The Allure of Newness
Martin Luther King Jr. has one of the most fraught legacies of any public figure in the 20th century. His words are appropriated, his views debated and massaged, and his shortcomings are a matter of public record (FBI surveillance and harassment notwithstanding ). Every year, I am fascinated by the unique ways we struggle nationally to recognize him. Holidays can be tricky like that. So are months.
Such is the case for anyone who lives a public life, of any degree of acclaim or note. One thing can’t be debated; he had a mission he was willing to lose his life over. Legacy is tricky to pin down because you do not control it in the way we think we do on this side of life. To get to know someone, even posthumously, is to spend the time understanding what they said and the context in which they lived and operated. Sections are better than sentences, and chapters more effective than quotes for learning who and what we laud.
It is a matter of historical fact that Dr. King was prompted to improvise much of the I Have a Dream speech. He had struggled with bringing the speech to fruition, and advisors had differing opinions on what the most important thing would be. The reason we know the speech as we know it today is what happened off stage.
But during delivery, King started improvising a bit when he reached a sentence that felt clunky. Instead of calling on the crowd to "go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction," he went with: "Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed."
It was at that moment, says King's adviser Clarence Jones, that Mahalia Jackson cried out: "Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!"
- Vox
Mahalia Jackson is a quintessential part of the speech we love to reference and exists indelibly, and unmistakably it does. It could have been a simple liturgy, but the Queen of Gospel was present to add the confidence that only she could. Even more striking, her voice helped guide King into a place he wasn’t aware he would go but was still prepared when he arrived. No one knew what was coming, but they knew they had a part to play.
With a vision comes trouble.
In Pain Sight
Every year, I write a letter to myself in the future without fail, and I forget about it until it arrives in my inbox. My 2020 letter was actually delivered a week ago, and I was shocked by how different I felt reading it. From beginning to end, it is filled with things I don’t accurately recognize right now. It’s not so much that they weren’t important, meaningful, or even good. It’s just that so many of them don’t matter to me.
What was missing, and what I am still piecing together, is the scope of grief and its necessary disruption.
Grief is asynchronous. It is non-linear. It has a stench. It is jarring and disquieting. Resolution from it, and towards whatever is a process that cannot be rushed nor timed. Nationally, locally, and personally, the ways it has shaped and reshaped the landscape is profound and unnerving. For the last 6 months, I have not had a week in which someone close to me has not died or a friend has not reported a death. That is separate of course, from the onslaught of job loss, uncertainty, and general strain that not having the proximity to the relationships we need and find joy in. We stack rank whether what we have lost compares to other things we have seen. To be asked how you are is an affront to you, even with the best of intentions. The passing of a year does not mean the season in your life has changed. To be honest in that way, about that thing, is to risk being at odds with yourself and your environment. Grief is a presence. It is a stain-glass floor to ceiling window, coloring everything around you. As if that wasn’t enough, you have a new companion that shows up unannounced: shame.
Shame is retraction. It helps you fold into yourself as a means of managing and coping through whatever it is that ails you. It can start harmlessly. It is why, for much of last year, I had nothing to say and much less interest in mentioning how much I do not care. The wounds of any even or loss leave a variety of marks and scars. We put incredible time constraints on how and what people should feel, then dictate the timeline where they should arrive at a resolution. When things don’t change as quickly as we thoughts,
In my own life, I’ve found that busyness, however tactical and organized it may be, simply delays whatever I have yet to process. There is always another thing until grief becomes the only thing and feels like everything. It is an unwelcome roommate and an abusive dinner guest. It leaves ruinous piles of debris in every corner of your life, and it shows up unannounced. Fewer spaces appeared to allow for a paradoxical unraveling; it is possible to be both grateful for what you have and can still do while wrestling with the excruciating knowledge that you have lost things you can never get back. I’ve been too fearful of creating or writing many days because I know what will emerge is an honesty that is frightening to even me.
Then, of course, there is how your needs dramatically shift, and how that can be at odds with both who you thought you would be and the weight and anxiety of your status with other people. It controlled much of what I thought I couldn’t do and too much of what I should have said. I was afraid not because of the pain itself but more than what I said would contribute to my own perception of being unhelpful.
This led to a much more unsettling question that I am still grappling with: What have I internalized and believed to be true that makes me police my own grief so deeply that speaking truthfully is more dangerous than the alternative? Why is the expectation that I would somehow unsee what I have seen?
Loss Accounting
Last September, McKinsey calculated the costs of unresolved grief in organizations. TL;DR, it’s not good for the balance sheet or the people.
For every loss, there is a need that is left seemingly unsatisfied.
But of course, there’s work to do. Or so I often told myself to make myself try and stop whatever was happening. Grit is no reason to amputate human responses to what we are powerless to avoid. Somewhere along the way through, I figured I’d try to avoid it anyway. Things are hard because they are hard, not simply because we have not learned how to mitigate them effectively. To be stoic is not to be without emotion, and we decide what we value in terms of expression, by what we feel comfortable allowing.
In the same way, knowing the five love languages is not proof that being a good parent to someone else, grief is not an obstacle; it is an inescapable part of the human experience. It would then. So while millionaires can be made in pandemics, so are widows. I know both, and they are not mutually exclusive. To speak of it without a resolution can feel like a betrayal. We have not seen times like these, so it is not surprising that wading into how to communicate both tremendous opportunities coupled with stressors of increasing variety, would push us to whatever we believe our limits to be, then past them. The intangible cannot be replaced.
The paradox of self-determination and surrender rages inwardly, but it has cultural implications I hadn’t realized until very recently. My crisis was one of confusion; at once I was perplexed about how to communicate what I’ve been seeing, not because I couldn’t, but because I somewhere, until you gaslight your own emotions in small, subtle, and persistent ways. It disgusted me, and then it controlled my voice. It is not self-pity to heave from the pain and be bent from the sorrow. It is self-delusion to expect that one could move through life being disaffected, as a sort of pseudo-stoic virtue. But here I have been, repressed and reluctant. What has ailed me wasn’t the situations I’ve been through. It has been my fear and dread about what speaking about them might mean to and for me.
The courage to be disliked is one thing. A good, necessary choice. It can provide the fortitude to pursue work that beckons to us in troubled times. But the courage to go deeper into what is happening, and live in a paradox is disorienting but unavoidable.
Dr. King was murdered at 39, much too young, but something he of his own admission was aware could happen at any time. Perhaps that is what Coretta’s husband went to Jamaica, rented a house with no telephone, and let his last published work be a question and not a memoir: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In the preface, a newly widowed Coretta Scott King writes:
…and that the grief that followed his death will be transmuted to a universal determination to realize the economic and social justic for which he so willingly gave his life.
Where do we go from here is the theoretical, spiritual, practical, emotional, and physical question that 2021 will implore us to explore, in ways that are far from familiar. I’m not sure it’s even unique to this year, even if we feel it in ways we haven’t before. Ms. Gorman’s stirring prose from Inauguration Day that:
even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
She painted vividly, and in the same vein of Phyllis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, called us towards a vision we have yet to realize. Poetry is both a mirror and a telescope, and hers is weighty and expansive. I was moved. Even still, the commentary quickly diverged into how if she is our future, we’ll be fine. She is young, gifted, and Black, but a savior she needn’t represent. Her talent and her future will be defined by what she says yes and no to, absent our definitions of what could be for her. Potential is a terrible thing to waste, but an even more dangerous thing to presuppose. We owe the same to ourselves. The thing I share with Ms. Gorman isn’t just a love for words; it’s the spectrum we’re on that people can’t see.
A presupposition isn’t just about the potential we like and want to name. It is about the small, split-second assumptions that can change your life, and how you make sense of them.
Tuesday of this past week, two undercover officers suggested that a drug-sniffing dog would be the only remedy to me not allowing them to search my vehicle after a less than routine traffic stop. “Traffic stop” isn’t entirely true, because there was no traffic, and the stretch of highway I was on only had the light of passing cars, and they were in the kind of vehicle that is made to blend in, with the other ones, until it’s not. My car was too new, the driver (being me), too nervous, and my story, just lacked that believability factor. If I had a little weed on me, it would be ok, they just wanted to check the vehicle, they said. I refused, the plainview doctrine couldn’t be established, and it turned out the nearest dog was an hour away. So, they let me go with a warning. I’m not sure if those are about the future or the past anymore.
We reflect and we mourn, so we can gather ourselves, and be present with what remains.