Sitting in the Dark
There are any number of pretty and perky things I could write about today. I could talk about the way ice glazes the trees, so that they shimmer gold in low light and silver at high noon. I could describe my puppy and the joy with which he bounds after a frisbee or a ball. There is no shortage of things to be glad about. But there’s no shortage of suffering, either. And in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s funeral, I feel pulled to sit in the darkness, rather than the light.
I am lucky that this is a choice I can make. It is rare that my own life circumstances compel me to look cruelty, injustice, or prejudice square in the face. This luck is called privilege.
I am the mom to three fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed boys. I talk with them about racism and about police brutality. I don’t coach them on how to behave if they encounter a police officer. I don’t need to. The odds are all stacked in their favor, stamped onto their skin in white ink. I love these three boys, and if their skin were differently inked, we would have to engage in any number of painful and frightening conversations. It is simply unsafe to live in a black or brown body in our society. This tells us nothing about the worthiness of black or brown bodies; it tells us rather a lot about our society.
As a white woman, talking and writing about race feels uncomfortable. (This admission also feels uncomfortable.) My discomfort contains a swirl of feelings and concerns: What if I say the wrong thing? What if I broadcast my ignorance? What if I’m part of the problem? What can I possibly do to help? What if I’m not doing enough?
When I allow my discomfort with discomfort to dictate my choices, I do not do enough. But what does enough even look like? For me right now, it simply looks like this: being willing to look long and hard at injustice, both within society and within myself. It means being willing to risk saying the wrong thing and being willing to learn from my mistakes. It means being willing to feel suffering that is not my own—and yet is also very much mine to hold, because what are we here for if not to love and hold one another?
In bright and cheery spaces, the lines that separate this from that or me from you seem crisply delineated. In darkness, the lines blur. I don’t notice this blurring in the moments when I run in a blind frenzy from my own discomfort. But when I’m willing to sit, to be still, to look into the spaces where light does not shine, my eyes begin to adjust, and I find no difference or separation between my boys and their Black classmates. The suffering of any mother becomes something for me to hold—a darkness that I want to stay with until a candle can be found that lights the space for everyone. I won’t be the person to find that candle. But I also don’t want to snuff it out in my haste to flee the room.
When I’m alone in a dark space, what I crave most is this: someone who is willing to stay beside me—whether or not they have a lighter or a match to offer. The genuine presence of another is its own sort of light.
Maybe your personal life is dark and heavy right now. Maybe you live under so much oppression that you can’t imagine stepping into someone else’s dark room. If that’s the case, then I wish you warm bodies to sit beside you. I wish you the knowledge that you are not alone—that your suffering is shared by others. I wish you the glow of our shared humanity.
I can think of no way to tidily wrap up this email. If it seems to you that loose ends are blowing every which way, you’re not wrong. I’m trying to stay with the darkness, after all. I’m writing to you from the messy middle, not from a pretty ending, tied in a perky bow. But right now, I don’t want that bow. I don’t want it until we can all have it.
In the absence of wrapping paper and ribbons, I offer you instead these wishes: May you be safe, in body and soul. In your moments of darkness, may you find that someone is sitting lovingly beside you. May you be that someone to somebody else. In the cold and dark, may love burn brightly within you—more vivid than your fear—and cast flickers of light that illuminate the connections between us and show you your own next right step.
P.S. Congratulations to Mahtaab, who won the drawing for a free copy of “The Body is Not an Apology!” Stay tuned for future book drawings down the line.