Sneak Peek From Grief Book

The preorder link for Unfuck Your Grief expires in a couple of weeks and I’m angling for it to do well enough to publish a zine on Burnout as a stretch goal. Which means I fell down a research rabbit hole on burnout that I really want to share with y’all!

Because I’m a feral excuse for a human who never remembers she even has a newsletter set up, I figured the least I could do was share one of the letters I answered in the grief book with my patient newsletter subscribers if I’m going to politely ask you to preorder my new book. And of course if you aren’t a huge fan of how I answered the letter you know off the bat to save your money for something cooler. Win-win!

— Faith

Dear Aunty Faith,

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit the US, I’ve been feeling all sorts of stuck, sad, angry, and anxious. I read an article about “collective grief” and wonder if that’s what this is. I’m definitely mourning a few individuals and not being able to visit my family has been super hard, but it’s the uncertainty and constant sense of dread that gets to me the most. Would thinking of these feelings as grief help? How would I even begin with that?

Dear Nibling,

When you Google the term “collective grief” you get over 22 million results which is pretty overwhelming. We also have a tendency to take terms from mental health literature and slap them on common human experiences (you and I both hate it when someone who is forgetful says they are “sooooooo ADHD” right?), so I don’t blame you one bit for wondering if your situation fits. In this case, it definitely does. Collective grief is defined as what happens when any community experiences extreme loss or extreme change. 

That could be your local chapter of Food Not Bombs if someone dies suddenly or your school if everyone’s favorite teacher is diagnosed with cancer and needs to take a leave of absence for treatment. And it can be the whole world when we experience a pandemic. It can especially be the whole world when we experience a pandemic and we are also fighting about how to handle the pandemic, our leadership is fighting about how to handle the pandemic, and we all know people who got sick and people who are still sick with Long COVID. We all know people who have died. We all had to make choices about how we were going to move about the world and precautions we were going to take, and have probably been ridiculed for being overly cautious or not cautious enough. Do we mask or not? Where? Which kind of mask? Gloves or no? Do we wipe down our groceries? Today yes and then never mind? How long do we isolate if we are exposed? How accurate are the home tests? The PCR tests? It’s exhausting. We’re exhausted. We’re troubled. We’re anxious. We’re angry. And yes, we’re grieving. 

My friend Jeannie, who also lost a husband to cancer, described it like knowing there is someone outside your house with a gun. You know they are going to break in. You know they are going to kill you. It is a fact. You are putting up barriers to them getting in and slowing down their progression, but you know they will eventually get through. You just don’t know when. I think the COVID-19 pandemic felt very much like that for people. But it was more than one person with one gun. There were tons of people outside our collective doors with who-knows-what in their hands for weapons and who-knows-what kind of damage they would do to us. The not-knowing of the timeline and the not-knowing what the end result would be. It’s untenable, but we’ve all been doing it anyway. And that explains why we haven’t done a great job, doesn’t it. We all really have done the very best we can.

I say this knowing I also have to admit how angry I would get at people. I thought many people were being shitty, dangerous doorknob licking assholes. Meaning, I wasn’t nearly as equanimous a Buddhist as I am called on to be. But as I sit here writing about it now, I do know, intellectually, that with the exception of a few chaos monsters, most everyone really was doing the best they could do and still are. And our responses were about wanting to feel in control when everything felt so out of control. And so many of our behaviors were related to this collective grief.

I wrote in this book about what therapists refer to as STERBs. STERBs is an acronym for “short term energy releasing behaviors” meaning “dumb shit we do to help ourselves feel better when we feel awful.” Since DSWDTHOFBWWFA isn’t a pronounceable acronym, we will stick with STERB. Humans are just doing what we do when we grieve. Very common STERBy shit. And all the things you’re feeling are very common collective grief reactions. Recognizing that what we are going through is grief and the weirdness of our reactions is related to this grief experience is really important. It feels weird to keep bringing Freud into this since I never write about Freud this much, but it’s relevant that what seems nutty in any other situation makes sense when it’s grief. Meaning, give yourself time. Work with the grief, then take a break and go for a walk. Work some more a couple days later, then watch a dumb movie. Grief work is slow. And you’ll grieve this time in your life in many ways forever.

And to be honest, there will be losses that we don’t even know about until years from now . . . just like with the AIDS epidemic. I don’t know how old you are, my nibling, but I am old enough to remember that if you contracted HIV in the 1980s or early 1990s, you died of AIDS. This was almost certain, up until we got the antiretroviral medications available in 1996. Those people we lost would have been our progressive queer elders, especially our progressive queer elders of color. As we fight for more progressive causes we don’t have their voting power, their leadership, their wisdom. They would have been the aunties and uncles of today’s queer youth and the counterbalance to the more conservative voices of their generation.

I say all this not to be depressing. I mean, it is depressing, but I’m not saying it to add to your things to be bummed about. I’m saying it because collective grief is huge and nebulous. Grief is already a complex and life-long process and when it is world-wide we don’t even know when and where the ripples will stop. 

So be gentle with yourself. Expect the unexpected. People don’t have a free pass on their STERBy assholery but knowing where it is coming from may help us both respond with a little more kindness. And when we are doing our own STERBy shit, our internal voice (self-coaching) can be more compassionate and gentle.

Aunty