Finding Agency When You're Feeling Grief
I thought I’d share some wisdom for these times from three wise people.
When I think of the Supreme Court, I feel grief and anger. I feel helpless in the face of huge power. And, although I’m a cynical former political operative, I feel disappointed. I was raised a Rousseau-vian (?) by a father who worshiped FDR and the New Deal. Our institutions have failed America in a profound way. We know this, but this SCOTUS session feels stark. Even as we fulfill our social contract, pay our taxes, do good work for our families and communities, the American system is so clearly broken. It makes it tough to show up to work and pay those taxes.
They overturned Roe v Wade, which 64% of Americans oppose overturning. Your grief may not just be about the loss of Roe V Wade. After all, weeks after Uvalde and with over 250 mass shootings in 2022, the Supreme Court majority just stripped states’ power to regulate the carrying of guns in public. Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs summed it all up better than I could:
“The Supreme Court has already moved on to ending the separation of church and state and will likely end the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 and possibly dismantle the entire federal regulatory apparatus this week.” (FYI: “The more tools the court takes away from the EPA, under the Clean Air Act to address greenhouse gas emissions, the harder it’s going to be for the United States to do an effective job of contributing to the world’s efforts to limit climate change,” said Robert Glicksman, an environmental law professor at George Washington University.”)
Like many of us, I grieve for my country, our people, and our planet. Grief is in the air. At the start of the pandemic David Kessler told HBR that all of us are feeling different kinds of grief for what we're experiencing both right now, and what we fear in the future.
Back in 2020, he said that the grief that we imagine in the future is really anxiety. It's like your mind is going to a future point and imagining the worst, which is called catastrophizing. As a longtime anxious catastrophist, I’m familiar with the process.
Fast forward, and The Court made all the catastrophes come true.
When catastrophic events happen, it’s devastating. But catastrophic events created by institutions we’re raised to trust create disappointment, bitterness, and helplessness. After all, if the highest court in the land rules, what can I possibly do?
History helps here. Harvard Business School Professor and Historian Nancy Koehn’s research shows that the greatest leaders are “people who refuse to take the road to bitterness and lasting anger when they experience great disappointment. It's a forcing mechanism to get better.”
Nancy told me, “When leaders stand at the cliff of despair, and are so close to giving up, an inner voice chimes in. They think ‘If I give up, think about the dominoes that will fall.’ That ability to connect the moment of despair to a higher purpose is often something that pulls you back [from the cliff]. You think, ‘I have something to offer other people and if I stop going, other people lose, other people suffer. Other people are let down. Other people are more vulnerable.’ That is actually quite fortifying. It lowers the fear volume. Not completely, but enough that you can get up the next morning and go on.”
The abortion providers who spent all day on Friday trying to find solutions for the women whose abortions were abruptly canceled did this. I’m sure most of them were at the cliff of despair. But they showed up and helped others.
I sat and felt inertia. I’m not one of those heroes. My friend and wise counselor Christine Koh says this is ok. “The first essential step is letting yourself feel your feelings in whatever way you process best. This could be curling up in a ball in the closet and weeping. Or talking to a therapist. Or raging on social media. Or writing. There is no wrong answer in that.
And then?
She says, “Everyone needs to find agency where they can, especially in this deeply traumatic, powerless-feeling time. Personally, for me this means that I am going to be pushing hard with GOTV. Or it could be donating money to abortionfunds.org or apiaryps.org. Or it could be listening and helping friends process. Basically, anywhere where you can exercise your agency.”
As I sat in my car this morning and cried, I thought about my interview with Jody Adams, who I admire so much. Jody lived through a loss of identity that is not dissimilar to what many Americans are feeling right now. She had to let go of that identity, slowly, to move through.
Jody is a chef and restaurant owner highly regarded in Boston. I interviewed her a couple years ago about her period of extreme grief, when she lost her dear sister to cancer and she lost her beloved flagship restaurant, Rialto, which she’d run for 22 years.
She told me, “I hadn't allowed myself to process the grief of closing Rialto a year before or the loss of my sister. And the loss of my own identity as the owner of Rialto was huge.” Like Nancy Koehn and Christine Koh, Jody believes that when you process grief, you can then take agency to make change.
“I think it's really important to pay attention to your strongest self, and pay attention to what people around you are telling you as to who you are and what you represent in their lives, because that hasn't gone away. One thing that I found that was enormously helpful is a Buddhist practice, a meditation practice to pay attention to what's happening in the moment and look at the things that you actually can control right now. My therapist helped me with meditation, and I worked through the feeling of grief as being something very real and something to hold onto on my own terms. I think it is not pushing grief away, not pushing the hard things away. It's actually a phrase that I came up with for myself: take suffering by the hand.
Working is good. Giving is good. My therapist said when you've lost your community, you need to find a new community. I think giving is so important when you're feeling like you're just so turned into yourself-- getting outside yourself and also connecting to the thing that's really painful. The idea of taking suffering by the hand and just holding onto it and getting comfortable with it, as opposed to trying to push it away.”
Yours in feeling the grief and seizing the agency.
Morra
PS: My podcast is on a summer hiatus. Right now, I’m planning episodes for our September start. But I’m going to keep the newsletter going through the summer.