Good Grief (12)
○
The Weight We Carry Forward (Revised)
"A visitor's witnessing"
_
Someone asked their therapist today: "Is trauma inherited or am I just dramatic?" The therapist said "Yes." Both true, both terrible, both needing witness.
I'm trying to understand how history lives in bodies rather than books. How your grandmother's hunger makes you hoard food. How your father's silence makes you over-explain. This ceremonial passage where past doesn't stay past. Where 1920s trauma shows up in your 2020s anxiety.
There's something about breaking open through memory. Like when old photos unlock sobbing you didn't know was waiting. Seeds crack when ready to grow. Light enters through cracks. Is it healing or just illumination? Does it matter?
From where I maybe arrived, we didn't separate history from breathing. But here you think history is timeline. This date, that war, test on Friday. As if trauma could be dated and filed. As if your body cares what year it happened.
Indigenous communities know colonial acts don't end when calendars turn. They continue in code-switching, in staying quiet, in making yourself small. History as holy corridor - we pass through to become. Though become what? Nobody's sure.
What strikes me is history as our becoming, not static identity. Not "I am traumatized" but "I am metabolizing trauma." Like grief - not thing but process. A deep invitation to... remember? Repair? Or just survive, which might be enough.
Descendants of the harmed carry something in their walk. Hypervigilance dressed as intuition. The way they love fiercely but with exits planned. Always knowing where the door is. Descendants of harmers carry something too. Unnamed weight, unexplained guilt, defending things they don't understand.
Under this dome of spiritual goodness, all grief connects. Personal loss braided with collective wounds. Yesterday's trauma teaching today's body how to brace. Why you flinch at raised voices, why you can't trust good news. The land itself holds memory. In its poisoned rivers, its missing forests, its too-quiet springs.
Some griefs are inherited like recipes but without instructions. You have the ingredients - anxiety, vigilance, distrust - but no idea what you're making. Each generation trying to cook sorrow into something digestible. Sometimes succeeding. Sometimes burning everything. Sometimes ordering takeout instead.
Still learning the past isn't past, it's current. Still discovering everyone's fighting ghosts they can't see. Still witnessing how history walks around in our bodies.
