An initiation into the sacred labour of grief
How’s your heart? This is the question I ask my loved ones when I want them to know I’m available for connecting vulnerably. It’s a shorthand for I’m here for it, for you, for us.
The last couple of months the question has felt like a bad fit –our hearts are clearly broken open and in pain. A more adequate line of enquiry and signal of care has been to ask about quality of sleep, stress relief, recovery strategies, and to offer support to each other tenderly and concretely amidst the grief.
Grief is pulling me deeper into its lessons.
The labour of witnessing a genocide demands the expansion of our capacity for grief. To do so, we must give up resistance to intense feelings while remaining present in multiple realities at the same time.
I’ve learned a lot about grief in the last few years, and there’s so much more to be humbled by. I know that resistance to it, stemming from an acute fear of its disruptive qualities, can lead to the most harmful coping mechanisms in people. The devastating reality of abuse in interpersonal relationships majorly stems from a dynamic of projection and denial of grief.
A denial of grief is a denial of a fundamental human experience. As such it's a form of dehumanisation itself, and ultimately a manifestation of an acute fear of life, for life is vulnerable and unpredictable. Control is an illusion, or perhaps more accurately, it’s a delusion fueled by liberal ideals.
Liberalism influences and controls our desires. Its mandate shapes Western culture, what one should deem valuable and aspire to. Liberalism proposes an objectifying relational logic towards self, others and environment, upholding ambition, comfort, and indiscriminate expression in the service of consumerism. Liberal culture turns nature into “resources”, communities into “networks” and relationships into vehicles for the fulfilment of personal and professional aspirations, trumping mutuality and interdependence.
Liberalism corrupts the interdependency of care by centring the individual, instigating competition under the premise of scarcity, and instituting the contempt that comes with the intoxicating thought pattern of “deservingness”. Liberalism tells you you deserve to be comfortable at all costs, you deserve what you want, you deserve to have more and to receive more from others with no regard for the human and ethical cost of material and relational exploitation.
Liberalism promotes dissociation from your own pain first. For it is only in the denial of the reality of personal pain that one can actively harm someone as a pre-emptive measure of self-preservation.
Fear of grief dehumanises. A skilful grief practice is a revolutionary toolkit in itself.
Grief tells me: You want to be a compassionate person? Then learn how to hold your pain first. Do not deny it, do not project it. Holding one’s pain is an act of courage, the opposite of getting stuck in victimisation, for the acceptance that one might have been a victim has the potential to progress the timeline of events, to say: That happened then, I feel pain now, I learn to manage my pain everyday. I am intimate with myself. I am vulnerable.
Grief denial is arrested development. Mental gymnastics to conceal the brittle and fragile reality of a weak heart, a scarcity of soul. Grief denial is denial of experience, of self, and ultimately a form of hatred.
Liberal culture makes a bid for your soul, attempting to limit your emotive range and the bandwidth of your solidarity. It distracts you by constantly moving the goalposts of your desires. It tells you to transcend your humanity, the ultimate maxim of the wellness industrial complex –SpiritualBypassInc. Learn the secret to manifest this. Have what you want. Biohack your nervous system —and the universe at that, transcend discomfort (and avoid compassion) by excusing anything, with the fuckedup platitude of ‘everything happens for a reason’. Avoid personal responsibility at all costs. You deserve, remember? And also, heal everything, live long, be young, control your beastly body, deny its decay, exercise it like this, eat like that, transcend suffering, the defining quality of life. Liberal culture denies life.
No one is free. Not a single decision you make is free from being infected by liberal logic. No one is above it. We are all vulnerable to the seductive and intoxicating powers of liberalism. And as I keep saying, if you think otherwise I implore you to reflect on that.
Grief literacy is a relationship sorter.
If you are not ending this year with a heart blasted open by grief while you process the shock of witnessing a genocide through the eyes of those who are enduring this rampage of extreme violence, our relational compatibility is probably nil.
If you are not shaken to your core by the depths of cruelty openly broadcast by the perpetrators of the most extreme dogmatic violence that teaches children torture and hate, that brags about indiscriminate killing under the guise of delusional victimhood, pinkwashing and omwashing while massacring, maiming, desecrating the dead, and poisoning soil and water —with utter contempt and macabre celebration, our relational compatibility is probably nil.
If you are not full of love in the humility instilled by the immensity of loss and despair, if this love doesn’t fill you with compassion for humanity and yourself; if you are not assessing the impact of all your actions and their proximity to complicity in harm, our relational compatibility is probably nil.
If you dismiss my grief, I now know you dismiss yours, grief initiated me into that knowledge, and without space for grief no relationship is possible.