Responding To Collective Pain

 

When I saw this quote by James Baldwin floating around on Facebook it struck me. Now I don't think Hate is the only emotion which we collectively cling to instead of dealing with our pain, but instead of focusing on which particular emotions are involved, I am going to focus on how we respond to pain both collectively and individually.

I think it often seems easier to hide our personal and collective pain under a cloak of “I’m fine”, "No one else would understand", or "X is to blame" than to face it head-on. I think this is a combination of fear that we are not strong enough by ourselves to face our pain and a tendency to want to hold on to our pain too tightly like an almost lover because we become comfortable with the familiarity of our pain and forget how to imagine something past the pain. Too often our pain becomes who we are not what we are experiencing.

But pain is not simply individual, we all also feel the collective pain of today. The pain of police shooting unarmed black individuals again and again and again. The pain of the murder of our trans siblings especially our trans siblings of color. The pain of institutions and systems which are not going far enough to protect us from COVID especially those of us who are BIPOC.

Right now there is so much individual and collective pain that is being expressed as hate, self-hate, anger, and many other big emotions that can get in our way. This hate is being expressed by individuals, political figures, and systems. 

Collectively we need to take a deep breath and honor the pain we are feeling. We need to honor the sorrow we are feeling too. We need to honor where we are in order to be able to move past our pain and therefore past our collective hate.