Retirement, career change, aging, call it what you will. I’m experiencing those changes, I’m feeling addled, or wiser. Call that what you will, too.
This morning, an article in the Washington Post. I so admire Deb Haaland, and I admire Joe Biden for appointing her. She’s sitting in long public meetings, taking testimony about the collective trauma suffered by indigenous people.
On this Saturday in June, Haaland rarely spoke for hours, listening deep into the afternoon, thanking everyone for sharing their stories of brutality and grief. The tour is essential to her department’s mission; healing a constant in her conversation.
“In a way, we’re also healing our country. That history is American history,” she said a few days later in her Interior Department office, down a wide hall lined with portraits of past secretaries, almost all of them White men, almost all curiously painted indoors and devoid of sunlight. “It affects every single American. It affects you whether you realize it or not.”
My own life experience with trauma taught me: The trauma is bad, but you know what’s worse? The denial that follows, the covering up. As in: It didn’t happen, wasn’t that bad, shouldn’t be dwelled upon. Move on.
Because that denial follows up the trauma with othering, as in: This is your problem, this what makes you different from us, this is what makes you less than. Keep it to yourself.
Which makes much of social life, and especially social media, an immersion in a toxic stew of inauthentic positivity.
As I experience these changes, this mid-60s time of life, more and more I’m OK with not being OK. I’m kind of settling into it. I’m learning that healing is not at all about moving on, or returning to “normal,” it’s about coming to terms with what has been and what is.
And what I see in the culture at large is mindless frenzy, the collectively enforced positivity locking all of our faces in the same hideous grin.