I am deeply troubled by what you just (and continue) to experience. I hold space for your and your family’s healing from this attack. The threats you received are unacceptable and unconscionable.
Being the person who holds up a mirror is not an easy mission. We live in the most divisive time period in modern history, in the throes of massive global and personal change, at the crossroads of deciding which timeline will be humanity’s future. Pulling off the Band-Aid f**king hurts and as I’ve followed your writing, you are pulling more than most.
As a white, cisgender, straight person, I’ve challenged myself to sit quietly with all the feelings that arise inside me as people of color, various genders, with various sexual orientations, socioeconomic and cultural classes and the differently abled express their justifiable rage from centuries of oppression and mistreatment.
To be honest, there are times when reading or hearing the phrase ‘white people do this’ triggers me. A systemically conditioned voice inside my head says, ‘but not me, I am a good white person, how dare they call me out like that!’ I am learning to acknowledge the origins of that voice and make a conscious choice to not allow my inner triggering to minimize another’s person’s experience. I believe we can only move forward when all the rage has been fully expressed and the systems that continue to oppress have been dismantled. It’s ugly, nasty and scary, yet here we are.
Holding back from outwardly expressing my inner triggering, thereby wounding someone again, is only possible because of years of personal and spiritual work, meditation, self-reflection and self-accountability. Most human beings have not committed themselves to that type of journey, they are still operating from a very instinctual, emotional and survival-based mentality.
Which looks like:
If someone else rises, I fall.
If someone else wins, I lose.
There’s not enough to go around, so I must hoard what I can.
People who don’t look like, speak like or believe like me are dangerous and must be suppressed.
If I don’t grab power, someone else will take power over me.
Do I have an answer as to how to shift humanity out of this deeply ingrained mindset? I wish. Perhaps it’s through people like you and I continuing to hold up the mirror, to reveal the ugliness in its entirety.
Everyone is hurting and very few are listening to each other. That’s where I am personally trying to role model. Why I deliberately go into new spaces to listen to as many different perspectives as I can. I even bear witness to hate (for the limited time I’m able as an empath), then turn and use my platform to encourage us to find some type of bridge.
None of us really know how to make this work. We’ve been doing the same thing for so long, lifting ourselves out of the rut and forging a new path seems impossible.
However, I believe in humankind.
Right now, we are like a bunch of toddlers fighting over a shiny toy. It’s mine, you can’t have it!
But, we also have the potential to become more self-aware, more self-accountable, to grow.
To learn how to honor both our diversity and our Oneness. It’s going to continue to be a bumpy ride, but consciousness is expanding, but by bit.
One small action at a time.
We have to be real about what’s coming up inside. We also have to recognize that our ‘truth’ might be harmful, hurtful or triggering to others.
So, I invite everyone reading to take a deep breath. Fully acknowledge how hard this is and how far we still have to go.
The internal work and the outside actions are worth it, I promise. We are setting the foundation for a new millennia of human existence. We are quarrying, cutting, lifting and moving huge stones into place, still trying to work out the exact alignment.
Over here, some say.
No, over here others shout.
Everyone trying to be the architect, because we are all co-creators of this joint reality. It’s a painfully slow process, but progress is being made even when we can’t see it.
It only takes one person to listen, to contemplate, to acknowledge the pain, to reach out a hand, to bridge the gap.
Then another and another.
Peace to you Umair🙏🏼
