Dear One,
These are difficult days. There’s no way around this fact for one who chooses to bear witness, as you have. All that ache you are feeling in your heart, all that weight you are carrying in your shoulders, are reminders of how very connected you are to others. Buckets of grief are drawn up from the depths of your love. What an achingly beautiful human experience, this capacity to connect so profoundly with people you have never met.
Still, I want you to remember that your spongy soul, so quick to absorb the feelings of the world, needs wringing out once in a while. Give yourself a walk, have a good cry, read a piece of fiction, dance around the kitchen. Otherwise, you end up saturated by all the grief and there’s no place for it to go. You stop feeling anything and just go numb. Your body becomes a creaky shell you carry with you, rather than a soft, warm home.
And that is a good thing, that softness. I know it feels like a liability at times. I see you trying to protect yourself by trying to live in your head. But as much as you may think you are living in your head, that’s an impossibility, isn’t it? It all gets stored somewhere… every story of trauma, every devastating photo, every heartbreaking video gets tucked under your collar bone, or slipped under your eyelids, or adhered to your lungs, until your whole body begins to buckle with sadness.
You are not alone. There are so many caring people in the world whose hearts are also breaking, whose bodies are weighed down with grief, whose souls are saturated with suffering. You cannot singularly absorb all that hurts — you could never contain the oceans of anguish. Yet you are well-accompanied by so many soulful revolutionaries, all allowing their souls to be filled, then wringing them out to water the earth with tears.
All that we have absorbed will not be transformed in this lifetime. But trust that you will get glimpses of something new growing in the places where tears of solidarity in suffering have been shed. When you do, remember: your soul can soak in beauty too.
Love, always,
Lauren