Grieving as an Act of Resistance
This week I’m delighted to be the featured guest on the I Did Not Sign Up for This podcast. The host, Carling, and I discuss my personal story of losing my sister to cancer, my own experience with grief, and my thoughts about how we can all be in better relationship with loss. Take a listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
One of the many things that Carling and I discuss is how societal structures and cultural expectations impact our experience after loss, and how having an awareness of this can help us reclaim the right to our pain.
I want to talk specifically about how systems like toxic capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy impact the experience of loss.
Oppressive systems such as these place a high value on productivity, efficiency, and individualism. These systems do not want you to be sad; sadness is not productive. They do not want you to take your time to heal; they want you to get back to “contributing.” They do not want you to seek collective care; they want you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep your tears behind closed doors.
Is it any wonder that our society is so terrible at letting people be present to their pain? There is an army of insidious and powerful systems working in overt and subtle ways to send the message that our sadness is unwelcome and that we would be best served by getting back to “normal” (i.e., back to work, back to doing, back to disengaging from our feelings).
I remember a time after my sister died when I started to put this together for myself, and then I started to get angry. I realized that so much of the pressure I was putting on myself to feel “better” and to “get back to life” was a result of the subtle messaging I’ve received telling me that my worth and my productivity are one and the same.
When I started to see my grief through this lens, something shifted. I began to really embody the truth that my sadness, my need for time and space, and my need for support were not problems to be solved. They were natural responses to my loss, and the only “problem” was that there were larger, harmful forces at play that were trying to convince me otherwise.
The next time you feel pressured to “move on” or to tuck away your sadness, I invite you to consider how these larger systems may be encouraging you to push away your grief and how this might be contrary to what’s best for your well-being.
How might it help to know that the problem is not you, but a society that values the wrong things? What if you were to push back by reclaiming your grief as your own?
And what might it look like if we all embraced grieving as an act of revolution - one of many ways that we can reclaim our full humanity?
As always, take gentle care of yourself.
