We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction… We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.
— Sonya Renee Taylor
In the last week I have hugged dear friends and family members I have not seen in the flesh in over a year. I have traveled by airplane for the first time in 18 months. I have enjoyed a meal while sitting inside a restaurant for the first time in 15 months. I have found myself in public settings anxiously trying to remember how to do the most innocuous things— hold eye contact, negotiate personal space with strangers, and respond when asked a question.
The anxiety that blossomed in my chest as I sat at the airport terminal two days ago, getting ready to travel outside of Los Angeles for the first time since pandemic, was visceral and undeniable. While I watched a troubling sea of normalcy unfold around me— people bustling to get in line, buying snacks from the kiosk, scrolling on their phones— all I could manage was slow and deliberate breathing.
I was reminded in that moment that—sure, the world around us may be “going back to normal”, but our bodies know better.
Our bodies hold the memory of quarantining in our homes for most of the last 15 months. Of watching as COVID death tolls skyrocketed around the world— over 500,000 deaths in the US alone, with numbers in Brazil (400,000+) and India (300,000+) still climbing. Of witnessing (and partaking in) an explosion of social uprisings—in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, state-sanctioned killings in Colombia, and the devastating 11-day bombing of Gaza by Israeli military.
In this moment, we are reckoning with death and grief in unprecedented ways. And I can’t help but notice the similarities between this collective reckoning and my own from this past year.
Last summer, I had a 14-week miscarriage, following a 10-week pregnancy. And earlier this year, I had a 5-week miscarriage, following a 6-week pregnancy. My journey with pregnancy loss has deeply defined me— something I have tried to be open about through social media and blog posts, in an attempt to normalize this devastating and painfully taboo subject that an estimated 1 in 3 pregnant people experience.
I can’t help but notice the painful poetry of this past year, having experienced the deepest grief of my life as I watched the world around me do the same.
I do not know what postpartum is like when it follows the birth of a living child. I only know it as an act of mourning. An impossible period of time, where one must contend with life in the wake of devastating loss. With what is being born out of what is dying.
I can’t help but notice that this is the same space we are collectively finding ourselves in now, as we emerge from global pandemic.
As someone who has been reckoning with this space in a very personal way for a year now, I want to share that there is profound wisdom and power here. In this darkness. A darkness that is, “as much of the womb as of the grave,” as Rebecca Solnit so artfully says in her book, Hope In the Dark. One that resembles, “the silence of nightfall, where we can hear the silenced voices amplified by the echo of stillness,” as my compañera and teacher Thea Monyeé recently wrote in her IG platform.
But perhaps Audre Lorde captured it best when she wrote…
“There is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut, stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” ”
I pray that we have the courage to stay in this darkness, long enough to learn from it.
That, as we transition out of our quarantines, we recognize our grief and make space for it. That we wear it, however uncomfortably, as we make our tender way back to each other.
That we allow our bodies to be slow and heavy in the transition. To be awkward and rusty and real when we finally see our beloveds in the flesh.
That, when we are unsure of how to grieve, we turn to the death doulas for guidance. And the grieving mothers, who have held death in their wombs and chosen to live nonetheless.
That we put money, time, energy, and resources towards the ancestral traditions that teach us how to be in harmony with the natural world. That we listen to Black and Indigenous voices who have been preserving and cultivating this knowledge for centuries.
That we prioritize funding the artists, healers, and educators who can help us make sense of this past year. Whose offerings will help us hold the complexities of pain, grief, joy, guilt, gratitude, and transformation we are collectively contending with.
I know I am not the only one praying for this.
Manifesting this.
Enacting this into the world.
Are you?