Grief is good, grief is important. But after that, there must be more.

Take your moment for the cut to heal, lest it harden and scar the soul

What do you do when a heart breaks? What do you do when things fall apart and all you can do is sit and think, what now? what now? what now?

Grief is good, grief is important. Take your moment for the cut to heal, lest it harden and scar the soul. There are many reasons to mourn, and you already know them. Times are unprecedented, times are changing. Listen to this song and give yourself a moment. Yes, you are exhausted. Yes, you are sickened. Yes, you are outraged. Of course you feel numb: America has been sitting on your chest.

You think: what next? You think: what now? You see the clichés floating around Instagram, it’s always darkest before the dawn/they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds/we have each other/love conquers all. Just because they’re overused doesn’t make them untrue.

When things get bad in my head, heart and body, I make my list and I hold on to it as hard as I can. Here’s my list today:

1. Times have always been unprecedented. Sure, the nature of the challenge might be new, but the people who came before us have seen things like the Black Death, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Genghis Khan. That last one sounds like a joke but apparently that guy was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people. My point is that we have short memories, short lives, and too much information. Everything feels like it’s ending – is it not. It just feels like it is. Remember that.

2. We have each other. Again – trite, hollow, flat. But true. We – you and I – have people in our lives who love us and care about us, who grieve with us, but we have complete strangers who we march with, who we connect with over shared values that in times like this only harden and solidify. We have each other. This is so fucking powerful, I swear it.

3. Chaos is worse than tyranny. This is not chaos. It looks and smells like it, but actually, this is about money, and money means fuck all in a collapsed civilisation. So no, this is not collapse, this is the beginnings of a fascist regime – but no regime lasts for ever. Nothing lasts forever except love.

4. After the grief comes the fight. Now we mobilise, now we find new, radical ways to subvert, now we figure out new ways to do community. Now we look to our most vulnerable and think: what do you need? How can I practice radical solidarity? How can I best be your safety net, as you no doubt will be for me? If you do not know, ask. The hardest part of the fight? Believing better things will one day come.  If you cannot believe it, if you will not believe it, life becomes devoid of meaning. You must find a way to believe it, because people in far worse situations than you have believed it, and they have been right.

5. This. Toni Morrison knows things. And if you need more, there is this. And this. Life is not meaningless, art is not meaningless, unless we allow it to be. And you must not allow it to be.

6. And finally. Stubbornness is underrated. We must be bullishly, empathically, relentlessly, religiously, lovingly stubborn. Protect yourself, but do not switch off. I need you, you need you, everyone needs you, and you need them. Today we grieve, tomorrow we get up, we go on. We go on, we go on, we go on.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

Toni Morrison

A quick favour. I love writing these posts, and I intend to do them for free for as long as I can. If you enjoyed reading this, forward it to a friend (or three) who you think might like it too. It helps massively, because validation from strangers is truly the only thing that makes the horrors bearable for me.

PS: If you spotted a typo, no you didn’t.