I Don't Want to Talk About Grief

Seriously, isn’t there something else to talk about? Something sexier, more complex, more original. Something that can make you laugh and feel lighter. I feel fear that my sadness will weigh you down. I know you have your own sadness. Do you really need anyone else’s, too?

But it’s the thing that feels most present for me right now. And I said I was gonna write about what is true right now. So.

I feel so much resistance to saying hard truths. I wrote it out, then quickly backspaced it because it looked so ugly on the page. I want to protect us from the ugliness and fear and sorrow of it. My dad is slowly dying of Alzheimer’s. Ugh. I’ve never written a shittier sentence.

Where do I even go from here? I guess, elaborate. I don’t want to. I don’t want to admit how much I cried this week listening to an old voice memo I found from 2018, of us talking late into the night about power and privilege, theories of social change, Moore’s Law, evolving consciousness, and our personal responsibility to the movement. It hurts to remember how seen I felt by him, how much of my inner world his presence brought out. Now his curiosities are limited to if I have a boyfriend yet and if I’ll ever get married and have kids. The thing I hate defining myself by, that makes me feel inadequate, small, useless.

I feel a strong urge here to say: and yet. And yet, we can still converse. We can still discuss the drama of the birds and squirrels outside the kitchen window, though it’s simple and repetitive. We can still even sing Christmas songs together, though he now struggles to sing the right notes and the right words. He still knows me, though he sometimes forgets how. I still feel our love, and I can still ground in his slow, calming presence when the rest of our family gets fast and frenetic.

I can see the beauty and poetry in it- the circle of life, the return to Source, the growing up I’m finally doing in this process. I can always see the beauty in hard things - that’s how I’ve gotten this far.

But I hear my child self stamping her foot. But it sucks. I don’t want it. It’s not FAIR. My instinctual reaction is to reply: life’s not fair. Other kids have it way worse than you do.

She wants to cry. She wants space to be made for her to cry. What if she cries and she never stops? What if it upsets others? What if it derails us from getting things done?

As my eyes mist over, I can so clearly see how the micro is a reflection of the macro. How much violence and hurt is being inflicted on our planet, on ourselves, and how little space we create for the pain of it. Emotions are not welcome in the workplace. Tears are unacceptable in the public sphere.

I remember working for large organizations and how emotions were scripted out of our interactions through agendas and professional speech. We were an absolute mess relationally - because we still felt all the tension and frustration with each other, and all the stress and pain of the world - but couldn’t address any of it, not with campaigns to run and numbers to hit. The system had us trapped in a robotic march of forward progress.

A few days ago, a shadow of that appeared at my house’s council meeting. The group ignoring the distress of an individual at the table, their focus on policy and protocol and solution-ing disconnecting them from present emotion. His unspoken pain felt so visceral to me that I burst out crying and sobbed for a good few minutes, stopping the conversation dead in its tracks. He and other housemates got up and hugged me, sat with me through my tears and verbal expressions of fear and activation. Then we all took some slow, grounding breaths together. It felt like an opening of sorts, for more honesty, more vulnerability, and it was hard, but we came to a solution.

Feeling our pain and the pain of the world isn’t easy. Expressing it is even harder. But it feels essential to healing and trust building and genuine, healthy growth. This post seemed so scary when I first sat down to write it, but I feel clearer and stronger after doing so.

Thanks for listening <3

Akemi