It was the week that George Floyd was killed, a year ago today.
The world had already started to erupt around us. The world that I cared about most was erupting, anyway — the world of movement and organizing and dreams of abolitionist futures. It was beginning to look like a moment of the whirlwind (within the whirlwind the pandemic beginning had already been), a moment when huge numbers of people are activated all at once, when big wins for liberation suddenly become possible overnight.
It would eventually turn out to be like that, anyway. It always seems obvious in retrospect. I had an inkling it could be like that then, but not one with any fire behind it. I was a deeply burnt out organizer, just barely keeping up with the work I still claimed as mine, isolated and disoriented by the two months of quarantine with my family. All I wanted was to get back that feeling of power and possibility in organizing that I had known just a few months before, the sense of feeling useful and really connected to the collective, even though (and maybe even because) the world was falling apart.
–
On Friday morning of that week, I pulled The Tower card in my daily practice. Change, disaster, humbling events. Old way are no longer of value. Awesome powers demand attention.
I thought, ‘oh yes, exactly. How perfect. That’s the state of the world right now, that’s the energy I need to tap into to see this through.’
Later that day I decided to make a painting of that card, a little watercolor sketch to help me feel into it even more. The Tower was telling me, ‘things fall apart, let them fall apart,’ and I wanted to listen, take that message as deeply in as I could.
I was almost done with the painting when Mom called me to dinner that night. I set it aside and figured I’d finish it after, still feeling disconnected but sure I was on some kind of path toward feeling my power again.
–
It was late in the meal that Mom told us. I can’t remember what we talked about before that point — the protests, probably, but with some feeling of distance. We were all so tired, so worn out from the reality of pandemic life.
Just about when we were done eating, she said suddenly, “I’m sorry guys, I have some bad news to share.”
“The doctor called with the test results today. They said that it’s cancer.”
–
Change, disaster, humbling events. Old way are no longer of value. Awesome powers demand attention.
Things fall apart, let them fall apart.
–
I never finished that painting. I still have it, tucked away in a book on transformative justice that I also never finished.
I never found a feeling of power or connection to the collective moment, either. I still tried to, for months after. I was so convinced that the only way I could feel like myself again (a version of myself that I liked, anyway) was if I was feeling useful to movement. Who was I to skip out on this biggest moment for abolitionist organizing in my lifetime, no matter what personal pain I was holding? Other people couldn’t just take a break, disengage. The people I was in touch with and trying to support in jail didn’t get to walk away from their fight for freedom because all of a sudden they were terrified for their mothers all of the time. All sorts of people had sick parents, dying parents. Why couldn’t I do this, why did this feel so completely impossible?
Things fall apart, let them fall apart.
–
When I think back to that time now, this unfathomable year later, I picture myself as holding a basket with all that my life had been before the pandemic in it, with all the things I did and the community work that defined so much of my sense of self piled up inside it. I see the universe turning me upside down over and over again, shaking me to make those cherished pieces fall out, while I clung on to all of them for dear life. I see myself clinging and clinging until I couldn’t anymore, until I was so completely shaken (and had spent enough time with a good therapist to recognize how completely shaken I had become, and enough time with good friends who reminded me I was loved and valued without all of those things) that I finally just… let them all go.
I did let them all go. Slowly, imperfectly, painfully. I did let them all go and for a good amount of time after I was confused, heartbroken, unsure of who I was without them, just as I had been worried I would be.
–
Months later, I found myself telling a version of this story to a small group as part of a resonating exercise, where each person in the group tells a personal story in turn and the role of the listeners is only to take it in, and reflect back to the storyteller the moments they felt most with them, most present.
I found myself saying how painful it was to disengage from organizing, even when I knew I had to. I found myself saying that as painful as it was, it was so much more painful to not be as emotionally present with my family as I needed to be — and that my clinging on to all that I could hold in life before was the main thing getting in my way.
I don’t think I knew the full truth of that statement until someone in my group reflected it back to me. Yes, that was it: it was painful to give up this thing that I thought defined me, but it was so much more painful to feel the ways that clinging to it was making me less than completely present with my family, with my sick mom.
Things fall apart, let them fall apart.
–
This doesn’t feel like a resolved story, a year later — just a true one. I still feel pain in my continued disconnection from organizing, sometimes, even though I’ve mostly landed in a sense of self that understands my role in collective change in a much more expansive way (more on that eventually, probably).
But if I could talk to myself a year ago, send a message to that very tired person clinging so very hard to all that was held in her basket, I would say, ‘yeah, you’re right. This is really scary. This is the apocalypse on top of apocalypse that it feels like — the entire world as you know it is on the verge of ending.
‘This is the apocalypse for you and it will also, eventually, be the moment when you stop wasting so much time in the toxic self-denial that’s almost always been the thing in the way of your growth.
‘This is the apocalypse for you and the only good news is that when you let yourself feel this fully as your apocalypse, no matter how long it takes for you to get there, the only path forward will be to spend the months ahead of you learning how to be ok when your world is ending.
‘You will spend the next ten months learning how to own your actual story, instead of trying to turn it into some idea of what the morally right story is; and you will learn to let that which needs to fall apart, fall apart, so that you can be with what is. You will learn to make meaning of what is, make a life within what is.
‘You will learn all of this just well enough that when the apocalypse actually comes — when the world as you know it actually ends — you will know how to still be ok.’
–
I am ok now, somehow. My world is still actively falling apart — a little bit more every time I remember that Mom’s not physically here anymore, which is roughly every minute I’m awake — but I’m ok.
Things are falling apart, and I’m letting them fall apart. I’m letting myself just exist as the core self that’s left when the basket is empty, when whatever I thought defined me has fallen away. That self is hurting, yes, but she is ok — she’s learning to be ok through the unraveling.
That self (me, now) is learning to understand my grief as liberation work too, in its own way.
I’m simply letting it be the only thing I have to do, anyway. I’m doing the thing that felt so very impossible a year ago: I’m letting my care for myself and my family after our world has ended be the entirety of my work, the entirety of my responsibility right now. All other work only happens if its in service to that goal, and I am finding a kind of liberation in it.
(There’s more to it than just that, this grief as liberation work thing, but I’m still working on finding the words for the rest of it.)
–
So here we are, still. More than ever before. Change, disaster, humbling events. Old way are no longer of value. Awesome powers demand attention.
Things have all fallen apart, let them keep on falling apart. You need to fall out of the tower if you’re ever going to find the ground again.