You are important

In high school, a friend’s mother was diagnosed with a rapidly advancing form of multiple sclerosis. My friend loved her mother very much and was obviously distraught. She also started relating all of her own emotions to her mother: If my mother can face this with positivity, I shouldn’t be mad/sad/frustrated/annoyed/worried about my relatively perfect life. If my mother is suffering, I shouldn’t be thrilled/excited/happy/joyous about the relatively trivial happenings around me.

I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of weeks.

We are witnessing genocide in real time. We are seeing our humanity questioned for not conflating hate or oppression with nationality or ethnicity or religion. We are swimming in a sea of mis-information, real information, and seriously biased information, and it is hard to know which is which. And if we are sitting outside areas of active fighting, occupation, or threats of terror attacks, we are experiencing the disembodied sense of empathetic pain, while being physically safe ourselves. We might feel numb or frozen. We might feel powerless. We might feel like we don’t have the right to feel anything at all.

I am writing all of this to say: you matter. Your feelings matter. You get to go outside and breathe in the beauty of nature. You get to feel love, joy, frustration, anger, and pain. You get to cry and laugh. You get to feel, hold your feelings with care, and recognize them for what they are: feelings. In fact, this is the only way we can hold onto our humanity in this time of great pain. It is the only way for us to be present enough to support each other in the work ahead.

You are important. I see you. Please take care of yourself.