exploring our intersecting griefs

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/zDdgfrLhQb0

Last month, our government tried to help us remember and mourn the over 700,000 Americans who lost their lives to Covid-19. They did so by creating a visual space that captured the magnitude of our grief: they placed small white flags on the National mall, one flag for every person lost.  It was stunning. Terrible.

Our world is groaning under the weight of relentless uncertainty layered on top of griefs known and, likely, unknown. Many of us, in America at least, have lived through years of instability in the institutions or identities we trust. In the Bible, there is a record of weeping prophets, who lead the people in lament. God, in God’s infinite wisdom and compassion, designed us to worship and to lament. We were not made to only see sunshine and roses, but were made to fall to our knees, crying out in anger, confusion, or for comfort. All is welcome in the kingdom of God.

Freud’s concept of melancholia explains that when we don’t bear witness to our grief, when our conscious selves refuse to process loss, grief moves into our unconscious. This shoving down of grief can force a break. I think of it as fracturing our souls. We try to break off the part that hurts so we don’t have to wade through the pain. In order to grieve well, we have to be honest about what hurts.

Understanding our identities, and bearing witness to all the intersections therein, can help. The concept of intersectionality, coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, helps us understand the ways our various identities overlap and interact, impacting our experience of oppression, exclusion or abuse. An unhomed white male experiences the world differently than an unhomed, non-English speaking female does. It is helpful to keep all our identities not in silos, but to explore how they intersect, thereby shaping our experience of the world.

I’d like to invite you to explore the layers of grief embedded in your own experience. People who often experience life from the margins are hurting; people who often experience life from the center of power are hurting too. Take a moment to think about the ways you encounter the world. Does your identity feel shaken? Do you sense a break within? Where do you feel disoriented? Understanding the intersectional nature of our selves and of our experience of the world can help us grieve what we have lost, and might still be losing.

Think about it:

For politically oriented people, the last few years have been absolute tumult. If you lean democrat then you watched Obama leave office, forced to confront the short half-life of legislative achievements and the tension between honoring diverse perspectives and the failure of delivery that posture sometimes ensures.  If you lean republican, you have watched your party morph and change in exhilarating ways, and have found yourself confused by the animosity you sense from others because of your continued allegiance. You might not understand why others assume you are the bad guy, and you feel you shouldn’t have to work so hard not to offend people.

For women, the last few years have exposed so much of our hidden realities in our relationships with men. We feel liberated to talk about it, and wiped out from the constant burden to discuss and process every situation. For men, many feel attacked, and find the need to reevaluate their instincts in every interaction exhausting. They feel accused, scared to trust what used to feel normal to them.

For those in healthcare, the burden of providing empathetic care while under-resourced and over worked, the proximity to death, and the daily frustrations of wearing PPE have led to burnout and grief. Given the ubiquity of vaccines, healthcare professionals now have the added burden of treating patients who abdicated their duty to protect themselves and others, while demanding life saving treatment from people whose lives their actions put at risk.

For people of color, a slew of public murders have heightened your sense of danger in public spaces. You are undone by your own inner need to investigate your surroundings. While mostly white spaces ask you to demonstrate you are one of the “good ones,” you are constantly doing your own calculations for survival. Will this police officer know how to check her implicit bias? Will the unrecognized power of white supremacy threaten the safety of your child in this space? Who is a trustworthy? These questions never stop, and the chronic asking destroys your ability to be present in a space without a hyper-vigilant sense of double consciousness.

If you identify as an educator, you are depleted and defeated, finding a new low that you aren’t sure you can sustain. You navigate parents who are angry about masks. You work under administrators who protect your safety by taking political hits, or who increase your exposure to dangerous environments. You teach in a mask, struggling to connect with students whose faces you may not be able to fully see. You often have to cover for colleagues, and your ability to stay prepared or caught up seems to have vanished.  Even if you experience the magic of collaborative learning some days, 5-20% of your students are out each day, and you constantly have to balance progress with remediation.

These are a handful out of 100s of identities. I lift these up hoping they will inspire reflection into the tiny griefs each one of us has held in the past few years. There is room to lament, to explore, to wonder about how you carry your story. None of us are just one thing, and sometimes we need to widen our view to explore all our identities and how they intersect. In doing so, my hope is that we find compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others. When you see the weight, when you witness the grief, compassion has to follow. As your capacity to mourn your own sadness grows, your capacity to resonate with and care for others grows too. Self-compassion can help you expand your us as you remember all the suffering around you.