Our Collective Grief...

We are living through dark times. There are mass murders on a daily basis across this country. We don’t even have time to process one school shooting before the next happens. Regardless of your feelings for Charlie Kirk, his death escalated tensions amongst the people as did the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband which went largely unrecognized. And this is just the murder factor. We aren’t even talking about anything else.

Emotions are explosive. Our world is grieving. We may shoulder different griefs. We may disagree about those griefs. But grief does not care. Grief is grief. It is an equal opportunity offender.

Grief is unpredictable. It is messy in that it is nonlinear. We bounce from anger, to sadness, to heartache, back to anger, to heartache, and so on. We do not choose the silo, it chooses us. We cannot pinpoint what will trigger it. That is out of our hands. It is also messy in that it forces up traumas and losses we previously suffered. Things we thought we healed, buried away deep in our souls. But that’s just it; our traumas never leave.

There is a place we go at our very darkest hours. When I am there, it is like sitting at the edge of nothingness. A blackhole, but pure stillness. No sound. No light. No weight. Just dead darkness. And there I sit, on the edge of my hole, my void, dangling my feet… and I look. This is where my losses go. This is where my traumas go. This is where I grieve. It is a lonely place. It is a sad. fucking. place. It is my deepest darkest place.

Every time I return, I see deeper into the void. Another layer of my soul peeled back. Which is painful. I don’t always want to look. But I’m on that edge until I do, so I might as well get it over with. Because if I don’t, if I choose to avoid it, I will live in my grief, and I will explode. I will explode at everyone and everything.

When I look away from my void, I am rejecting everything in it. I am telling myself that those things—my losses, my traumas, my sufferings—are bad, and I am bad for having them. I am telling myself that I’m not strong enough to own every fiber of my being. Or worse, that there are parts of me I wish did not exist. That I don’t care about my heartaches or how they shaped me. And that, my friends, is a very dark place to be. That is who I am when I choose to grieve without looking at my shit. You have your own traumas that shaped you, and however they’ve impacted you is exactly who YOU become when you grieve without looking, too. It’ll really fuck a person up to grieve like that.

So let me remind you… our entire world is grieving. If you know your own void, your own hole, you may be managing right now. What I’ve noticed, though, is that most people avoid their hole, their grief, at all costs. They have not made peace with themselves. And so, they are reactive, explosive, hateful. And that is a recipe for disaster.

I don’t have any sure-fire solutions. What I know is that the closer I am to someone, the more I care for their well-being. When I am connected to another human being, I naturally want what is best for them. I believe, deep down, at our most human level, that the vast majority of my fellow human beings have that same instinct.

The lack of empathy in our society is by design. It is propagandized. It is built into the algorithm. It is perpetuated by each and every one of us. We are conditioned for it. It is the only way they could have convinced us to turn on each other as we have.

What we need is basic, ground-level connection. We need to humanize each other. And we need to do it fast. That’s what this whole network is all about. I am essentially asking you all to resist our culture, our economy, our media, our politics, our SYSTEM, to rebuild ties with other human beings. Humans that may think differently than you. Humans that live differently than you. Create community beyond your community.

There is no system coming to usher in order for us. It’s literally not going to happen. No matter who you vote for, no matter what organizations you donate to, no one is going to swoop in and magically fix the collective wounds of our PEOPLE. We don’t need them to. Passing the puck is how you sell your empathy in the first place. The people have to heal our wounds directly. Reach out a helping hand. Or we stay here. Your choice.