Sometimes the only way we get to see what is real or true is when we are thrust into the dark. Only on the darkest of nights, and in the darkest of places can you suddenly be in the presence of the Milky Way. When it gets so dark you aren’t sure you are going to be able to walk back to your house or the car—you are suddenly caught off guard. When you feel disoriented and wobbly because you can’t see even one step in front of you—so you look up in an attempt to get oriented—and there it is in shades of white, pink and yellow: our universe –suddenly visible. So big. So vast. So ungraspable. And you realize that it’s always been there, even though you rarely see it. The way you suddenly see the sun on a rainy day when you are traveling by air and the plane shoots up above the clouds. Reality and our perception of reality are really affected by filters of light and weather.
I am starting to recognize that the emotions I struggle with the most: grief, despair, and disappointment are the emotions that make my world go dark. I can’t see my way forward. I feel lost and disoriented. I want to stay put and find my footing.
This darkness feels alien to me because my normal state is one of optimism and hope. Optimism and hope can be great things, but for those of you who have lived through trauma or grief—sometimes this optimism or hope has an extra edge or energy. It’s survival hope—‘new good childhood hope’ – ‘American dream’ hope. It has a manic energy that pushes back on reality testing. It gears up in the face of disconfirming data.
Hope has been massive source of energy for me as well as a source of protection against grief and despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with a terrible loss or the endless fight against violence or injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or loss happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice, that loss, that grief. That level of sorrow for knowing that you can’t change it. The helplessness of seeing just how big it is and not having any idea of how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. Your world goes dark. You are brought to your knees.
And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—at the very bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’ And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.
In grief and despair we find the most pessimistic parts of ourselves. And we can find the both the most tender and the most hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and tender and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we can be, ironically, more whole. In being able to sit in the dark for a bit—we can see more clearly what is there—see the universe we actually live in, not just the one we aspire to.
John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”
Grief and despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling grief or despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this truth. Hope can obscure what is really there—it can keep us from becoming whole.
Grief and despair can be turning points. Suddenly you can see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer. The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion to 1.54 trillion times the mass of the Sun and contains between 100 and 400 billion stars and at least that many planets. The darker emotions force you to hold the complexity, which actually provides the only real hope of healing.
So we need to sit with our despair which means sitting on the ground if necessary. And we need to tolerate the dark enough to see the light that is actually there—and see the size and edges of our universe as they are, and not just how we wished they were. Seeing what is really there is ultimately how we will get where we hope to go—and the dark may be a painful, yet effective aide. In some languages the name of the Milky Way is translated as the “Bird Path” or “Way of the Crane” because it is the Milky Way that guides the birds to safety and nourishment.
© 2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
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