keep speaking the years from
their hiding places.
keep coughing up smoke
from all the deaths you have
died.
keep the rage tender.
because the soft season will
come.
it will come...
—Nayyirah Waheed
We lose homes, beloved animals. We lose our health or limbs. We lose capability and
sometimes our skill sets. We lose agency. Sometimes we lose our freedom. We can lose
our dreams.
We lose people. (delete: things) We lose those who depart from this life, sometimes far
too soon, and often without any resolution for who and what they were to us.
Sometimes we lose faith, or whatever we conceive of as God. We grieve the lack of the
communities that we thought would sustain us but perhaps shun us with silence or
denial of our realities.
We think of the places that shame us now, but were once sources of survival at another
time.
We grieve the periods that we lived outside of our own hearts, our own warmth, our own
kindness just to survive.
We mourn for what we lost through the sexual, physical and psychological violations
that created a warped sense of what it means to be the gender we inhabit. We may have
lost the sense of what it means to be sexual, affectionate, playful, or powerful in the body
we live in.
We grieve for what is within us that was never touched by love or never touched period.
We struggle with the worn out strategies to survive, that no longer give anything to us
and in fact harm us: our addictions, our old patterns that used to seem like they were
helpful to others that neither served ourselves nor the ones we were trying to fix.
Our healing has to include finding a way to reckon--and perhaps respect with kindness--
all we hate inside ourselves and all we that we reject because of shame. This is the
demon of self-contempt that spilled over on us from the perpetrator’s own self-hatred.
Our healing has to incorporate the present circumstances of the time we are in now: the
world, the climate, the wars, the body of the earth, the landscape of fear and violence we
ourselves may be victims of. Our healing may need to face how we somehow contribute
to these circumstances by our own actions or inaction.
We grieve the loss of species, environments, cultures, disparities. We recognize the
horrific conscious and unconscious racial injustice, and profound violence to the
genders who love one another differently than we do. We note our own blindness and
disgust toward those who do not see the world as we do. Yes, this is also grief.
We ache for the loss of country, culture, family, histories, or what we hoped would be
family that would sustain us.
We look at the selfishness that we witness or engage in because of our fear.
In the words of Francis Weller, we grieve the soul of this world.
Mending ourselves must involve touching into that complicated space called
compassion--for ourselves and for others-even those we cannot love or forgive. This is a
word that has been overused and perhaps compromised with shallow lip service. The
work of recovery and grief is about release. We do not need to pretend everything has to
be okay with what has transpired nor allow rage and revenge to infect us with its own
toxicity. We release ourselves.
If we can include honest unflinching truth about ourselves, we can grieve our
depression, our isolation, our fear, our anger, our crippling disappointments and
discouragement. We can let go of the coldness or numbness that we take on as shields
of defense against the pain.
We grieve for all the time we still believe the lie that we are small, that we are unworthy.
We grieve for the ways we might have bloated our persona to be included or recognized
in ways that were not authentic to our own true self. All of this is grief beneath the mask
of who we really are and how, in the end, we long to love and be loved.
This journey is essential to being human and healed. This is recovery. It will set us free.
