Brutiful (brutal + beautiful)
Don't know about you, but this week felt BRUTIFUL (brutal + beautiful)...
I was paralyzed by grief this week.
The kind of aching, stop-you-in-your-tracks grief... where it was impossible to work, and the only damn thing I was capable of was putting one foot in front of the other on a long walk.
What was I grieving?
Initially I thought I was grieving all of the suffering -- the terror of people dying alone with Covid-19, the heart breaking decisions being made in hospitals about who lives vs dies when there aren't enough ventilators, the shock of people newly out of a job and panicked about how to pay rent.
But after talking with a friend, she helped me realize that underneath that grief, what I was actually feeling was the terror of my own POWERLESSNESS.
...I just didn't want to acknowledge it.
Why?
Because it's terrifying to be confronted in so many ways every. single. day. for weeks... on... end... with VULNERABILITY.
The grief for others and the outside world was a way to safely distance myself from the real terror WITHIN.
Vulnerability is THE thing I've spent most of my life avoiding.
On a material level, I hustled HARD to build a life where I never thought I'd struggle with the hunger, poverty or fear of displacement that my grandparents endured in war-torn China.
NEVER AGAIN, I thought.
On an emotional level, my family -- living the whispers of trauma passed on through the generations -- implicitly taught me that the only acceptable emotion was "happy". Darker emotions -- like sadness, anger and fear -- just weren't given space. ...because for my grandparents, if they let themselves feel them, let alone get paralyzed by them, they'd probably have died.
NEVER AGAIN, they taught me.
So I quickly learned as a child that if I felt any "inconvenient" emotions, I had to shut them down FAST. ...because no one else was going to be there with me in them. And to my young self, being with darker emotions felt like life or death, just as it had to my grandparents.
...Life or death, just like it feels RIGHT NOW.
So here in the middle of pandemic, I find myself grieving not only the enormous backlog that went ungrieved throughout my life, the collective weight of the even larger backlog of my ancestors, but also of the tender, innocent child-like parts of me that never got held in love or cultivated.
It's a lot to sit with. Especially as the inner pressure cooker of this pandemic only continues to build. It's like the Instant Pot seal has locked, and we're going to be sitting in this heat for a while (and I'm damn hoping that there's a beautiful meal that comes out of this intensity. At the very least, I'm not in the mood to clean up any dishes. ;-))
And rather than run, and repeat these ANCIENT patterns of fleeing from vulnerability, the questions I've been sitting with the last few days are --
* How do I / we turn this vulnerability into a soft strength?
* How do I / we let in the kind of power that comes from realizing just how SMALL we are in a VAST vast unknowable universe?
To give these tender parts space, one thing I've been starting to cultivate is WONDER as an antidote to powerlessness.
...Allowing the kid in me who didn't get to play freely the chance to marvel at the ways that my budding veggie garden grows when fed a steady diet of sun and water... to find awe in the way warm water feels on my body as I take in a sudsy bath... to discover joy in the everyday alchemy of cooking food.
And so that my friends is why this week has been both brutal and beautiful.
BRUTIFUL.
Would love to hear what's been brutal &/or beautiful for you (and anything in between)! And what's been supporting you in these pressure cooker times!
PS, The reason I've been writing / sharing more than I normally do is that I've been finding it helpful to make sense of what's happening in real time... and be in conversation with all of y'all. And it's also helping me learn to develop a new relationship with vulnerability. So thank you for being a part of this journey together!