I’m thinking big picture/small details. Forest/trees.
Current and ongoing global moments are relentlessly heartbreaking. You all know what they are. It’s August 2021 and not only people but the planet is hurting. Twelve months ago was not much different. My post on August 23, 2020, was titled “On Choosing” and started like this: “For the last many months, taking in news global, national, and local has been like living in a dystopian novel where Diamond Dogs is playing on a loop in the background: unsettling with weird moments of beauty. While I actually typed a list of those events here, I just erased the whole of it since it ate up the rest of my blog space like a Ms. Pac-Man gone berserk.”
Hello, here&now. August 2021. While the past year has certainly seen some progress (I’m looking at you, vaccines and new administration), it’s also had its share of looping back on itself (hey there, Delta/Covid/masks up and fires blazing in the west). Today though, there’s a big scoop of fatigue swirled on top of my mental sundae, drizzled with a sense of What Next…? I’ve no doubt a majority of us have a spoon stuck in that mindset. With myriad servings of humanitarian and climate crises, one does get placed on top of another, so I find myself searching for a way in before everything melts down.
Last year, while the crises in all their shapes and forms did not feel manageable in the traditional definition of that word, there was a visceral energy in watching folx move en-masse, raising voices, footsteps, and fists to deliver messages of Hell-No-More after George Floyd’s murder. I was committed to examining the racial biases inside myself, a process ongoing. I could understand, respect, follow COVID lockdown and safety measures. Work toward and worry over the 2020 election bringing in a new administration.
Leap frog a year and fresh crises mingle with the old. Also new discoveries. This time my generosity and compassion reflex has bubbled up a deeply personal realization. While the crisis in Afghanistan around women and girls has me looking for ways to help (see below for a few), a funny thing happened on the way to this particular altruism: I tripped over my own woman-girl issue. Mothers and daughters. It feels redundant, unnecessary, to use the word complicated alongside the pairing. In my family tree, I’ve been ignoring the roots while wrestling with the individual branches. In so doing, I’ve been swinging from emotion to emotion without paying attention to how I’d lost sight of the ground, what lies below, what keeps the whole thing upright. I’d become increasingly focused on showing how I could climb higher, be more than she, compete for better-person award. In that process, I forfeited grace and compassion inside our relationship. Where this competition began is the stuff of many therapy sessions, but in the immediate, the game is doing me no good. The scars of the past—her mom’s, hers, mine—are each of ours to carry, but they do blend together in our DNA. And they aren’t things to be fixed, but rather moments to be understood, listened to, lived with. By stepping off the emotional court of competition and onto the sidelines where I can support rather than slam away to score the next point, I hope I can make more space for the needs of the woman and girl inside me so she and I can have room to get stronger. In turn, I also hope my commitment to other women and girls can grow stronger in the learning. I can come closer to understanding that the ties that bind are so much more than a problem to be solved, a fixed point with a finish line, and are instead the ongoing struggle to be seen, heard, and taken care of in whatever way we can help each other to do that.
Ways to help Afghan women and girls in the immediate (these have been vetted through charity navigator, although Women for Afghan Women does not have a score, there is a breakdown of culture and community around the org that’s helpful):
Overall ways to help the Afghan people are listed in this NYTimes article.
And a few to support women and girls in the US:
Pace Center for Girls (my mom sent me this one)
- inspiration paid: Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” (read it/revisit it here.)
Does This Make Me Look 