In November, following the election of Trump as the next U.S. president, I was at a loss for words, but now it’s January; the inauguration has passed and a terrifying new era is upon us. As is my despair, and perhaps yours as well.
I’ve heard all the voices, Quaker and others, saying Do not fear, and Don’t give in to hopelessness, and Turn your strong feelings into action. I don’t find these admonitions useful, or even doable by me.
I’m a therapist, and I spend my work days helping people turn toward their unwanted emotions, and encouraging group therapy members not to comfort one another out of shame, guilt, grief, or rage, or even out of despair. A feeling that is acknowledged and allowed to flow freely through the heart can become plastic, fluid, transformative, and the feeler can decide whether or how to act on a fully owned emotion. An emotion that is stuffed, disowned, minimized, or repressed simply waits in its dark and airless container until we are vulnerable and then roars out again, making all the noise that something locked in a trunk makes when it’s freed, allowing very little leeway for how, or whether, it is to be expressed in action.
So with despair. I am not saying that despair should be encouraged, wallowed in, or fed daily tidbits of hopelessness and gloom. I am saying that despair, like any emotion, must be felt as fully as one can on any given day, acknowledged, given room to crescendo, and only then pointed toward action.
If anger is the emotion that draws boundaries and prepares to defend them, and disgust warns that something is nasty and contaminating, and fear shouts to fight, flee, or freeze, and guilt shines a light on one’s own misdeeds, and shame warns of ostracism from the group, so too despair has its uses. Allowed to flow freely, it says, That which was so longed for will not come to pass. Hope—a different hope, wearing different clothes and speaking a different language and pursuing different goals—waits on the other side of a dark chasm. Like every hero in every hero’s quest tale that I love, despair demands that we go down into that chasm and be in that darkness.
I despair for the new administration. The climate hopes I had four years ago seem demolished on Day One, and I see no Lone Ranger of an equally powerful nation that might save us from ourselves. The Paris Climate Accords goal of keeping global average surface warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures is beyond our grasp, and I don’t want to think about how bad the results will be. I release the hopes that we will avert what for some of us will be major inconveniences and for others will be catastrophe.
And in that “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” wail, I hear the voice of God. Not comforting me out of my despair, nor scolding me out of what I’m feeling, nor accusing me of faithlessness, but simply and quietly being with—the kind of accompaniment I sometimes feel when I have abandoned all efforts to squirm away.
I don’t know yet what to hope for on the chasm’s other side. I anticipate that there will be far more hard work, and substantially less joy, than I might wish. I try to prepare for human misery, both preventing it where I can and witnessing it where I must. I know I will need to draw very clear distinctions between what is in my power, and thus deserves all of my power, and what is outside of my sphere of action, and so must simply be known. I don’t know the future, which is sometimes terrifying and sometimes a relief.
I do know there is another side to the chasm. This knowledge does not mitigate that there is a long climb down into it, and an even longer climb up the other side. Like the kind souls who kept me company through 53 hours of labor when my first child was born, God does not take away any of the pain—and does not leave my side.
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