A Winged Heart

Reflections for supporting readers

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

I want to write about grief, today. More than that, I want to know how to write about grief. I recently went through some immense pain, pain I tried to deny. Not because I wanted to, but because that’s my habit. I don’t know if it’s inherently difficult to write about grief, but I do know that running around this boulder, pretending it isn’t there, and distracting myself from it has felt easier than confronting it head-on. But the numbness of distraction itself comes to feel like pain, comes to manifest as pain. After not too long emptiness hurts, immensely.

So I am writing about this because I have to, not only because I want to. My grief caught up with me and froze me in multiple ways this week. It’s immensely personal, of course, but for this newsletter I’ll try to write about it broadly and not just about my experience. I hope that this will be more about our psyches than our politics, in a departure from the norm here. But, of course, I think that grief, individual as it may be, is connected to the world at large. Even more so I think that our ability to grieve is influenced by the society we live in. So the political will be present, as it always manages to be.