Healing VS Being Held Captive by Our Pain

Thank you to Megan Westra for the summer book study on Henri J.M Nouwen’s, The Inner Voice of Love. For the next few weeks I will be sharing my reflections based on the reading.

One of the hardest things I have had to learn is that in order to heal and move on from one’s pain, one needs to confront it. But it is so much easier to hide the pain behind anger or to even just blow it off and say, “you know, what? Other people have it worse. It’s not a big deal.” But when you refuse to confront your pain and pretend everything is alright, the pain doesn’t just magically appear. It may stay quiet for a bit, but it will eventually bubble to the surface and impact every other facet of your life.  

But in the short term,  distracting or ignoring your pain, seems easy. Additionally, in a society that is obsessed with individualism and independence, hiding from your pain may seem like a “strong” and mature response. Hiding your pain can give others the illusion that nothing can harm you and that you are unstoppable. You may even begin to believe that lie, yourself. You may begin to think that the messiness of humanity-the sorrow, the pain, the betrayal, can’t impact you and that you are above all that.  But eventually that lie will come crashing down and you will have no choice but to confront your pain and wounds that you had been hiding.   

But confronting your pain and dealing with it, can often feel like whining. So many of us want progress and healing to be linear. We can feel sad for a little bit but after a day, week, month, or a year we need to move on and go on as if nothing had ever happened. But that’s not how healing works.  Healing is a long process with bumps and hiccups. And more importantly, healing takes time. 

I am sure people on social media are tired of me talking about the racism within academia. I am tired of talking about the racism within academia. People may ask, “well why don’t you just get over it. You are no longer in academia, why do you still care?” 

Of course, part of the reason I still care is that I absolutely want to make sure that other students, especially Black and Brown students, do not need to have a similar or worse experience. But another reason why I continue to talk about racism in academia is because I need to be able to grieve. I spent my late teens and all of my twenties studying and earning degrees. I had invested so much of my time and money (in the form of student loans) in an institution that I thought cared. But unfortunately, while academia may have wanted my Brown skin to be visible to demonstrate how inclusive and diverse, they are, my opinions and my humanity were devalued. (Of course, not by everyone. Throughout my different programs I had numerous professors and peers who encouraged me, who valued my opinions.)  

Academia, like every other institution in the United States, is a heavily racist institution. Black and Brown students face not only blatant racism and micro-aggressions, but we are expected and forced to remain silent about our experiences. If we don’t, we are labeled “difficult,” our jobs and funding packages are threatened, we are berated and ridiculed, little or minor mistakes that could be corrected with coaching, become evidence of our unsuitability for academia. We are driven out. When we do try to speak about our experiences we are not believed. We need to provide “proof” about our experiences and such proof cannot be in the form of the pain and suffering of other Black and Brown students. It needs to be “objective” proof.  

The racism of academia causes pain. So many Black and Brown students and professors have invested their lives in an institution that cares very little for them. And so, when we are driven out or if we leave for our own health, the pain lingers. 

As humans, going through our various painful experiences, we often struggle with wanting to be open about our pain and yet not being held captive to it. We need and want to move on but in order to get there we need to process our experiences. We need to move into our pain and go through it. But the danger is of course, that in trying to move through, we get stuck and we live in a perpetual cycle of re-opening wounds, letting it heal a bit, and then reopening them again. 

 It is even more difficult for Black and Brown people, because society both wants us to deny our pain and be held captive to it.  Society often gives lip service to “healing” but wants to ignore the justice that is required for healing and peace to take place. So as Black and Brown people, the struggles with pain and moving on that confront everyone, is compounded by the fact that we are navigating systems that do not want us to succeed and that in some cases want us dead. We have generations and centuries of trauma to process so our individual pain is often tied to larger systemic issues. That makes healing, grief, and confronting our pain, vastly more complicated.  

Henri Nouwen suggests that in order to re-enter the space of pain and emptiness, in order to heal, we need to remember that there is a place beyond our pain and wounds. We need to move into that new space, turn it into a home, and remain confident that this space is our final home. We can go back and revisit the past and the sites of our old pain, in order to mourn, heal and grow, but we know that at the end of the day, those old sites of pain are not our homes. We do not need to stay there.  

Nouwen writes, “…you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there.” 

These past few months since I left academia, I have been trying to be open and honest about my pain without living in it. I haven’t always succeeded. I have bounced between wanting to hide and ignore my pain and just wallowing in it. But as the months past, I have become more certain about one thing: God’s love for me is and delight in me, is inexhaustible. For God I am not “too much,” too outspoken, too loud, etc. And that knowledge is slowly helping me both confront my pain and not get sucked into it. It is a long, drawn out process. I will make mistakes. But I will heal. and maybe, just maybe, I will be able to in turn help other Black and Brown students struggle to exist in an institution that wants their bodies and labors, but also seeks to silence them.   

I do not mean to be glib about God’s love. God’s love is helping me heal individually but contrary to what some may preach, God’s love will is not the easy answer that will bring an end to systemic racism. But the knowledge and acceptance of God’s love, can help keep me centered as I strive for the systemic change that is so desperately needed. God’s love helps me want to keep moving forward and in the face of institutions that want me to be quiet.