I love my life and I’m afraid to tell anyone about it
what Garden Coffee Lady can teach us about collective suffering, grief, and touching grass
I am a perpetually online person. Let’s just get that straight. I have been online in some capacity since at least 2003. I have an 11th house moon and I love the internet.
Some days, though, I also hate the internet. Yesterday was one of those days.
If you aren’t on Twitter, some backstory: this tweet caused quite a stir yesterday, mostly involving the wave of responses to this innocuous post that claimed the original poster was privileged, ableist, in a dead-end marriage, and exploitative, amongst other things.
What immediately struck me about this situation was how it confirmed one of my own fears: sharing my joy with the world (via the internet) will result in criticism, shame, blame, and possibly even ostracism.
I mean, we all agree that these comments are serious cases of projection, but haven’t we all felt that same fear of sharing our joy, to some degree, especially in the face of all the unacknowledged, ongoing loss in our world? I have slow mornings with my husband and my coffee, too, and it’s not because we are rich—actually, quite the opposite—and I have, historically, held off on sharing these precious and joyful parts of my life, because people are suffering.
People are suffering, the capitalism machine has continued on in its never ending conquest to eat us all alive, and we have been cornered into sacrificing ourselves for its sake. We have not been allowed ANY space or time to slow down and process all of the loss and suffering that has been experienced on levels both micro and macro. My great-grandmother died in the summer of 2020, and we didn’t even have a funeral for her. I didn’t realize until then how important funerals actually are to processing loss. So much death has occurred, in the form of human lives, but also in the losses of imagined futures, of certain once-in-a-lifetime experiences, of any sense of certainty. That last one really bites.
So, what do we do instead of feeling all of that loss? Lash out at any unfettered expressions of joy or glimpses of tranquility in other people’s lives, obviously. This disproportionate backlash to a woman and her husband enjoying mornings together *is* the collective resentment that’s been building as a result of the insistence that life and work go on as normal while a million lives have been lost and going to the grocery store might get you killed, either from catching a deadly virus or getting fucking shot.
We want to grieve. We need to grieve. But instead we have been forced to maintain the status quo. So naturally, anybody who manages to find a sliver of peace and connection and joy in our disconnected and frantic world must be either living in ignorance to the suffering all around them, or even worse, contributing to it.
It’s not joy that’s the problem. It’s the fact that we haven’t been allowed to grieve and wail and fall apart and bang our fists and sleep for days and cry for weeks and stare at the wall and scream and rage and truly feel the losses we have all incurred.
When you can’t access grief, you can’t access joy, and you certainly can’t allow those around you to express joy, lest you are faced with your own unexpressed grief.
We already know that America has a big issue with grief. This is not a country that can acknowledge its past, because to do so would require large-scale grieving to occur. This is a country that lives in denial about its present (like thousands continuing to die every week while nobody wears masks anymore), because to acknowledge loss necessitates that we give ourselves time and space to Feel Things. We can’t do that AND keep the economy afloat with our exploited labor. People who are out of touch with their emotions (and their bodies) make better workers, under capitalism. This is a system that predicates its future on our continued ability to ignore our feelings.
America has a feelings problem, really, and the sooner we allow ourselves to truly feel loss, the sooner we can allow ourselves to feel joy, and then we won’t need to do things like projecting our experiences with capitalism and ableism onto a person describing something beautiful in their life. I’m not gonna go on about how we need more representations of how life can still be tranquil and filled with love and slowness and intentionality. It’s true, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that feeling our unpleasant feelings is revolutionary. It is our power. It is how we arrive at transformative justice. And the more we do it, the more we can create the world we want, where everyone can have the mornings they so desire, whether that’s long talks over coffee, going for a jog (I don’t understand it but I respect it), or staying in bed as long as possible. We need to let the voice of grief have its time, and acknowledge the depth of our losses, so we can build lives that also honor the depths of peacefulness and joy and connectedness.
Welcome to Scorpio season, babes. The only way out of our emotions is through them.
Yes yes yes! Feeling is the only medicine.
I relate to this so much. It seems like many people will judge or criticize if you dare to express either joy or suffering. Any intense emotion. I hesitate to talk about either one very much openly, yet I know it shouldn’t be like this.