Hello dear ones,
I hope that you’ve found some moments of softness this weekend. This newsletter is gonna be a bit of a heavy one. Content note: discussions of COVID-19, anti-vaxxers, white supremacists, and the Canadian trucker convoy. Before we jump in, a few reminders:
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THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
Today, as I walked home from an appointment, I heard horns honking in the distance. This has become a familiar sound these past few weeks, as the so-called Freedom Convoy has taken over the streets of Edmonton. I know that things have been much worse in Ottawa, where as many as 8000 people have been gathering to “protest” vaccine passport and mask mandates. What started with truckers rallying against vaccine mandates to cross the borders quickly grew to an alt-right movement with people proudly displaying confederate and nazi flags. Just a few days ago, the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, just lifted the vaccine passport mandate in response to the convoy.
Soon, I began to see the vehicles making all of the noise — Canadian flags hung in the backs of pickup trucks and the windows of cars. There were people out on the street with smiles on their faces, holding signs that read “Freedom From Fear.” I felt the tears coming to my eyes as car after car drove by. Grief coming to the surface: how can they not care about the safety of others? Why don’t they care?
Many months ago, I was having a conversation with a dear friend of mine whose brother-in-law is an anti-vaxxer who believes that COVID-19 is a government conspiracy. When I asked her how she’s able to have conversations with him, she said: “It helped when I realized that his disbelief is a trauma response.” I’ve been thinking about her statement ever since. When I watch those participating in the convoy, what I see is a group of humans unable to process the reality of the present, in which so many have lost jobs, family members, loved ones, and any sense of their “normal” lives.
I think about the words on so many signs “Freedom From Fear.” What does it mean to be free from fear? Knowing what I do about the nervous system, fear is vital to our survival. Dr. Harriet Lerner explains: “Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where ew might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble.”
One of the things that I’ve learnt through my healing journey, is that we need all of our trauma responses, including fear. As someone who lived most of my life gripped by fear in the form of intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, dissociation (the tools fear uses to keep us from feeling the pain of our trauma), I’ve longed to be free from fear. But the more I tried to cut fear out of my life, the louder it screamed. The goal, I learnt, wasn’t to be free from fear; the goal was to learn how to listen to, be present with, and collaborate with my fear.
The reality is I’m more afraid of those participating in and supporting this convoy than I am of COVID. Seeing the very faces of those who’ve said “I care more about my individual freedom matters than I do about our collective survival” terrifies me. Their inability to be with their fear, to understand its necessity to our individual and collective survival, impacts me and so many others. We are interdependent beings. Mia Mingus writes:
We should be framing this pandemic in terms of interdependence. This is the right political framing because it is the only moral and humane framing. Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how horrible our society is at valuing and practicing interdependence. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today. If we do not understand that we are interdependent with the planet we as a species will not survive.
What it has also highlighted for me is that we suck at feeling fear. Fear has been labelled as a weakness, something to hide, something to overcome. My fear is that in seeking freedom from our fear, we forgot about our interconnectedness. If we don’t feel fear, then we don’t need others to comfort us. I think about how, as a child, if I woke up in the night terrified, I’d run into my parents’ room and they’d comfort me. I honoured the fear; I sought out connection. Later, after my mom’s death, when intrusive thoughts took over my life, I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended that I was fine (except, of course, for the fact that I slept in a spare bed in my dad’s room for months). I knew that things were different. If I named the fear now, my father would dismiss me. It would take until my early twenties before I expressed my fears to another person again. This time, my best friend. And each time I did, she met me with connect. My fear was the catalyst for moving towards connection.
This makes so much sense. We think that the first thing that happens when we’re afraid is that we go into fight or flight mode. But that’s not true. First, we look for connection: is there someone here to protect me, comfort me, validate me, care for me? In the absence of a caring other, our sympathetic fight or flight is activated. And when fight or flight aren’t options, a different state of fear takes over: tonic immobilization. We freeze. We play dead. Fear becomes a permanent state rather than a fleeting emotion that we move through. The antidote to fear is connection, interdependence, care from another.
The same is true for grief. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the story of Inanna and Ereshkigal, and how collective grief heals the latter and brings the former back to life. Unfortunately we’ve been so disconnected from the practice of communal grief. Grief comes with its own cultural baggage: when we witness another’s grief, we respond with platitudes like “time heals all wounds” and “they’re in a better place now.” Prior to the invention of the funeral industry in the twentieth century, we were much more comfortable with grief. Deaths would take place at home, people would stay beside the beds of their beloved dead for days before any next steps were taken for burial (I highly recommend Caitlin Doughty’s writing if you want to learn more).
Not only do we suck and feeling fear and grief, we’re terrified of death. There is this cultural investment in being immortal. And so it makes sense to me that so many want to believe that the pandemic is a hoax, or that it’s over, or that we’ll eventually go back to “normal.” We’re experiencing death on a mass global scale. It is unprecedented. And it is terrifying. We need to feel the fear that comes with living during a pandemic. This doesn’t mean that fear needs to rule our lives. It does mean that we have to learn to befriend our fear. And that we must learn to sit with our grief.
For me, the grief I’m experiencing is the absence of care exhibited by the trucker convoy, by those who refuse to get vaccinated and who then leave the house without masks, by the lack of government policies that could protect us all, by the absence of state care for those impacted by the loss of work, and jobs, and housing. I’m grateful to be a part of queer crip communities who’ve always known that the state isn’t going to protect us. And I’m so, so scared right now by all of the people who have stopped caring — or who, perhaps, never cared — about the collective.
I sit here, at my computer, one of my cats in my lap, and I let the tears flow. And, when I’m done, I let my grief and my fear fuel my imagination of what is possible. These emotional states let me know that the world is hurting, and, that a better world is possible.
PRACTICES
I wanted to share a practice for being with our grief called Collaging the State of Our Heart. You can download a collage kit to use here.
Collaging is such an intuitive practice for me, and so it’s hard for me to say “here’s what to do” — but I’m gonna give it a try.
Print out the digital collage kit and gather any other magazines, paper, washi tape, or glueable items plus your scissors and gluestick.
The last two pages can be your backgrounds, if one calls to you. I always start my collages by choosing a background.
Select one of the many hearts that speaks to you (or all of them — there are no rules). You can also grab some construction paper and cut out your own. You may want to place it at the centre of your background. The last one I did (see above) wasn’t centered. Again: no rules.
Select any of the collage pieces that speak to you. If you know the state of your heart at the start of this collage time, then you can pick out any pieces that resonate with you. If you’re not sure what state your heart is in, let your intuition lead and help you discover where you’re at.
I usually play around with pieces quite a bit before gluing them down. If I like some placements then I take a photo on my phone so that I can come back to it.
When you feel ready: GLUE AWAY!!
If you feel like sharing yours with me, you can email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com or tag me on Instagram @softcore_trauma 🖤🖤🖤
ACTIONS
Next month, folks in my 6-month long Aligning Our Actions With Our Values container will be completing the activity Mapping Our Roles in the Social Change Ecosystem by Deepa Iyer. I found this framework to be super helpful for imagining all of the different roles that we can play in activism, and Iyer has offered so many great reflection questions.
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