To Heal and Be Healed
For most of my life, racial justice was something that affected other people.I lived in a white bubble and had a detached interest in the subject until George Floyd’s murder. Then, like a lot of other white folks, the video of a Black man being murdered by a white cop finally moved me. This is a brief account of the thought processes that have led me here to Lace on Race, and where I hope to go.
I’ve always wanted to be a healer-physical, emotional and spiritual. For much of my life, healing was akin to fixing. Something was hurting somewhere and I wanted to make it stop. But fixing things isn’t the same as healing.
I am constantly tempted to fix rather than to heal. My motivation to heal is so often driven by my own reaction to witnessing human suffering. I want to stop the suffering because it’s painful for ME to watch. When I operate from a place of placating myself, even subconsciously, my prescriptions for healing are usually wrong. I also realized there are things I just can’t fix, no matter how much I want to. Often, the greatest human need is to be witnessed–to not suffer alone. Only when I can put my own reactions and ego aside can I clear my mind enough to begin to understand what someone really needs from me.
One lesson I internalized growing up was the importance of being right. Both in having the right understanding, and also in knowing that I was right, that I was in possession of the truth. This idea permeated everything-my schooling, my religious life, and my interpersonal relationships. It created a driving need in me to research, study, understand, and even memorize arguments to prove that I knew the truth about things. I could often use the things I learned to help people, but I cringe at how obnoxious I must have been (and still certainly am).
In the last 9-10 years, I’ve been challenged to re-examine my underlying assumptions about what I thought I knew and about the importance I placed on being right. Having children with very different experiences than myself has helped me understand that what I thought I was doing was not how others experienced me and my actions. My actions weren’t giving me the results I expected, based on what I thought I knew. I wasn’t actually healing, or fixing. But the only way for me to come to this knowledge was by listening to others with true humility, completely uncentering myself. (It’s hard to do, and I struggle with it daily.) If this was true for my relationships with my children, what about wider groups of people?
I can tend to wounds, but if the instrument that caused the wounds is still being used, I’ll spend all my time putting BandAids on and never stop the wounding. What happens when I find out that I was not only the one applying the BandAids, but I was also the one doing the wounding? Thanks to the power of seeing how I am seen by others, I recognize that I have been wounding others almost as often as I have been trying to fix them.
I began to wonder just how much my ideas about rightness and truth were limited by my own experiences. Through searching, prayer, meditation, podcasts and books by wise people, and a good therapist, I came to realize that truth wasn’t something I could own. Truth was something I had a relationship with, and others would have their own relationship with. Their relationships with truth would look different than mine. And that fact is key to helping me understand more truth.
After George Floyd’s murder, I began to ask new questions: What truth am I missing because of my limited view and experience as a white woman? What truth could I learn from people of color? Searching for answers to these questions is what led me to Lace on Race. I have stayed here because I recognized one of the functions of community: to reflect the impacts of my own attitudes and actions back to me so I can see as I am seen.
It was time for me to do some new experiments in healing, starting with a new hypothesis, that I am wounding as much as I am healing, and that one of the ways I wound others is with the very assumption that I am right, that I somehow possess the Truth that they do not and it’s my duty to impart it to them-to fix them.These are obviously very problematic attitudes. Many people in power work to harness human weakness to their benefit. That’s why these attitudes are foundational to white supremacy.
Healing is ultimately an act of faith. My ability to understand what is needed, and how people will react to it, is always going to be limited. At some point, it’s an educated guess at best. I just have to decide whether to take the risk, or let the pain remain unchanged.
Lace on Race exists to lessen and mitigate the harm endured by Black and Brown people, perpetuated by white supremacy and white people. I recognize that our social experiments have yet to bring about the results I am looking for. The healing is elusive still, because weapons are still being wielded. I am ready to take the risk-to learn how to lay down my weapons and stop wounding, so true healing can start. I know I will never be perfect, but I also know I can do much better. I’m ready to bear witness to the suffering of others without trying to “fix” them, while standing ready to offer any help that is needed when action is called for. I am ready to hone my relational ethics skills. I am ready to view white supremacy as an addiction, and treat it accordingly. Will you join me in a community that can provide the mirrors you need to see where you are wounding others, and support you in laying down the tools of oppression you have gathered?
True healing can only begin when the wounding stops.
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