june notice
monthly theme: [isolation]
Healing is personal and interpersonal, happening individually and collectively (often simultaneously). As I obsessed over self-help books and doom-scrolled critical race theory last year, I wondered how much impact healing the individual really has on the collective.
It’s not something that can be dissected and studied in a controlled experiment--is it nature, nurture, me, or my neighbors who are responsible for things getting better (or worse)? Isolation gave me time to contemplate the relationship that holds it all together.
Because it is relations that make any of this make sense and move forward. Nothing is ever truly isolated. The incarcerated human being in tortuous solitary confinement is still within our society. Their experience of life influences yours even if you don’t acknowledge their suffering or existence.
This year, we discovered a new form of isolation--a collective and abrupt isolation from each other and any activity we had been doing just a month prior. Everything changed in an instant. We dramatically called it “lockdown” and “quarantine,” when it was simply “staying inside to keep everyone safe, healthy, and alive.”
I’m not saying it was easy to stay inside--a lot of my coping mechanisms to avoid depression were no longer accessible to me. During the physical isolation, I frequently had to isolate myself from the news of full-capacity hospitals. I wasn’t running away, I was incubating.
But it was hard not to think of it as a cop-out, as something I couldn’t handle so I had to avoid. There was a lot of shame about going inwards and looking out (and down) on who wasn’t isolating. But that just meant I needed to go in deeper. So notice that process within yourself--reflect on your own words, pictures, and memories of being incubated.
need help looking inward?
check out my journal prompts or social media retreat for encouragement + inspiration