to it, convinced that to acknowledge the drowning is to drown.

Let’s start there.

Once in a peer support group I had to write my own obituary. It was confronting. It brought me face to face with my mortality and made me viscerally aware of everyone else’s. Grief is the ultimate suffering. It’s a painful acknowledgement that life is a series of impending goodbyes, yes - but that’s still true when we avoid facing it. Cheryl Strayed says “part of being able to bear the things we can’t bear is not about tossing them off. Not about making the weight lighter but simply learning that we have the capacity to carry it.”

Without the ever-present edge of grief, I get complacent. Organize my life around petty conflicts and chock-full schedules and self-improvement projects and forget to ask one vital question often, if at all: what’s the point of all of this, anyway?

I think joy is the point. Not the frivolous kind that delights you, like your favorite coffee or new music from your favorite artist. That joy is useful and offers a temporary reprieve, but it’s insular and grossly ill-equipped to sustain us. The joy we find in connection with each other, though? That joy has mettle. It gives us the stubborn resolve we need to build our capacity. To recalibrate when we get lost because we do, don’t we? We get so lost chasing shadow versions of the real thing.

That connective joy is essential to survive the grief. But we have to experience the grief to remember to prioritize that joy. In this way, maybe the grief is good. Necessary, even: to dislodge us from the false comfort of our maladaptive conditioning and face our shared reality.

Lemme just get ahead of any rebuttals and say outright that I don’t intend to convince you to take any action, of any kind. This isn’t a plea to attend a local rally or study global conflicts or write to the Prime Minister or any of that. This is a call to microdose the mourning. Just acknowledge the small ways life refused to bend to your will today and really feel the injury left behind. My theory is that, when you do this consistently, you acquire the skill of knowing when to let go. To let go of the job that no longer fits, the relationship that makes you doubt yourself… and eventually, your belief that ignoring what hurts does anything more than leave you remarkably under-resourced for the inevitable.

I don’t mean to minimize the perceived risk of engaging with the right-here-and-now. We’ve been inundated with insidious messages all our lives about how not-enough it is. How dangerous. But I do want to provide testimony that living in pursuit of collective joy has right-sized that risk for me. In community, in the gorgeous agony of the present moment, I am inoculated against the holograms and toxic fictions that have separated me from my deep knowing that we belong to each other. That liberation has made me certain of what I’m made of and for and God damn I want that for all of us.

Can you even imagine what our world would look like if we prioritized the joy - not the cheap kind we buy, but the kind we build, in relationship with each other?!?

Well, fuck. I wish you would.