Content Warning: Grief, sudden death, childhood cancer, the brutality of life…go easy on your heart.
The words haven’t felt like public words these last few months. And putting anything into the world just for the sake of it has had bad taste I couldn’t stomach. So, the words have remained my own. But I’ve thought about you, thought about what I want to say to you about when I feel ready to share the thoughts that live in my journal (my heart). And then this afternoon the nudge came to be here, to show up, to write to you arrived with a subtle nod.
Brutiful is the word of the year. A made-up word I think I’ve adopted from Glennon Doyle’s lexicon. I’m thinking a lot about brutality and beauty and their co-existence, and how I think it might just be the most perfect encapsulation of humanity.
So many of us are doing hard shit this year. The hardest shit, it seems. Just this month…
a dear friend’s rental she was about to move into got swallowed up by a sinkhole. The earth literally opened up and ate her home.
a dear friend of mine lost a friend of hers. She had a brain aneurysm. She’d seen her the day before. They’d spoke of new found confidence and reclamation of self. They shared moments of joy in being who they were. Feeling home in the body of theirs. And then…the unfathomable. The split second, absolute earth-shattering slap that reminds us all just how fragile we are and it is. So. Fucking. Fragile.
a brilliant woman I once worked with had to write a Facebook post about the death of her three-year-old daughter after a valiant year long battle with cancer…the absolute unfathomable and the most fragile. Thinking about the size of the grief she must hold in her human body feels too enormous to comprehend to me. How truly unfair and unholy.
Totally brutal.
I’ve been pushed to the edges of my grief these last two weeks, having to make the kind of body bending decisions that re-arrange your DNA and you can’t help but be changed entirely. And now I’m pondering humanness and heartache and how much we can hold. I’m pondering the profane way the world spins when some of us are navigating the hardest stuff, and that the rest of us have no idea. We have no idea the size of the heartache, or the endurance, being asked of each other in any moment.
I numbly walked through a Westfields yesterday and looked at the people going about their Sunday, and I thought, they could be having the worst week of their life and I’d have no idea.
We have no idea.
This seems like a flaw in our design.
We don’t know anything.
And yet the lesson I’m repeatedly having to learn this year is asking for, and allowing, help.
So, I know we need each other.
We need each other.
Totally beautiful.
The other thing I’m being urged to remember right now, a knowing deep in my bones and as true as the life in my lungs, I know I am okay. It will be okay. Even when it’s not. And that feels like the most brutiful knowing of them all.
You are okay.
It will be okay.
Eventually.
Pearler is written on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people in Meanjin, and Claire acknowledges this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Oh my love xxx huge huge love to you and yours xx brutiful is the word.