The Grieving Time Traveler: To Create The World That We Want, We Must Heal; To Heal, We Must Remember; To Remember, We Must Time Travel.

A Palestinian child throwing a stone at an IOF tank, reminiscent of the well-known image of the late Faris Odeh, 15 years old, killed by IOF soldiers in 2000, about ten days after being photographed doing the same thing as the child above.

“Remembering As an Act of Revolt” - Vicky Osterweil

Every time I visit Cocoa Cinnamon, my favorite local coffee shop, I am transported back to the Summer of 2019. It’s as if I’ve jumped through a portal. When I am not too preoccupied, I can briefly feel the pangs of grief and rage and urgency rising to greet me at the doorway like a group of old friends.

I enjoy the coffee. But what I appreciate most is how this shop serves as a gate of remembrance and revival. It is the site where radical seeds of community care were sewn into me by a grassroots organizer named “O,” who in June of 2019, sat across the table from me and asked warmly, “So tell me what brings you to this work?”

This time period was characterized by so much loss and harm, both personally and collectively.

Donald Trump had been in office for 2 years, moving with reckless impunity. He was unique in his refusal to adhere to the proverbial guardrails of Democracy that the Democrats like to pretend prevent them from (at most) broadening social safety nets and (at the very least) serving as a stopgap for rising fascism. Countless unarmed Black men, women, and children were falling victim to State-sanctioned violence because of the threat they posed in the imaginations of the white cops who killed them.

Earlier that Summer, my wife and I moved back to a city whose landscape had become unrecognizable, with its high-rise condos, breweries and axe-throwing bars; meanwhile, Black and Brown folks in public housing were getting sick and dying because of decades of divestment resulting in crumbling infrastructure and deadly levels of a carbon monoxide and black mold. My Granddad, a man who existed in my psyche as a super hero with immortality, was putting up his best fight against Alzheimer’s Dementia. He would become an ancestor later that Fall.

Grief and hopelessness made a home inside of me that Summer.

But O lifted me out of despair with her invitation to connect to something bigger than my pain and fear. And I spent the next couple of years fumbling through lessons on bottom-up organizing, working alongside others to transform our neighborhood at the level of relationship. Eventually, I began having my own conversations with strangers-turned-neighbors about their hopes for the future, learning their beliefs regarding housing, and policing and safety. I extended my own invitations to folks to co-create the future that we all deserve.

I expanded so much in the summer of 2019. Those moments, now memories, formed a callus inside of me that gives me ballast whenever hopelessness and despair try to creep back in.

Vicky Osterweil offers us a gentle reminder of the importance and power of remembering what we’ve been through in her essay, “Remembering As an Act of Revolt”:

“The state wants us to forget the very things we have just lived through. They want us to forget everything we've learned and experienced. In an age of mass gaslighting and mass misinformation in the name of mass disablement and death, where the state offers us nothing except the comforting lie that this is normal, the simple stating of the facts, standing up for our own memories, becomes an act of resistance. Do not forget what you know. Do not forget who you are. Forgetting is an active process, and it's one we must resist and refuse.”

Not only do I refuse to forget the summer of 2019 and what followed: we organized to get a $90 million dollar affordable housing bond passed, and divested funds away from the local PD to create a community safety task force. But whenever I get the itch, I rarely pass up a chance to visit Cocoa Cinnamon for a coffee and a little reminder of our collective power when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, a reminder that we have all we need to be free in each other.

Queer Time Travel

In a way, I am a Queer Time Traveler.

When I say that I am Queer, I am referring to my gender, and my positionality.

“I am Queer” as in “abolish the police.”

“I am Queer” as in “Reparations and Land Back.”

“I am Queer as in Free Palestine,” (word to @elsie.dehan).

“I am Queer” as in “Free Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Hawai’i, Cuba, Tigray, and all colonized peoples across the globe.”

“I am Queer” as in I am in direct opposition to the cultural norms of antiBlackness and anti-fatness, cisheteronormativity and transphobia, ableism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. My mere existence necessitates the destruction of this world’s systems and the construction of something radically different in its place.

When I say that I am a Time Traveler, I journey back to the past through reading and studying and reflecting, through listening and bearing witness—an act of remembering all that we have survived. I do so in defiance of the State which, as Vicky Osterweil reminds us, manufactures our collective forgetfulness.

When I say that I am a Time Traveler, I journey forward to the future through relationship and community building—an act of survival. I am heeding Grace Lee Boggs clarion call to “prefigure,” or practice the world that we envision for ourselves right now so that we are ready for it when it comes.

I sojourn between past and future to sharpen my defenses against the colonial forces of the present that demand we keep our heads down and cooperate with our own death and destruction.

I ain’t goin’ out like that.

And we ain’t goin’ out like that.

Safety in The World’s Underbelly

One of my homies recently said that, “We cannot declare ourselves, nor a space that we are creating, ‘safe.’ We can express our intentions to embody safety, and to cultivate safe environments.” We can express our values and how we plan to enact those values into the world. But, they continued, “safety is not something we can claim on someone else’s behalf.”

Community is a constellation of complex trauma and grief orbiting around another with so much precariousness and potential for misunderstanding and harm. As we collectively build the future, what will it take for us to experience safety in the world’s underbelly? How can we embody safety, in relationship with ourselves and in relationship with one another, in spite of all of the pain that we carry?

Healing is often framed as a personal and private matter. Regulation is considered a prerequisite for gaining access to community. Meanwhile, our culture of pervasive violence keeps us constantly activated, and the State robs us of both choices for, and access to, healing. This highly individualistic, carceral framework leaves us feeling isolated, harmed, and unworthy of the community care and healing that we so desperately need in order to survive.

In the words of Kelly Hayes:

“Many of the social patterns and behaviors that lead us to reject one another and revert to individualism are the products of trauma, so to do the work of being human together, we must make space to address these emotional and physiological realities. Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements, but in this age of catastrophe they are more crucial than ever.”

Erica Woodland strongly suggests that we ground ourselves in a framework of Healing Justice, adding:

“We are not going to get free if we don’t have healing traditions at the center of our political work. And we are not going to be healed if we are not transforming the conditions” (“How to Survive the End of the World” Podcast).

Collective grief work, healing work, and restorative conflict resolution are the threads we need to weave a tapestry of safety that covers us in our pursuit of liberation. Whatever we build in order to heal from our grief and trauma will become the sturdy foundation upon which our resistance work rests. And if we do not become more intentional about building an ecosystem of care and healing right now, The Work of getting free will never be sustainable. We must always remember this.

Moving Beyond Acknowledgement

Lately, I’ve been reading Secure Love, a book on attachment theory. It talks about safety, belonging, and worthiness as “felt senses.” The example used in the book says, “We don’t have to tell ourselves we’re hungry. Our body feels hunger, without us having to think it.”

The same can be said of safety. The body knows and reacts to threats without us having to think to ourselves, “I am unsafe.” However, just because the body knows, it does not mean that we are attuned to hear its warnings. That is because colonialism and capitalism separate us from our bodies, numbing our perception to the threats all around us.  We move through this world disembodied and defenseless, cooperating with the way things are, forgetting what we’ve survived, forgetting what we have learned about ourselves and the world, normalizing loss and violence, and spilling onto one another in harmful ways.

In response, we have to be intentional about building care infrastructures and practices to heal our grief and trauma, and ultimately to reestablish and maintain the connection to our bodies, connection to each other, connection to nature, and connection to the futures we hope to inhabit.

Selin Nurgün recently said of this work:

“We must move beyond acknowledging, intellectualizing and theorizing the dire state of the world; and toward the practical of building something different. Because I just know all this awareness with no deepening, processing and healing is leading to despair.”

When I lost my Gramma in 2023, I quickly learned that grief is political. Capitalism was actively taking from me all the things that I needed to heal: time, interdependence, connection to my body, connection to the land, ritual. But grief returned me to my body. Grief tending empowered me to feel deeply, to hear, process and respond to my bodymind’s needs with clarity. Now I am more attuned to grief’s whispers, well before they become roars, turbulent and demanding to be heard.

We can, and we must, build what we need to heal:

a container for the individual and collective grief and trauma that we carry under antiBlackness and anti-fatness, cisheteronormativity and transphobia, ableism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism;

a container where we can all return to our bodies and collectively respond to our needs for safety and wellness.

As Cara Page and Erica Woodland teach, healing and liberation are inextricably linked and the work of both is our collective responsibility.

Acknowledgements

To O:

If you’re reading this, thank you for extending community to me during a time when hopelessness had made a home inside of me. Your wisdom, fire, and principled commitment to our people was like gasoline to the flickering flame in my belly. Thank You feels insufficient, but thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ve been wanting to say that to you for years and this essay was my attempt at articulating what you and that moment in time meant to me.

To D4A:

Y’all were my first “political home,” the first example of what is possible when a bunch of regular folks move together in pursuit of freedom. We ain’t all have to be scholars, nor experienced, and most certainly not extremely resourced. We just had to be present and willing. Y’all taught me that radicalized, queer folks have so much collective power in our own heads, hearts and hands. Thank you for making my political imagination colorful and vibrant.

Resources

I don’t want to leave you, the reader, with my thoughts on what I think must be done and not provide some map on how to do it. Below are some resources that I have found incredibly helpful in working through my grief, creating healing practices, and practicing community care alongside others. I hope you find them supportive.

• BadSchoolBadSchool’s “Building Beyond the March” (Instagram Carousel)

• The Lady Ms. VaginaJenkins x Willow “People Are Waking Up” (Instagram Carousel)

• The Lady Ms. VaginaJenkins x Willow “People Are Waking Up” (Long Form Essay)

• The GEN Grief Toolkit, created in collaboration with and Camille Sapara Barton (PDF Short)

• “Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community” by Camille Sapara Barton (Book)

• “The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief” by Francis Weller (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-rituals-of-renewal-and-the-sacred-work-of-griefBook)

• “Healing Justice Lineages: Healing at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety” by Cara Page and Erica Woodland (Book)

• “Rest is Not Resistance, and That Is OK: On Cancer, Grief, and Audre Lorde” by Trey Washington (Essay)

• “Remembering As an Act of Revolt” by Vicky Osterweil (Essay)

• “Refusing to Forget with Vicky Osterweil” (Death Panel Podcast)

Please consider working through these with a friend, or a group of friends. This work is best done collectively. Request the books at your local library. Check them out for free using the Hoopla or Libby App. Hit me up if y’all have difficulty accessing these resources. And feel free to add more resources in the comments.

Peace,

Trey (they/he)