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“On the sea the storm rages, the winds scream out, but the fish swims; he is not swallowed up because he is used to swimming. To you, this world is the sea. Its currents uncertain, its waves deep, its storms fierce. And you must be this fish, that the waves of the world do not swallow you.” — Bishop Ambrose1
Last week I started a new meditative practice of drawing fish, painting them, cutting them out, and situating them on a watercolor sea. I’m not an artist but I have been dreaming. Of watery things: Longterm grief spaces, technologies for mourning, and Tuan Mac Cairill’s favorite life as a salmon.
I’ve had a broken heart for as as long as I can remember. But I think it all started the day I found out that not all in this riptide world have a friend. My mother worked in nursing homes when I was little and I used to go there with her, which is to say this awareness came early.
Speaking of mothers and friends, this time last year I was writing about Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ reflections on Blessed Mother as protector, who “has the words that matter most to the forlorn soul: I will stay with you.2”
Since then, for all kinds of reasons, I’ve been fixated on friendship. In my reading, writing, and work with people I’ve looked at responsiveness, witness, remaining, and other qualities that make one ready to both have a friend and be one.
I’ll never forget these last months. More than fifteen thousand Palestinian people have been killed by the Israeli government’s bombardment in Gaza. I personally have lost more this last year than I could tell you all here. But in the wake of meticulous mourning fruits have come. In the form of clear callings, as promised. Toward urgent and tender life options3.
For an essay I’m writing elsewhere, I’ve been revisiting Philip Cushman’s Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy, and more specifically his work on consumerism and the empty self.
Drawing on the work of historian Warren Susman who studied self-help manuals from the 1800s, Cushman notes that self-development efforts at that time were primarily focused on character. Character which was seen as a malleable thing that could be strengthened through hard work and sacrifice.
Around 1890, the manuals shifted from a focus on character toward an emphasis on personality. Rather than character’s attention to service and humility, personality had to do with being unique, attractive, and charismatic.
Coinciding with the rise of entrepreneurship, personality was about “attending to and manipulating others, not by following moral codes or adhering to religious ideals…[but through] poise and charm…personal grooming and health."
As advances in science and medicine drove Americans further away from religion, the human search for transcendence was also shifting from the communal toward the individual. People were beginning to imagine personal health and well-being as ends in and of themselves, rather than byproducts of participation in community.
In a post-war economy that relied on the unceasing making and buying of non-essential and poorly made goods, views of healing rooted in connection and community gave way to ideals of individual wellness that could be achieved through consumption. For Cushman this was in part how a new twentieth-century self, that expressed itself through consumption, emerged. Cushman calls this new American identity the “empty self.”
Without community and shared meaning, the empty self experiences a sense of disconnection “as a lack of personal condition and worth” and “embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated, emotional hunger.” And this hunger, for Cushman, maintains the “mindless, wasteful consumerism” of today.
The empty self “yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost” and in doing so unknowingly drives the consumer-oriented economy. Without the empty self which “strives, desperately to be filled up…America’s consumer-based economy…would be inconceivable.”
The view of consuming as “an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost” feels particularly salient. I think it underscores the necessity of longterm, sustainable, and accessible grief work, and the connection between grief and liberation.
This weekend marks the end of the narrative therapy training I’ve been in all year with Jill Freedman, Gene Combs, and a cohort of others. The most significant thing I’m taking with me from the year is an understanding that the self is relational.
Through the course of the year I’ve experienced my self as relational in a very raw way and have understood that experience through feeling. I’ve begun to put into practice what I’ve learned, and feel (somewhat) prepared to share what I’ve gathered with others.
Before I came across Jill and Gene’s work I’d encountered the relational worldview through Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s book Toward Psychologies of LIberation. Watkins and Shulman critique notions of the self as bounded inside the individual body, and write that “the hoarding of soul within interiority has served a defensive function, protecting us from the tragedies and travesties in our midst.”
The narrative training has thickened and made these ideas practical for me, including Jill and Gene’s rich description of the self as a verb, “referring to a project we are pursuing in active, ongoing relationship with other people across a wide variety of contexts.4” I’d add non-human animals to that, too.
The year’s readings, exercises, and discussions have been fortified by lived experience including significant relational loss, anxiety-induced social isolation, and difficulty bearing sustained witness to the genocide in Gaza as a person who lives alone in the suburbs. I’ve learned in a very visceral way that we really do “make each other up” in connection.
But even in my fortunate situation of deep and rich friendships both human and non, in a sea of multi-dimensional and often overwhelming grief I have to admit: I spent more money in October and November than I’ve spent any other months, maybe ever. I’ve come to understand Cushman’s empty self, too. Emotionally hungry and unconsciously “compensating for what has been lost.”
Finally, two things:
First, these inciting words from a recent email by philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé:
“…grief is how loss travels. It is the choreography of loss in its world-navigating, world-upsetting circuits. Grief is an impersonal, potentially decolonizing force. Grief infiltrates structures, decays edges, and forces new postures of reverence and irreverence. Grief is not mere sadness; it is a mutiny against established patterns. Perhaps a little part of all of us, regardless of the sides we claim, is co-creating a commons marked by grief.5”
Second, I’m planning to be up north a bit this winter, with a telling of one of my favorite stories of loss and the relational self—Tuan Mac Cairill—and a clear call to make and hold spaces for grief. If you have or know of a group or space in New England that might like to host an event, reach out and let’s talk.
You’re reading the Offering for December 2023. I make these Offerings weekly for paying subscribers, if you’re interested in upgrading you can hit the subscribe button below. Thanks for being here, and we’ll see you next time. <3
From On the mystery: Discerning divinity in process by Catherine Keller
From Untie the strong woman: Blessed mother’s immaculate love for the wild soul, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
This language comes from Ivone Gebara’s Longing for running water: Eco-feminism and liberation in which she puts forth a call to “develop life options that refuse to put of justice and tenderness until tomorrow.”
From the article “Narrative therapy’s relational understanding of identity” in the journal Family Process by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs.
From an e-mail sent my Báyò Akómoláfé with the subject line “What if grieving were a kind of politics?”
Your evocative artwork and insights inspire me to start using my craft supplies instead of hoarding them...there is something about the empty self of consumerism that explains my cluttered office...perhaps a way in which purchasing things feels aspirational, while making actual imperfect art is scary and "unproductive" in the capitalist mindset?
Thanks for sharing. To me this year has been grief and needing to have courage when so much is unknown. It seems doubly hard if that’s possible. I did the same thing with my mom, who was a nurse. I learned a lot.