Who says you can't go home?
I have been picking up long hand journaling again. Rusty and resistant at first - unable to commit to the pen not leaving the page for a meager three sheets in that familiar but estranged Ye Olde Morning Pages way. My attention fragmented, I get up mid-page, mid-sentence and abandon the effort to do any number of unimportant things that could stand to wait a few minutes, just a page more really. Usually it's to blow my nose. Sometimes to straighten up my desk or put on socks or a sweater because suddenly I'm very cold or that pile of papers and books is intolerable. Most likely it's checking my phone (FOR WHAT??) or just spacing out. I practice coming back and picking up the pen, gathering my attention back onto the page.
Like when meditation teachers say to gather your attention like a puppy who doesn't know any better, lovingly bringing it back into your lap. Only it doesn't feel loving, it feels like a persistent but growing toothache that maybe (probably) is an abscess, but I'm not quite sure yet and there hasn't been a way to get a professional close enough to look at it properly. So I poke around with my tongue in the general area. Blindly trying to figure out exactly what it is that's hurting, where the pain is coming from. A bit frantic, a bit anxious. How serious is it? Do I even want to know?
Bishop Michael Curry (of Harry and Meghan's royal wedding fame) is on an NPR segment 'How Faith Leaders Are Finding Hope in Dark Times' I hear (pre inauguration but post insurrection) out on a food fetching errand in the early dark rainy night of winter; hunched over the steering wheel to see (but also out of hyper vigilance, in genuine fear and emptiness). Finding hope? Yes, please my hope tank is empty, I want that. I turn up the volume. His advice is simply, to pose yourself three questions: 'What hurts? What helps? How can I help?" I roll the questions around in my mind. How smart, I think, to keep it simple in the midst of active trauma. What hurts? What helps? How can I help?
Somatically I can feel it there, just on the periphery. What hurts? Part of, but also underneath the loneliness and isolation. It is the first time I have a spontaneous proper cry about the State Of Things. Which is not to say I haven't cried at all during this Hellscape of a time. Not to brag, but I'm an experienced crier. An empath with a Cancer Moon. Whether I want to or not, I cry a lot. I don't really have a choice when or how so (bonus!) I'm an expert public crier. These days I just cry at home, because it's where I spend most of my time. And I have. Cried, I mean, at home. But it is familiar in a comforting way to feel hot salt water on my cheeks in the car, at a stoplight, in the middle of traffic, witnessed by a hurting world even if no one is watching. Even if no one cares. Maybe even especially so.
Familiar too, is the warm melting thaw. I think back to early days in recovery hearing and reading about how painful the return of feeling can be when we reacquaint ourselves with emotion again after surviving trauma by cutting it off. Like the pain that accompanies sensation returning to extremities after frostbite, it can be intense and excruciating at times. The classic trauma trifecta. Fight. Flight. Freeze. "I feel like I've been in a state of suspended animation", my dearest friend recently said. My body responds to this. YES. A deep freeze.
I read Sabrina Orah Mark's latest Happily essay 'We Didn't Have a Chance to Say Goodbye' and I start sobbing and can't stop. Big heaving genuine sobs. Where my tongue has been blindly feeling around for the toothache, I've found a crack. There it is. That ambiguous grief shaped thing. The outline at least. Or part of it. In between putting down and picking up my pen again, the stops and starts at long hand journaling, I can feel the uncomfortable pressure of all I have to say to myself, of all I have to witness and begin processing building up in a bottleneck. It is all rushing to the exit door which is finally opened, ready to see the light of day. I think I need a grief midwife, I write to myself. Which feels infinitely more like lovingly gathering a puppy back into my lap.
I open a bottle of champagne for inauguration night festivities in the pajama's that I have been wearing since the previous night. My hair is a tangled mess, my eyes are puffy from last nights tears watching the COVID memorial and the 400 lights at the Washington monument edging the pool of reflection and in honor of the 400,000 (and counting) lives lost. It's a bottle I'd been saving since it was gifted to me by my work secret Santa two winters ago, I think, but time has very little meaning anymore so I'm not sure. I didn't know what I had been saving it for until this moment. I cry throughout the inauguration and afterwards in relief during the inauguration concert, a steady thawing stream of salt water as I sip champagne.
I have been trauma-bonded, I think, to certain news anchors over the course of the election. And they feel almost like friends now, because, I miss seeing people's faces regularly and have seen theirs more than actual humans IRL (maybe even including my husband while he is working overnights hours away). Like Leslie Jones, I talk at (not to) the anchors throughout their segments and then get enormous satisfaction rewatching her watching the same segments noticing the same things about their new haircuts or home office backgrounds, their outfit changes (or lack thereof Kornacky!) I should probably not watch the news so much now, I tell myself, but I am so relieved to see regular press briefings and a hand on the fucking wheel I can't bear to look away. It is reorienting but in that almost tentative recalibrating way where coming back to balance is within sight, hopefully, but still new and unfamiliar. You know, like recovering from trauma. My tarot card for this month is Temperance. Fitting. I woke one morning at the end of 2020 from a dream of its image in my favorite deck and placed it with hope in a location of honor on my desk for this month.
It is during an internal battle with myself about my news consumption when I hear a loud explosive POP and look in kitchen to find the cork I had stuffed back in the half empty champagne bottle from inauguration night ejected on the floor. Even a half empty bottle can create enough pressure build up, I suppose, to do that. Though I can't imagine how. It is Friday. I can't concentrate on work. I feel distracted. The isolation and loneliness that has built up inside of me pushing, pushing, pushing to be witnessed along with the countless other unnamed things behind it trying to squeeze through the newly opened Exit door, among them the big one that I am just starting to see the shape of. My first vaccine was supposed to be today so that I can volunteer at our KP vaccine clinics but it has been cancelled along with many others. I am so angry about the vaccine stockpile being a lie, and I am not surprised. I'm sick and tired of being right about this shit and sick and tired of sick and tired being my baseline. I don't want to deal with that, or with work, or the fact that I can't seem to change out of my pajama's most days.
So instead I indulge in some very self destructive procrastination spiraling, which I tell myself is well earned and maybe even long overdue. You deserve it. A totally toxic and unfettered voyeuristic social media dive. It's been so long. Just let yourself. It has been a long time. I've avoided facebook mostly since after the 2016 election and even more so when we moved to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago. It was a weird reminder of a place that was no longer home but was all the same the memory of home, changing everyday in ways that I didn't have access to except through social media. It compounded the standard issue "normal"(?) feelings of isolation and loneliness that come with moving. Time was marching on, family, friends, children, growing and getting older. But I didn't want to witness it that way, apart and distant from. A voyeur. When I was there in person it felt like being deposited from a time machine, I didn't feel different myself but everything and everyone had changed so drastically I couldn't understand how or when it had happened.
As with any good social media spiral I start with innocent enough intentions. I don't go directly to the places I know I should avoid. But it's a short walk from the nostalgia and yearning for home, family, and past to the unencumbered toxicity of interconnectedness and morbid curiosity. A tender probing of the ambiguous grief sized shape of not being able to really go home to the home that was ever again butts up against that unnamed and unnamable thing, that the world will never be the same. That a place that was home would never be the home I knew but especially so now. Not after the devastation of wildfires, pandemic, economic destruction. There is no way to turn back time. But what would I find if I did? The same toxic bullshit probably. But maybe anything can be rose colored compared to autocratic facism, climate crisis and a global pandemic. The short walk to mildly toxic places leads inevitably to the deadlier toxic places. My mom's family. My brother tells me they are Tr*mper's. Of course they are. I am surprised in a way I should not be. But then it has been decades since I have seen them or heard of them in any significant way. They are and have been thoroughly off my radar. But I search them one by one, just to see how bad it is, my morbid curiosity rising.
My brother's argument to my parents to sway them against the tide of Trump has been that these people, my Mom's family, have values in line with Trumps. It's a brilliant illustration I am proud of him for making. He relays that they bristle and argue to the point of yelling at him (which is rare, he can reach them more easily than I) and that he is surprised that this doesn't convince them. And even though I am so proud of him, I feel the surge of emotional charge when I explain how I am not surprised they can't see the connection, it took them almost 30 years to see the truth of sexual abuse history in her family and face it squarely, more or less. My social media dive uncovers one by one the obvious QAnon tinged white supremacist Trumpism of my Mom's family, a dark path that ends with seeing that on my uncles page he has posted a meme, a photo of a man and woman at a bar drinking with their arms entwined in a marriage toast that reads: "As I gazed into her eyes, my knees got weak and I could feel the butterflies in my stomach...I knew right then and there! I had roofied the wrong glass"
What hurts?
I slam my laptop shut after deciding not to screenshot the meme and send it to my brother. I will tell him later. The pain of this moment meets the pain of the others as they burst through the opened Exit door. Me first! It cries. Me first! they cry. And then I cry. A lot.
What helps?
There are the basics - drink water, eat some nourishing food - easier said than done but yes. Get some movement. The obvious. My brother tells me too that I should really stop watching so much news. I don't disagree. Go outside, take walks he says. Yes, yes. That. Maybe micro dose. Sure. Couldn't hurt. Watch a comedy, give yourself a break. Gladly. But what I need, what I really fucking need is witnessing, whole, undiluted, complete. And maybe this is that? And maybe it is something I can only give to myself. In this relatively safe place. But wouldn't it be great if we could share it with each other, in our time. Without fear of retaliation. With the healing balm of listening.
How can I help?
I want to listen, I want to help witness, maybe I can help be a midwife to your grief if I learn how to midwife mine. I'm figuring it out, how to help, and realizing how hungry I am to be of help. I have been trying, in my way, feeling like it is never enough, a drop in the bucket.