These past couple weeks have been full of highs and lows.
On one hand, my family has been on a much-needed summer vacation with friends and family that we didn’t get to see enough through two years of pandemic isolation. It finally feels something like normal to eat and travel and laugh with old friends again. We have been seeing the sunsets, eating the s’mores, telling old inside jokes, smelling like campfire and feeling cool lake water on our skin.
On the other hand, nothing feels right. My family was staying with old friends when news broke that Roe was overturned and we all gathered in the kitchen that morning and stared at each other in—what to call this? Disbelief, grief? All of us had been raised with anti-abortion beliefs, but growing into adulthood came to realize that forcing women and girls to give birth is cruel and immoral, and that most human suffering begins when women and birthing people are forced to have children that they can’t take care of, or can’t afford.
That people at the highest levels of government and law are callous or blind to that reality is galling.
I felt that gut punch while also having the first summer in a long time that feels like a proper summer with the sun on my face, and heart-lifting moments and experiences of awe and natural beauty. And still, every day my heart sinks for something else: Climate, erosion of queer rights, violence toward Black people, democracy in crisis, gun violence…
I think part of what is particularly hard about Roe is that it it signals that none of this is going away quickly. We are firmly in what I heard someone call “The Great Backslide.” Many things suck, and they won’t change soon.
But also, our lives are unfolding in these days, and they are ours to take.
As the great writer and sociologist Tressie Cottom put it:
All of these things happening at the same time have felt almost like an “out of body” experience for me, like I’m watching life sometimes from the outside. It’s not a life or time that I imagined, but here I am. Here we are.
Do you feel like this lately? I would love to hear about it in the comments.
YES! This out-of-body feeling describes my experience so much right now. Lovely summer days, but the world is burning and the threats to democracy are real. Really real. It's hard to stay present and embodied when there is so much dissonance to try to absorb. I also think it's interesting that you described the feeling this way, because the overturning of Roe is such an attack on my bodily autonomy -- so feeling "out of body" is basically what we are left with,. I love the Cottom quote so much. It reminds me of a story an old friend, who worked in human rights, told me, that at a refugee camp she was working in, there was incredible sadness and desperation, but also....people hadcrushes on each other, and teenagers teased each other, and life itself just...went on. That's where we are today amidst all of this.
YES! This out-of-body feeling describes my experience so much right now. Lovely summer days, but the world is burning and the threats to democracy are real. Really real. It's hard to stay present and embodied when there is so much dissonance to try to absorb. I also think it's interesting that you described the feeling this way, because the overturning of Roe is such an attack on my bodily autonomy -- so feeling "out of body" is basically what we are left with,. I love the Cottom quote so much. It reminds me of a story an old friend, who worked in human rights, told me, that at a refugee camp she was working in, there was incredible sadness and desperation, but also....people hadcrushes on each other, and teenagers teased each other, and life itself just...went on. That's where we are today amidst all of this.