There were too many feelings and ideas, too big to name or hold. They were jumbled in my heart and head and still are. I had to shake them off me, expel them, or at least release some of the pressure, so I could reclaim my body. I needed to look at my guilt, despair and fury outside my body, so I could understand how they collide inside me as I witness the slaughter of Palestinians. Month after month, ten feelings pop up in a conversation, and before I process or respond, ten different feelings take over preventing all connection. I can’t catch up with myself. Or breathe.
Watching a genocide in real time through WhatsApp messages from friends is heavy and isolating. I feel crazy most of the time. Am experiencing generational Holocaust trauma for real now, understanding how so many people let it happen to us, to others, because I see so many people let it happen again. I confessed my anxiety to a friend in exercise class and she said, “You can only do what you can do.” She let herself off the hook for doing more before she had done anything. Nobody gets it. I moved away.
So, to be able to climb out of my overwhelm and refocus on the political challenge, I sat down to write. I wrote a letter to a girl in Gaza, the daughter of a friend. I wrote a letter to a Jewish influencer I know who 18-months in still posts photos enjoying meals at cafes with smiling friends. And I wrote a letter to Anne Frank who, unlike me, had the maturity and wisdom to see the beauty amidst the ugly.
I printed each letter out on different colored paper and cut each letter into bites. I interspersed them on my dining table, letting them crash and converge, and while the whole thing makes no sense–not the conversations nor the genocide–I feel calmer having expelled these toxins from my body, slightly stronger to face more. There is so much more to face.
Dear Nora,
I have at last taken the time to enlarge and read your poignant and wrenching work of art and humanity. You have made the invisible visible, made clear the things we know or should know, the deep unfairness that some of us have a choice to pay or not to pay attention to that which is ripping the peace, or the life, from others. Like the others who commented before me, I honor your work in braiding together these strands, creating something that has its own power to awaken and penetrate. And I honor your struggle to make room for everything, and send love.
Dear Nora, it’s Gord Doctorow from Toronto (member of IJV). We’ve communicated before a few years ago. Having read your post, I feel compelled to say that I empathize and sympathize with your feelings. I am glad that you shared your approach to dealing with your feelings of being overwhelmed with despair. I know that feeling. But you have done something about it, something that is emotionally wise and worthy of sharing. Thank you for doing that.
However tormented, however much we bear or try to bear…I’m struggling to still believe the heart has room for everything. How to stay strong at this time–I don’t know but I’m trying. I send what love I can.