Be on high alert if you find yourself hoping for a return to ‘normal’. The norm is no longer yours to determine. Release normal. Release.
(Truth: ‘Normal’ was (is) awful for a lot of people.)
Be cautious with your desire to feel ‘good’ or ‘nice’ right now. With your longing to take a break from witnessing and feeling the intensity of righteous anger and overwhelming sadness. With the inertia and confusion of what to do. Allow your gut to ache and your throat to clench and your sleep to be disrupted for the foreseeable future. Allow discomfort. Allow.
(Truth: Sitting in the discomfort causes far less suffering than resisting it.)
If you breathe a sigh of relief seeing police and protesters arm in arm, check yourself. What are you hoping for? Are you more concerned with when this ends than how it ends and what it solves or heals? Be honest. Tell yourself the truth.
(Truth: Dissonance, not harmony, always precedes true change.)
If you find yourself wanting to suggest that we ‘just talk about it’ or ‘keep the peace’ or ‘maintain a 6-foot social distance’ or ‘that just worsens the cause’ or any other opinions about how this movement that is not yours to lead moves, ask yourself why. Not why did this or that happen, but why do you feel compelled to dismiss or counter, to speak your thoughts with such knowing right now, shining the light on you and distracting attention from the voices already sharing their reality? Shush. Shhhh. Listen.
(Truth: The time to debate is over…and never was.)
Normal and nice, order and certainty are tools of white supremacy. Insidious tools of whiteness. They’re OUR tools. They’re buried so deeply in each of us and are so firmly rooted that we don’t even realize their presence and how they drive our actions and reactions, our beliefs and thoughts. Guiding us to stay quiet and comfortable, seeking agreement and peace.
This is not the time to use those tools.
Resist.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
Audre Lorde
