Collective healing
Stock image of hands from Unsplash
It has often been said that there is power in communication. That the first step to overcoming a problem or set back is to talk about it, for example, by asking for help. But what happens when you can not put into words or even talk about what you are going through, firstly, because you can not process it and secondly, it feels too personal and shameful and you do not want to invite ridicule from those around you, let alone invite pity, because you think no one else is going through the same thing or can relate. That is why, say what you must about the ill’s of social media or the internet, but one thing that can not be denied is that it has given a voice to the voiceless, we may not like some of the voices that are taking up space but like a lot of things in life, you learn to take the good and leave the bad. A lot of inequalities and injustices that are especially geared towards Black people and Women have only come to light because someone somewhere was brave enough to share their story/experience and it snowballed into lots of other people with similar stories and experiences coming forward to highlight the actual magnitude of the problem and most importantly to highlight the fact that these cases are not isolated. You are not alone. Look at the #metoo movement, racism within nursing in the UK and other institutions, Black Lives Matter movement and many more.
Yesterday was such a moment, when someone shared their thoughts and it resonated with a lot of folks. I was taking a break from writing my third book (well technically my 4th) as it was getting heavy and i needed a mental break. So like most people nowadays i turned to my apps for distraction and came across a post on Twitter (listen that’s the name he was given at birth) that chimed with some of what i was actually writing about. The post talked about going to school as a child the following morning after your parents had tried to kill each other the previous night and not being able to tell a soul and it hit a nerve with not only me but alot of people given the amount of comments and quote tweets that followed. The reason it hit a nerve with me was because i had lived experience of what was being described in this post and from the replies it looks like it was the lived experience of a lot of folks growing up and the common factor was that each and everyone one of us felt that we were alone in this experience(s). I was also reminded of a conversation i had with one of my colleagues at work. We were doing our children safeguarding course because we were doing a study that would involve children. The course was triggering and we got to reflecting on our childhood experiences where i shared my experience of growing up in a domestic violent home but was grateful for the power of play because while i was outside playing with my peers i could be a child without worries again and also none of the estate children ever brought up my home situation or bullied m about it. I was allowed to just be in those moments and one of my colleagues remarked that it maybe the reason why the other kids never teased me nor bullied me about my home situation was because it was their reality too. That remark has stuck with me.
One of the barriers to healing is thinking that we are alone in our experiences, which can be a lonely place to be. It takes a huge amount of courage to share your pain, put it out there so to speak but sometimes that’s the one step we need to start our healing journey. Just by realising that we are not alone, that there are folks out there who have almost similar experiences to you and are at different points in their healing journey that you can tap into if you so need. Or sometimes that feeling alone of knowing that you are not alone is in itself comforting enough. So @tii_bag whatever frame of mind you were at at the time you decided to share your thoughts, i hope you have found comfort at least in the fact that you were and are not alone and that we can collectively heal.