My close friend called me this afternoon, her voice shaking.

"My fish is sick. And I don't know what to do."

We talked about the fish, the aquarium, the situation and then she said, matter-of-fact-ly, "Well, if this fish dies that's just what's happening and that'll be end of the pet fish experiment. I should start thinking what I'm going to say to my kid when he gets home."

The shift from shaken to indifferent set off my emotional spidey senses: This fish isn't dead yet. So why the jump to assume it soon would be?

"I feel there's more happening than the fish. What's going on, my love?"

She admitted that she didn't sleep because she had nightmares about ICE taking her children away. And even though she knew that was very unlikely to happen to her US citizen family, the feeling was still very real. "Because it is happening to other families and I'm overwhelmed that I can empathize so deeply but I can't stop it. And I feel like I'll never even have time to stop it because, instead, I have to do dumb shit like go back into a work meeting in 20 mins."

I get it. I've been in a fog of anticipatory grief, too.

For my own part, I am burned out on "not normalizing" and I'm feeling a strange numbness when it comes to art and solidarity. Instead of letting myself be vulnerable to all these confusing and conflicting emotions coming up, I've been trying to hide them and carry on.

How can I be a creative coach who doesn't feel any emotion for art?
How can I sign-off saying "Love + solidarity" when I feel so isolated and detached?​
​Since it's unclear how to hack this quagmire of messy humanness, let's just pretend it's not happening. Ok, Sam? Ok, Sam!

Moving away from these complicated feelings to keep up an unshaken front has so far been.... unsuccessful. I feel like shit and I'm getting very little accomplished over here. Moreover, my presence in the world has felt smaller and smaller since I started trying to hide my messy grief. Instead of soldiering on, I see myself having less impact, less connection, and less hope.

So now I'm trying something different. I'm airing out this strange (and, frankly, inconvenient) sense of grief, even though it's pretty awkward and embarrassing to do so. I'm not sharing because I think this is an obligatory emotional stage or even a common one---the embarrassment I feel comes from thinking that these feelings are a luxury of someone privileged enough in this shit society to fear so much less than my neighbors. I tell myself, I'm in the best position of anyone to keep being strong right now! To keep showing up! Where the hell do I get off slowing down this much?

I'm sharing because, like it or not, this is just where I am right now.

To say that grief "should" or "shouldn't" be there is irrelevant to the fact that it is there.

And the way to move forward is by letting ourselves go through it.

Of grief's many iterations, anticipatory grief is probably the most confusing since we feel ourselves letting go of things before they're gone. It's actually kind of terrifying. My knee-jerk aversion to feeling sadness for things that are still here makes a fuck-ton of sense. Don't give up hope! Keep swinging! What will happen if you lose faith in a better world??

It can feel damn near impossible to reconcile grief with our need to keep hope alive. In fact it's even a very scary thing to try to do (hence, my natural inclination to shut down instead of trying to integrate it).

HOWEVER. Every time I come up on an "either-or" binary like this, I know it's an invitation to get curious:

What if these two things I need to feel---grief and hope---aren't at odds with each other?

What if I have to grieve the things I'm afraid of losing in order to find hope again?

The rise of fascism is happening at a destabilizing pace. You're like, no shit! This is not news! Yet, in all our attempts to resist normalizing fascism, I do believe we've accidentally made the argument that we should get used to the dizzying pace of destabilization of our communities, our homes, our healthcare, and our sense of safety. Something terrible happened today? What else is new! Keep fighting back! Don't lose steam!

Every time I tell myself the exhaustion I feel is an intentional effect of the system, I have this little follow up in my brain that says, so get over it, babe. don't give in to those feelings.

Which.... now that I'm finally writing it out loud, is absolutely not how that works.

Knowing the grief and overwhelm are intentional tools employed for the spread of fascism, means we need to make more room for grief and overwhelm, not less. We can be grieving and overwhelmed and on the streets/in the studio/loud as hell. BUT, thinking we can avoid feelings of grief and overwhelm while showing up in these ways is a unsustainable as fuck. A direct ticket to burnout-land.

In order to be in solidarity with others, we must be in solidarity with ourselves: what we're feeling, what our bodies need, the ways we feel vulnerable.

And in order to be in solidarity with ourselves, we must be in solidarity with others. It's a spiritual and biological imperative of being human.

Letting myself feel sorrow for the fish I might lose, allows me to show up with more hope and care for the fish that's still here.

I've known for a long time that grief and gratitude are two sides of the same coin. Allowing ourselves to feel one more deeply, opens us equally to the other. Now, I'm learning that anticipatory grief and hope share a similar relationship.

Grieving the loss of the future we were hoping for is needed medicine to start imagining a new future to build hope in.

With that ---

KEEP YOUR EYES ON MINNESOTA FRIDAY! Watch this state of badasses shut it down with a general strike! If you're not in Minnesota, show solidarity by withholding your dollars, too, especially from online shopping. (I'm headed out for groceries right now!) And of course, find a rally near you and get out there!!

​
Love, solidarity & see you in the streets with my tender heart in tow,

Sam

​
P.S. - Fuck ICE.