A Love Letter to Marginalized Community Members in Late October 2020

Feel the pain of it, not the disgrace of it.

—Sharon Salzberg, Shelter for the Heart and Mind

Me. Unicorn and butterfly face painting by 4 year old.

Me. Unicorn and butterfly face painting by 4 year old.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and I feel like a steel-toed boot just kicked me in the face.

Before that confirmation, I decided to speak with family members about Barrett. As both a cisgender woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I figured empathy would prevail. My family members would see, hear, and value me, my partner, and my almost five-year-old daughter enough to link Barrett’s confirmation with the loss of hard-fought protections and rights. In that moment, my yearning for deep connection blinded me to an intergenerational reality that is steeped in white supremacy, misogyny, heteronormativity, and unbridled self-interest. There’s a lot of addiction, anxiety, and perfectionism in my ancestry, too, which I would argue are the family-level version of the more macro-level forces I just named.

So what I got in return for bringing up Barrett was what Resmaa Menakem would call dirty pain—pain that uses denial, avoidance, and blame to block trauma from metabolizing and, therefore, healing. They denied that she will contribute to economic and cultural harm for many through a judicial position of power. They blamed the “liberal media” for painting her in such a negative light. And, perhaps most agonizingly, they avoided responding directly to the anguished question I posed, “How can you say you love me and support her nomination?”

Here’s the deal. Yes, we need to fight the oppressive conditions in this country that have existed from its inception. AND it is going to be much harder to engage in that struggle effectively and over the long haul if we don’t do so from a foundation of self-love. Assertiveness, confidence, and resilience do not emerge from the trance of unworthiness.

I am 45 years old. This past year I finally allowed myself to experience—not just think about but actually feel—being delighted in by another. Did you know that being delighted in is one of the primary conditions of secure attachment? Until recently, I did not. Yes, I “knew” we need to feel valued to experience a substantial sense of connection and belonging. I did not yet feel, in my body and with emotion, that the path to believing in your value is feeling delighted in by those around you. I have received plenty of accolades and pats on the back for my accomplishments; that is not the same thing. To truly be delighted in is to experience someone lighting up simply because they are in your presence. You do not have to say anything, do anything, or feel a certain way. You—your whole, glorious, messy self—is celebrated for being here, with me, in this moment. Over and over and over.

Developing the capacity to allow in someone else’s delight in us is no joke after a lifetime of oppositional messaging: “You need to obey to belong.” “You need to perform to be loved.” “You need to not be needy to keep me from leaving.” Getting these toxic beliefs out of our system is a process that requires time, patience, and heaps of self-compassion. In other words, we need a lot of support. The good news is that oodles of amazing people and resources exist to assist us if we learn how to let them (I’ve linked to some of my favorites below). In case my own long and winding journey can support yours, I want to offer this:

Before we can generously feel our own value, we need adequate safety—of the physical and emotional kind. It is nearly impossible to give ourselves undivided, loving attention if we simultaneously need to be vigilant about protecting ourselves from judgment, shaming, and humiliation. How we get to safety is going to depend on our circumstances (what resources are available to us) as well as our willingness to try something different. When we have a lot of experience with staying silent to remain safe, anticipate a lot of “Yeah…buts” coming up. “Yeah, I would love to be delighted in, but that’s childish.” “Yeah, I get what you’re saying about this radical self-love idea, but I need to spend all my time getting out the vote.” “Yeah, I see how this system that focuses only on my performance is exploitative and dehumanizing, but it’s all I know.” Unfortunately, those “buts” dismiss the insight in the first half of the sentence and keep us stuck. I invite you to engage in an experiment: see what happens if you can catch the “but” as it comes out of your mouth and replace it with “and.”

If we are not in a life-threatening situation and can stay with the truth that we need safety to take in love, so many possibilities emerge. As someone who has struggled with feeling like a burden to others if I ask for support, I’m grateful for the existence of practices that require only our imagination (linked resources on this below). For example, I recently imagined a dome of blooming clematis vines surrounding me and blocking out any voices that were critical, taunting, and demeaning. While sitting on a soft cushion that rested on soft grass within the safety of that living shelter (all of this imagined, by the way), my ideal parent appeared. For me, my ideal parent is a trainer I had, but they do not have to be someone with whom we have actually interacted. What matters is they know how to delight in us, exactly as we are. So my trainer showed up on a cushion, sitting across from me. She looked at me with her kind, twinkling eyes and reached out with her baby-blue-painted fingernails, inviting my hands into hers. And once we settled in to being with one other, she said to me, “You are lovable just as you are.”

Because I have allowed myself to enact these practices, I am more and more able to take in the nourishment from my trainer and savor it. And the more I take in this nurturance from an imagined ally, the more possible it feels to receive it from real, live sources available to me in my current life—the cat sleeping on my lap as I write this post, a 20-second hug from my partner, my child’s snuggles, the beauty of the fallen red maple leaves outside my front door, and the loving friends with whom I have built reciprocal, trusting relationships. And, yes, the more I experience being delighted in—not merely tolerated or even accepted—the more I step into a loving and fierce presence that has the capacity to use my voice to fight for collective liberation and justice. In my everyday interactions as well, I am growing better at clearing the FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt) and embracing a practice of love that is rooted in honesty and acceptance.

An important note: if the substantive nurturance I highlighted above has largely been missing from your life, please know that tidal waves of grief are going to accompany this process of learning how to love yourself. Hence the opening quote from Sharon Salzberg—feel the pain without adding the second arrows of judgment and shame to it. Seek out and receive the support you need to feel this grief all the way to its end. I promise you can:

Breathe in the pain

breathe out the love.

Come to see

right here

right now

you are a goddamn miracle.

Resources