There is a favorite place where my family and I like to go on vacation every couple years. It is a tiny off-the-grid cabin in the middle of a wooded valley. The cabin is heated by a small wood stove and electricity comes from solar panels. We use a composting toilet and conserve our water usage while we are there. We leave our phones and tablets behind, we bring good food and some books and board games. We sit, we listen to the woods, and we are still.
The stillness at the cabin can be comforting, but sometimes it can also be unsettling. With the decrease in activity and distractions, away from other humans and my usual responsibilities, whatever tensions I am carrying deep inside me will rise to the surface. Anything that is a source of pain in my life, anything I’ve been resistant to admit, anything I’ve been glossing over with half-hearted hopeful narratives comes to face me in that cabin. And it asks one thing of me: that I feel it.
Yesterday I got to join my library colleagues in an online discussion on the topic of dismantling white supremacy culture. Given a list of characteristics of this culture, we were able to identify ways that it manifests in our lives and in our communities, as well as the pain it creates. We shared that pain with each other. We faced it and felt it.
White supremacy culture tells us to keep denying that this pain exists. It wants us to find a way to gloss over the damage that it does, to keep writing and rewriting the narrative that everything is fine and acts of violence are an anomaly in our nation instead of the norm. Admitting this pain and giving ourselves the time and space to feel it is step one in dismantling white supremacy.
Many of us are experiencing cabin fever these days. With decreased activity and human interaction, as well as dropping temperatures, we don’t have the usual distractions from our inner tensions. It’s ok to feel that pain, to give it space and time to live and breath inside you. There is no healing without pain. You may find, after feeling that pain for a while, that it evolves into something powerful: the ability to name what ails you, to call it out, to not have to live by its rules any longer.
You may find that pain comes from living in a culture that asks you to devalue human life by continuously overlooking atrocity. If you want to understand that better, start here: https://www.dismantlingracism.org/white-supremacy-culture.html.
Angie Gustafson 