Grief’s Many Faces
Reflecting on Aisha Mirza’s compassionate offerings on “grief as revolutionary resistance”, exploring how grief manifests in the context of manic-depression, and inviting concurrent truths.
This past week is the most I have written and shared publicly in years, and maybe ever. And it has been a product of my exasperation, guilt, the fire of grief as it manifests in my body. Less visibly, it is a product of my own work-in-progress navigation of neuro-divergence.
Not long after I immersed myself into community organizing in college, I was diagnosed with manic-depression. My experiences navigating this particular kind of neuro-divergence informs all of my work. It is the reason data healing was born, it’s the reason I theorize about ritual, it is the reason I fluctuate between being hyper-online, and hyper-offline. It’s the reason I’m trying to figure out what a digital rehabilitation clinic could look like.
I came of age on the internet and have encountered both immense vortexes of trauma, and immense pockets of refuge here. The internet is where I was first doxxed, at the age of 19–my personal Facebook page hyperlinked in national publications, giving hundreds of white supremacists a direct channel to flood my inbox. But the internet is also how I came to discover the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarsinha, whose book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice has been nothing short of an anchor to me for the past 5 years. And most recently, the internet is how I discovered the work of
and Jezz Chung, whose writings these past weeks about navigating heartache alongside neuro-divergence have served as the most timely of reminders of the compassion that a disability justice lens can invite.I’ve never really shared about my experiences with manic-depression publicly (at least not this explicitly), but as I reflect on the vulnerability of writers such as Zeba and Jezz and Aisha, and digest the very keen reminders that hopelessness is not to be disavowed in its entirety, it feels necessary to contextualize some of what I’ve shared this past week within this lens.
During a particularly intense episode a few years back, I remember having an epiphany that if I wrote–if I let the whirlpool of emotions and thoughts come out from my brain and onto the page–they stopped feeling so destabilizing. This newsletter–sharing here as regularly as I have been–is an attempt towards carving out a way of engaging online that isn’t tethered to Meta’s dreadful algorithms. It’s an attempt towards being in conversation with other people and thinkers and feelers and lovers and friends! In long form. And it’s an attempt at getting the grief out, stumbling along the way, but finding ways to continue.
Earlier today,
shared a piercingly thorough, love-as-a-verb Substack post in which they wrote about grief work, somatics, and their experiences in Palestine. In that letter, they responded to my most recent Substack letter about hopelessness–offering a prescient and gentle counterpoint about the necessity of honoring grief:“I believe hopelessness should be honoured and made space for because it is rarely the whole story! Let your body usher you through the grief of liberation and if hopelessness is part of that, feel into it, follow it through the dark, for the meaning of life is on the other side, and yes, Palestine will be free.”
(Aisha Mirza’s post also cites the work of Sobonfu and Malidoma Some, two practitioners who revolutionized the way I thought about neuro-divergence through an African Indigenous lens. I highly recommend reading Aisha’s Substack post in full, and bookmarking all of the references!).
Grief, for me, is something that sends me to the depths in every dimension. Sometimes it manifests as getting lost in the spiritual plane. Sometimes it looks like paralysis. And sometimes, it looks like it did this week: writing ferociously because the thoughts and feelings swirling in my mind felt so intense that I had no choice but to get them out–realizing after 3 days of reading and writing and digesting information, that I had forgotten to take a shower. Grief looks like forcing myself to stop reading news and sitting in the bathtub and realizing that I feel guilty for taking care of myself. Grief looks like having to resist the temptation to dissolve into that guilt by neglecting my well-being, while honoring the flood as it takes shape. Grief looks like working through all of that in private because it’s realest there, and in public because sharing works to loosen the grip of shame and stigma.
“Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and cultural worker. It’s one the mainstream doesn’t often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age ninety-eight.”
– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Navigating neurodivergence, and the risk of mania in particular, means that showing up in person is potentially devastating. Some of our brains and bodies are just not equipped to handle the number of sensory variables and potential psychosomatic triggers that in-person actions expose us to. In the past, ignoring this reality has led to my being hospitalized; an experience which 1) deepened my understanding of communal care as a life-saving practice / fundamental alternative to institutionalized ‘wellness’ and 2) necessitated carving out ever-evolving accommodations to stay safe and pursue equilibrium.
Those of you who have been following my work prior to the past few weeks will know that I find social media counterintuitive to our relational well-being at large. I’m a proponent of the mushroom internet and aspire towards restoring ‘Telepathy as an Operating System’. And yet, as the devastation in Palestine has catalyzed an information war between mainstream media and social media, many of us have had to lean on social media.
When I share calls to action that can happen via Instagram, it’s not because it’s low-lift (the visibility of doing so is actually quite high-stakes in its own, often illegible way), it’s not because I think enough Instagram posts will lead to our liberation. It’s because Instagram is the closest thing a lot of us have to being in “public” while keeping our bodies physically safe. Now, there’s a lot to be said about how trying to use social media in these ways necessitates digi-spiritual hygiene, how it can be a source of triggers of its own (aka data trauma), and how it can function to disconnect us just as much as it serves to connect us.
Something I’ve learned from my dear friend Nènè Konaté is the necessity of a “yes, and also” framework. Holding concurrent truths at the same time. This was something that I was reflecting on a lot in 2021, specifically within the context of virality:
In Aisha’s Substack, they referred to these juicy and timely questions posed by
which serve as potent guideposts:“⁃We need mass efforts toward the archival of current and previously occupied populations. This is paramount. Instagram, not even your finsta or the app formerly known as Twitter can be considered archives. They can be essentially erased. We need to work together to develop physical hard drives of the cultures’ struggles and futures of us all. Tech has made eradicating history swift, it doesn’t take a generation-long phase out anymore
⁃How can we practice organizing without the internet? What are ancient forms of communication that we can talk into? Can we just send more letters? Can we slow down? Can we use intuition as a revolutionary form of communication? Can we use nature?
⁃How do we avoid this dwindling into a “25% of proceeds go to…” situation?
⁃How do we avoid the 501©3-ification of genocide?
⁃What is the healthy amount of consumption of bloodied media?
⁃How do we take care of each other?”
I invite anyone reading these to sit with these questions, and reflect on the concurrent truths you feel yourself needing to hold in your own life/practice.
Ultimately, care is the compass that leads us to liberation. And care in and of itself bears as many faces as grief. Sending love in abundance to anyone who’s navigating the many matrices that the Present moment is invoking, and saying a prayer for the collective will to continue onwards.
In Solidarity 🤍,
Neema
neema, i just managed to actually read this (been moving soo slooow and in awe of how quickly you responded to my post lol!) thank you so much for your generosity and the softness and breathing room in your work. so lucky to be in this fight w u x
Neema, I'm so grateful to have found your writing. Thank you for what you've been writing over the last few weeks, and especially for the beautiful way you've named neurodivergence's impact on our abilities to show up in person. I have chronic migraine and have been trying to figure out how to do the most that I can in the struggle for Palestinian liberation and demanding a ceasefire, while not hurting my brain and making it impossible for me to do anything for days at a time. It's been tricky to navigate and I resonate so much with what you've written here! Thank you for the disability justice reminders here <3