Just a little preface to this post: I was given the opportunity to speak in our zoom church service a couple of weeks ago on the topic of suffering and community. This post is a version of those thoughts. If you’d like to view the actual recording, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As7TRhdeaU8&t=2821s (my part starts around the 46:50 mark)
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In the best of times, suffering can be so isolating, especially when the suffering is internal and virtually invisible to the average observer. Although many of us are not dealing with the Coronavirus physically, the psychological weight is becoming a heavy burden to bear. The uncertainty, the feeling that the social rules are changing by the minute, and the constant vigilance every time you leave your own bubble have made this such an emotionally exhausting time to be alive.
When I was in my time of deepest suffering after losing my family, I spent so much time and energy trying to avoid the sadness. I felt like no one else could understand my pain. No one I knew had experienced the immense losses I had sustained, so I didn’t feel like I could truly let anyone into what I was experiencing. My grief became very sacred to me, very precious. I entered my own kind of isolation, though no one else could see it.
Until I was able to open up and share with other people about the grief I was hoarding, I couldn’t realize the connection that happens when we share our troubles. For me, it took going to a Motherless Daughters retreat to break that seal. I sat for a whole weekend with 9 other women who had all lost their mothers. Even though none of them had experienced the exact loss I had, something in me cracked open. Something in me realized that we have to recognize our wound before it can begin to heal-- especially when the wound is so deep.
When it comes to the pandemic, we are ‘lucky’ in a strange sense to be grieving these losses together. I have heard it said that 'we are all in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat', and I believe that’s very true-- I think some people feel like they have no boat at all and are out there drowning. And perhaps it’s easier for those who are completely drowning to cry out for help. Many of us, in our nice, cozy, houseboats are just feeling a little seasick. Who are we to complain? But we must make room for our disappointment, our worries, our fears. Being seasick for nine-months on end is pretty miserable.
After listening to a gorgeous On Being interview with Katherine May, I read her book, Wintering. She writes about the importance of making space in our lives for all of the seasons-- actual and metaphorical. As a person who loves summer and gets a little depressed in the winter, this resonated strongly with me. And as a person who has spent a lot of time avoiding grief instead of sitting with it, well, this book was like balm to my weary spirit. And the Pacific Northwest just happened to be getting a freak snowstorm the weekend after the book arrived, so I had even more of an excuse to just cozy up and read.
In Wintering, May writes: ‘Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and allow us to be weak for awhile while we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on, that sometimes, everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves, to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind. To find our own grit in our own time.’
What would that look like to make space for the pain of others? And for our own pain? We are trapped in a culture where sadness or anger or jealousy or bitterness are squelched because they are deemed inappropriate. When we comfort a friend who is sad, our first instinct is to cheer them up. Sitting in someone else's sadness can be more uncomfortable than sitting in your own sadness. We want to move past the hard feelings because they are, well, hard. But we make the mistake of minimizing those hard feelings, belittling them, making ourselves and others feel foolish for having to feel such things. Let me tell you, if you are feeling a feeling, it is valid. We live in a culture of control. Where we want to control even how we feel in any given situation. Here’s a news flash: WE CAN’T. We can control our feelings any more than we can control what causes those feelings. And feeling those feelings doesn’t make us weak; it makes us human.
One thing that has been getting me through this pandemic is TV. Lots of TV. My husband Kevin and I don’t typically like the same shows. I’m more of a Jane the Virgin-type watcher, he’s into Man in the High Castle. But one show we watched together and LOVED was Ted Lasso. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll summarize that it’s a story of an American football coach who moves to the UK to coach a soccer team, though he really knows nothing at all about soccer, and the whole show is really kind of a comedy of errors. In the final episode the team loses a big game and everyone is really bummed. Ted comes into the locker room and says this, “Be grateful you’re going through this sad moment with all these folks. Because I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad, and that is being alone and being sad. And no one in this room is alone.”
If you’re like me, the pandemic has made you feel more alone than usual. Well, except for that weird phenomena that I’m NEVER actually alone because there are always other humans in my house. We feel alone in what we are feeling. But I just want to tell you: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. You might feel alone. You might be feeling like there is no one else on the planet that feels the way you do. And though that might be true, it only makes you more alone to not share what you are feeling.
Here’s my encouragement, next time someone asks you that passing question of “how are you?” , take a moment to really think about it. How are you, really? Maybe even shock the asker with an honest answer. And practice being okay with your answer, whatever it may be.
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P.S. And if you won’t take my word for it (or Ted Lasso’s), here’s Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy with the same reminder: