I am finding it especially difficult to type words this evening. Perhaps it is because I am simply exhausted - worn out from illness, emotionally-drained, and aware of my loneliness this evening as I sit on my couch in this silent apartment. But I'm inclined to believe that my difficulty with words tonight has more to do with the heaviness that this day holds for me and so many others. I learned today that sometimes care for the self can take the shape of allowing the space and time necessary to enter into memory - not in a way that could in anyway be experienced as re-living the memories, but in a sacred way that holds onto the present and the future while entering into the past. I remembered today. I remembered the horror, the loss, the confusion, the community, the faces, the places, the media, the protesting, the conversations, the songs, the dance, the trees, the trips, the book, the girl. But there was something different about today's process of remembering - I was able to remember my "self" in all of it - who I was then, how I was then, what I was longing for, how I was naive, what I needed, who I was becoming, how my world was being cracked open. In the past I would have felt guilty for spending too much time thinking of my own woundedness when so many others were far more wounded and directly impacted by the shooting 11 years ago - but today I valued my own life enough to acknowledge my pain and my growth as worthy of remembrance as well.
One last quote from Serene Jones in her book Trauma & Grace as I sign out for the night:
"The fragmented anatomy of trauma can leave one without a world, without speech, stories, memory, community, future, or a sense of self; theology's task is to renarrate to us what we have yet to imagine."
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