My grandmother's funeral was yesterday. Following the Jewish tradition, my family is now spending seven days sitting shiva, a period of mourning where friends, relatives, neighbors, and members of my grandmother's synagogue come visit us and sit with us during the day and pray the mourner's kaddish with us each evening. These visitors are largely strangers to us because my grandmother lived across the country from the rest of my immediate family. Although I am slowly becoming more comfortable experiencing my emotions in general, this does not extend to sharing them openly with strangers at the moment. And while these strangers are very nice and well-meaning, they are also mostly uncomfortable witnessing our grief. This presents a real challenge. How can I be present and not suppress my emotions, while also spending hours each day around people with whom I do not feel comfortable experiencing intense and painful emotions? In general, I tend to retreat into myself when I am dealing with difficult situations, reaching out to close friends and shutting others out until I have dealt with my emotions on my own. Is this a symptom of my disconnection from my heart, or is this simply the way that I function best? Living in a society that is so head-centered, it is hard to tell whether this is my true self expressing itself, or simply the technique I was forced to develop as a young child to function successfully in my culture. Starting in elementary school, students are discouraged from expressing any "negative" emotions in class, discouraged from being present in their own experiences. As I continue to interrogate the assumptions and automatic reactions that I have carried with me through my 29 years of life thus far, I am curious to see whether this tendency to process emotions privately will shift over time. And if it does, how will strangers react? Is there a way to express painful emotions publicly without alienating well-meaning people around me who are not equipped to witness intense emotions without needing to fix or judge them?
In the 10 years since I wrote this, I've spent a lot of time in deep ritual space with strangers, and I've become much more comfortable being in my raw experience in front of others. That's in a context where everyone has chosen that experience, and we're all participating in the depth.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how it would feel to be in this cross cultural context again, where I am so much more embodied in my rawest emotions, especially grief, but in a context where the others around me weren't used to that.
Reading this is also helping me appreciate how different my cultural context is these days, and how much more access I have to communities of people where being real about our emotional experiences is the norm. Mourning in my grandmother's community represents where I came from - a norm of almost 100% disassociation, a necessarily survival response to my grandparent's generation surviving genocide. And then 10 years ago in LA I had forged a really deep and broad community, where art and activism held us together, but not vulnerability or sharing our raw inner worlds.
These days, my community is much smaller and more intimate. It is disjointed because of migration and covid and late capitalism. A smattering of individuals here and there, who don't know each other. And, in each of those connections, the rawest, most vulnerable parts of ourselves are what we share with each other. Thank the Goddexx!