5 Strategies for Surviving the Age of Ambiguous Loss

I recently listened to Pauline Boss's interview with Krista Tippett on one of my favorite podcasts, On Being. Boss long ago named the feeling I've been having around COVID that I haven't had a name for-- the million thousand heartbreaks, from national to trivial, that I can't square or reconcile. I have been struggling to figure out how I'm feeling about the state of the world and what we're living through. I didn't realize how helpful it would be to have a name for it-- ambiguous loss: that feeling of unresolved grief that comes with a tragedy that has no reconciliation or ritualistic processing.

Without a big election to overturn the rampant evil of our time, without a vaccine to help me hope for the end of this lockdown, without any resolution to all of the deaths and economic suffering from COVID, and the trauma of all of the losses for my kids, I have been feeling a pent-up sense of sorrow, despair, dashed faith, and anger at the people causing all of it. Ambiguous grief as a concept helps me realize that the feeling I'm having is grief.
















Yesterday I called one of my best friends, Betsy Rosenbaum (who happens to write a brilliant blog when she has time and inspiration), and she shared the first of my cries with me. She was the first person to help me think of my feelings as grief. I was explaining to her that I felt an overwhelming feeling of sorrow and anguish, and that I was desperate for a friend to hold my heart for me. I explained to her that I worry that I would never see my parents again. I worry that my daughter would be traumatized by this. I worry that I may lose my job. I worry that so many people will suffer so badly. I worry that the country is devolving into an authoritarian state. I worry that the election won't work. I worry that martial law is happening in Portland. I worry about the myriad forms of violence, suffering, and even death that this president has put in motion. I'm so angry, so worried, so sad. Many of us are, I know, but I hadn't really grasped how intensely I was feeling these things. (When it all began, I wrote about "A Million Tiny Heartbreaks," but this feeling has only gotten worse.)

But if what we're feeling is grief, as Boss and Betsy reminded me, there are strategies we can use to cope, and I guess I have to start using them. Here are the ones that make the most sense to me. I don't do them as much as I should. But I know they help when I do.

1. Connect authentically with loved ones. Even though zoom and Skype aren't the same as being with people in person, COVID offers an opportunity to remember that our wellbeing relies on human connection. We aren't individual islands, as capitalism and the American Dream would have us believe. We are ecological and social beings. Get to know your neighbors. Get to know your non-human neighbors. Let those you love know it, and tell them why. Under COVID, this is the hardest one; it's ironic! We are beset with a condition that makes us suffer and disallows us from using the tool we most need to navigate suffering-- relationships. Don't let this defeat you. Relationships are all around us anyway. With fierceness, build them. Birds, parents, children, molecules, bacteria, comets-- all of it.

2. Create rituals.  Our habits may be becoming very boring. I know that I feel really bored by my life right now. There's no purpose, no Thing to Look Forward To, no mission. My kids and I just languish languidly through the days, trying desperately to find value in anything, and mostly getting jazzed by a new movie or recipe. When I wake up, I try to think of how the day will bring many boring things, and I try to ritualize them-- dishes, laundry, the sun coming out, meals, my daily shower. I try to make these rituals feel really meaningful by being grateful that I have the privilege of having them at all. I imbue them with a redolence of sacredness, despite their mundaneness. I do this by noticing them and being grateful for them. That's all it takes to make something a ritual. "Here is this thing I get to do. It may feel mundane, but I'm so lucky to feel that way about it. In fact, making this meal is an act of faith, an act of love, an act of weaving people together, an act of honor for the people who made it possible...." Injecting sacredness into my mundane life feels good.

3. Focus on what you can control. I really, really, really hate our president. I am so resentful. I am so worried. I am so FREAKED OUT.  How can this person exist? How can so many people love him? How can he be the person in charge of our country in the middle of COVID? Rabbit-hole warning.

Deep breath.

I can control my garden. I can control my body. I can control my kids' filter on their world. I can control my friends' and family's feelings of connection and support. I can control the feeling of hope and support in the people in my circle. One day at a time. Some days are worse than others. Some days I languish in sorrow. I wish I could cry more. But when I'm in those states, I turn to the people directly around me and realize I have a HUGE impact on them, starting with my kids and partner. Starting with myself.

4. Understand how chemicals work in your brain to create emotions.  Remember oxytocin, endorphins, and dopamine? Oh right! FUCK YEAH!!!! I LOVE THOSE FUCKERS! Eat good food, love on animals and people, exercise. It's really that simple. (No, it's not, but if you focus on these things, it will help launch you into other amazing things).

5. Answer some "grounding questions" for yourself. My grounding questions vary, and I don't answer them every day, but on occasion, it really helps me on a really bad day to write some answers down, just to anchor myself. A few examples of grounding questions are:

• what is one thing I can do today to give me pleasure?
• what boring thing may happen today (e.g. the sun coming out) can I imbue with sacredness?
• who is one person I can reach out to today?
• what is one thing I can do today to honor those who have helped me?
• what would it take to find peace in the midst of what is going on?
• what do I do in my day that does not serve my wellbeing?
• what can I do to move my body?
• what can I do to invite or create beauty or humor in my day?

Recently, I felt really low. I realized I needed to write a few grounding questions out. I focused on the sun coming out-- I decided I would mark it by stopping whatever I was doing and just recognize it.

I knew that I would have to make dinner for my family. I decided I would make a ritual out of it and try to appreciate all the labor and nature that went into the meal.

These are examples of that Robin Wall Kimmerer calls in her book Braiding Sweetgrass "practical reverence." It's a practice, and I'm feeling the need for it ever more in this time.

Similarly, Annie Dillard has written,

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” 



Sometimes, I feel Dillard's quote is too much pressure-- really, you want me to find existential value in standing in line at the DMV? At other times, like in COVID, I find this to be a guiding light, breaking things down to the basics. When all things are up for grabs, when all that is solid melts into air, when the ground we stand on is shaky, when everything is falling apart-- who are we, and what do our lives mean? The only answer to that is in how we spend our days.  Each day is our life in miniature. Some wasted time, some debauchery, waaaaay too much wine, some illumination, some connection, some awe. Some of this we have control over. If you knew that how you spent your day was the meaning of your life, what would you do?

5.  Spread it. Good vibrations are contagious. There is science that proves this, but I'm just going to leave it at this: in spite of all of the shit going on, your love, compassion, and skillful actions will make others want to do the same. The planet, social justice, your family, and the future of democracy all require you to imagine the radical awesomeness that this rupturous moment is creating. If there ever was a moment to rise to the occasion rather than shrivel into despair, this is it. We see it in the George Floyd protest streets, we see it in AOC's speech about Rep. Yoho's assault, we see it in our teachers, we see it in our kids. Some days, we can just wallow. But on the others, our ability to cultivate optimism is not just a matter of self-preservation; it is a matter of societal viability. After you've had a good cry with your best friend, take your vulnerability and faith in progress on the road; we are here to hold your heart.

Resilience: A Keyword in Environmental Studies?

Everybody likes the idea of resilience, right?

Resilience connotes bounce-back-ability.  Grit.  Adapting to change and dodging hardship.  Surviving struggle.

Why wouldn't we want to design resilience into communities, cities, architecture, cultures, young people?  Why wouldn't we want to raise our kids this way?  Why wouldn't we want to study the ways in which these things have proven resilient in the past, in order to emulate them for the upcoming storms?

Or, put another way, why would we resist grit, given all the shit?



















We hear it like this:

What's wrong with millenials?  They lack resilience.

Why do we admire hardworking migrant farmworkers?  They're resilient.

What can we do about colonialism?  Cultural resilience.

Cities designed for climate change? Resilient.

Communities that can come out on top after a disaster?  Resilient.

Survivors of sexual violence, institutional racism, intergenerational trauma? Resilient.

Critiques of the word abound.  It's got a lot of problems, as these statements show.  Condescending, fetishizing, appropriating.....  It smacks of privilege.

It puts responsibility for pulling up bootstraps on the individual, and absolves structures and history of blame.

It erases, or risks appropriating, historical ways of managing colonial violence (e.g. Vizenor's concept of native "survivance").

In the context of climate change, "adaptation and resilience" become funding opportunities that accept business-as-usual carbon colonial-capitalism as inevitable and fixed.



Is it a good word? Can we talk about cultivating resilience in the Anthropocene without participating in all these erasures of blame and history?  Or is it just a worthy ideal we can all get on board with?

______________________

This keyword entry is inspired by a Facebook thread involving a cast of brilliant thinkers who expanded my own thinking immensely: Britta Spann, Julie Sze, Mary Mendoza, Jennifer Ladino, Deborah Miranda, Anita Mannur, Leena Dallasheh, Rachel Pye Hamling, Stacy Alaimo, Aubrey Streit Krug, and Dianna Fischetti.  I'd be so dumb and uninspired without these women.  Child development, social and clinical psychology, popular culture, indigenous studies, the environmental humanities-- these fields approach the term quite differently.  

What I'm Reading Now: Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown

I learned about this book through my work on a collaborative CSU/UC network project through the University of California Carbon Neutrality Initiative, called the Transformative Sustainability and Climate Education Knowledge Action Network (KAN).  Our workshops were facilitated by Abigail Reyes, whose approach to facilitation is inspired by emergent strategy principles.   Emergent Strategy just blew my mind.  I have so many ideas about how to use it in my life, research, teaching, collaborations-- all my work.

My "pie in the sky" dream would be to use the facilitation principles and processes outlined in the book as pedagogy.  The entire point of that process is to identify vision and translate it into actions we can do to achieve the vision we want.  Students are always seeking a salve for the doom-and-gloom of the content of climate change, environmental injustice, critical science studies, and the challenges to their positionality that happens in environmental studies classes.  They always want do-able "actions" to address those problems.  Below, I take issue with those impulses, and write about this at much greater length elsewhere, but one way to give students what they seek is to facilitate a vision/change/action workshop for them during class time, or build in transformative student leadership workshops somewhere into the curriculum, or make them a co-curricular opportunity.

Otherwise, for me, the book emphasized the value of:

·      cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around).

I am so strapped for time, that relationships with colleagues and anybody in my various communities seems superfluous, not on my to-do list, and so I rush away from social interactions so I can keep working on my task list. I always work from the principle of spreading myself an inch deep and a mile wide, covering a ton of ground, but superficially.  I'm notoriously late everywhere, because I'm always squeezing things in before other things. I'm happy doing half-assed work because I live by the motto "just get that shit done."  So cultivating relationships in ways that don't feel like I'm achieving immediate items on my to-do list has definitely not been a priority to me.  However, Emergent Strategy makes such a convincing argument for the value of relationships, that I am committing myself to letting myself actually enjoy my colleagues, appreciate the languid feeling of just talking to people, and seeing the immeasurable but crucial work of conversation as part of my work.

·      valuing conversation over deliverables

Similar to how important I see the humanities as resisting the corporatization of the university, because it teaches stuff that cannot and shouldn't be monetized in our lives, conversation and relationship-building aren't seen as valuable aspects of "action".  Emergent Strategy argues otherwise, suggesting that the relationships are precisely what keeps a community or group resilient and sustainable for the longer haul.  The language of "action" and "deliverable" and "impact" misses so much important work.  In describing the work of a group called Ruckus, Brown discusses the "action" culture of their direct-action activism as "masculine action culture" and "penetrative"; "Rather than forming long-term partnerships with communities, Ruckus was in and out with mind-blowing, creative actions.  This was in line with a model of action grounded in spectacle" (61).  I spend a lot of time teaching my students that there are so many ways to define "action" that aren't just about marching in the streets, and even that could be argued to be not effective at bringing about "action."  In other words, the idea of "action" needs to be deconstructed, and the value we put on "action" over thought/theory challenged.  This insight from Emergent Strategy really resonated with me because I value the intellectual work of thinking so much, and try to convince my very action-oriented students to spend the time in the world of critique, thought, the mind, conversation, research.  Timothy Morton says something like "don't just do something, sit there!", and he encourages students not to get dirty in soil, but to "rub their noses in their own minds."

·      expanding our notion of  what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change

Extending this broader argument about what counts as "action," Brown suggests that the messiness of nonlinear movement and iterative, incremental shifts is OK; that's 'emergent strategy.'  I love this.  This relieves us from feeling we have to save the world in one day.

·      shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development

As an environmental studies person, I'm always hearing that environmental studies is all about problem-solving.  Students in this major think they're getting trained to problem-solve.  We have classes on problem-solving.  Michael Maniates' "Teaching for Turbulence," which I read with my students every semester, tells us that environmental studies is the 'problem-solving' field.  Problem-Solving is one of the Environmental Studies Program Student Learning Outcomes.  It's everywhere.  Yet, I have so many issues with this.  As my dear friend and colleague, Janet Fiskio, says, "I want my students to create problems, not solve them."  And Ted Toadvine's fabulous "Six Myths of Interdisciplinarity" examines the assumptions behind "problem-solving" (whose problem is it? Who benefits and who pays to solve it?  What about competing notions of solutions, definitions of the problem, etc?).  Also, sometimes environmental studies should be about other stuff.   Emergent Strategy is a beautiful antidote to the myopic "problem-solving" definition of environmental studies.

·      increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold

This gives value to all our little steps and small work.  Brown's argument is that "small is all," which suggests that the MOST we can do is the small stuff we can do.  This is hugely relieving and empowering to me.

·      emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students

·      shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”

·      paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc)

This one is really mind-blowing for me, since I'm so keep to criticize and whine about everything.  I will make this a mantra of mine, so I can be buoyed and uplifted, not anchored, dragged down, by the things I spend my time thinking about.  Or at least I'll try to resist whining more than I do now.  For example, rather than sitting around biting our nails about climate change, we should be asking "what is compelling about surviving climate change? What do we need to imagine as we prepare for it? How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear?" (58-9).

And also, she says "sometimes we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out" (112).  Ouch. I think that's why I intellectualize my grief.  Ouch.

·      doing work that fuels us.

I'm so driven by all the "shoulds" in my life.  I always say things like "I need to pick my kid up".  Should is shit, though, and I WANT to pick my kid up.  I want to do things in life that I desire.  There's no time to waste. Mary Oliver beautifully put it, "what will you do with your one wild and precious life?"; so Brown writes, "As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren't part of your visionary life's work. They you can give your all, from a well-resourced place, when the storm comes, or for those last crucial miles" (72).  Brown says that saying "no" to things that don't fuel us allows us to open up to more "yes's" that do. I love thinking of no as a kind of yes.

I could go on and on, but I'll wrap up here by thanking a group of colleagues for reading this book with me-- Janelle Adsit, Christina Accomando, Janet Winston, and Renee Byrd.