How fragile our systems of care...
...if we get stuck on the contractions that arise out of fear.
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I share essays exploring the themes of displace(ment) and un(be)longing 1-2 times a month that follow the stops of my 2023 Migration Tour, and sometimes bonus snapshots from the road. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.
The last essays were reflections on power and being with fallen trees in grief and acknowledgement.
Usually my Substack is prose-heavy, but today I wanted to share a comic essay about care. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is also just a big lead-up to sharing a bunch of links and readings about care, which will be this month’s bonus post. So subscribe for that and stay tuned!
Zooming out, I know that the loneliness and unsupportedness that I’m feeling isn’t isolated to me or unique to my circumstances. Even happily-coupled people situated within large communities are lamenting the lack of community and the dearth of tangible support that makes modern life so burdensome.
The pain is vast because the need is vast.
My theory is that we’re still grappling with the ripple effects of ongoing traumatic pandemic(s) on our collective nervous systems and care webs. As we head from one polycrisis into more acute polycrises, the pain keeps highlighting what our bodies need: care and each other, at a deep deep level. Our immune systems — literal and metaphorical — are weakened, and we are afraid.
Some days, I don’t know what to do with it all. Leah Manaema Avene says that naming the yearnings is part of the process of reconnecting with lineage, decolonization, and kinship networks of belonging.
On a personal fractal, I feel unprepared for what’s here now. I wish my care webs were stronger in the place to fight the ICE raids kidnapping neighbors, to navigate unemployment as an artist, and to face an upcoming medical thing.
The twin dojo of radical acceptance and radical imagination means {accepting what is} alongside {moving towards what we want}.
After the 2024 U.S. presidential election, there was a glut of Substack articles talking about community, theorizing about the lack of community, and giving advice on how to build community. The anxiety was palpable, though none of the tips shared in the articles were earth-shattering. We all know we need to get off our phones, increase friction in our lives, make eye contact, and follow-through when someone invites you to a thing.
As much as I know what to do next to create more community, I hit mini walls of resistance.
Turns out, I can’t just skip over whatever feelings arise about the ‘what is’ about my current lack of community infrastructure if that’s my present reality — whether that is the bitterness of an ancestor who felt isolated at the end of her life, the hurt of an inner child confused about why no one wants to play with them, the regret of having moved so many times that all your people are planes and planes away, or the still-unprocessed grief of relationships lost during the fallout of global lockdowns.
So that is all this post is about today: giving more space for those feelings that arise. Because there is also wisdom in those parts of ourselves who are resisting change. There is a form of care to tending to those stucknesses gently instead of overriding them.
Breathing with you, beyond one body.
This is such a beautiful essay. I'm really feeling all of these things and I love how simply you laid out all the vulnerability. Sitting with all of this today đŸ’— and sending you love from across the ocean!