Dec 10 | Panagia Track #3: Healing is Slow

I wrote this in late July after reading a Twitter thread by writer Kai Cheng Thom about how trauma affects interactions among marginalized peoples. It’s amazing to me that the human body can heal itself of superficial and severe injury through medicine, the strange magic of sleep, and a healthy diet, but it occurred to me that we must take a more active role in mental, emotional, and spiritual healing, and how very difficult that is. We have to untangle neural pathways in the brain that may have been helpful to us once but no longer are. I thought of grief, and how much longer it took me to fully grieve than I thought it would (and how indeed grief is unending), and then I thought of the kind of faith I have now versus the kind of faith I had as a younger person. It’s all a process, and yet it is so much easier when we find each other, when we do the work together. Can we hold each other?