Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Painful Habits

    I am a fan of the song “Habits (Stay High)” by Tove Lo. In it, I hear a portrait of a person living through the self-harm that comes from emotional avoidance that I’ve written about in earlier entries. The speaker of the song is living in hell. The loss of an important relationship in her life has left deep pain and grief, a grief she avoids through anonymous sex, binge drinking, and eating in the bathtub. In the refrain she repeats a defensive mantra, “I’ve got to stay high all the time / to keep you off my mind.”

    What becomes clear in the song is the unwinnable situation the speaker creates for herself. She seems aware that she is living in a “haze” and a series of unsatisfying moments, temporary reprieves from her underlying pain, but she also knows that to become sober means experiencing her loneliness and pain. Unwilling to experience this, she retreats into her escape routs. The unspoken hope fueling this behavior, one might infer, is that if she simply avoids the pain long enough one day she’ll wake up and it’ll be gone. The truth, in my experience and observation, is that her behavior only locks the pain more firmly in place. Detachment from our body and heart’s capacities to experience and process emotion means losing a profound source of understanding and integrity.

    My saying this should not be construed as morally condemning the singer of the song or anyone who finds themselves in that situation—a situation that is not at all rare. We do not know the life story of the singer, we do not know how she experienced pain as a child, how her family taught her to recover from or suppress the pain, whether her culture provided validation or condemnation. We do not know what traumas she might have suffered that make her pain even more unbearable.

    Melancholy, by Andrew Mason

    Our culture does not train us to deal with grief. Our culture of relentless positivity and happiness labels pain as undesirable and celebrates “strong” people who proclaim (or pretend) that they don’t feel vulnerable. If we look back to the singer of “I Will Survive,” we see her willingness to acknowledge her vulnerability before moving into strength: “At first I was afraid / I was petrified.” This is a strength of integrity, accepting herself as she is. The singer of Habits is pure vulnerability unable to accept her strength, her capacity to feel. She is the shadow of the “I won’t even miss you” singer in songs like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”: “Baby I won’t shed a tear for you / I won’t lose a wink of sleep.”*

    Several people responding to the video on YouTube seem to think that “young people”—who are often invoked as people somehow more susceptible to the imprint of a pop song than the culture of their families and communities—will listen to this song and take it as an instructional video for how to deal with problematic emotions. I like this song because it is honest, because it speaks to something in the heart and in our communities that is uncomfortable to acknowledge. It’s easy to dismiss and criticize the person who made the song and much harder to wonder how we might support the people in our lives who are living that song—or look at the ways we stay high to avoid pain. Having compassion for a person’s suffering is not the same as agreeing with or accepting their self-harming coping strategies. This is the kind of art that provides an opportunity for connection and recognition, for someone suffering to realize they’re not alone in this.

    * Of course I had to mention Beyoncé.

    I am on vacation and will likely not produce an article for next week.

  • Freedom With

    For the past three days I’ve had two different songs stuck in my head, alternating. When I grasp a piece of music that excites me, I tend to overdo it, and I heard these two songs together for the first time and then listened to them both repeatedly. Apparently whatever within me responded to these songs and has opted to keep them going, ad nauseam. My head feels very noisy, which is nothing new. I’ve always tended toward the head and have had to work to feel and understand my heart and body, work that continues. Though I prized my intellect, I also hated what my active brain cost me. Sometimes I feel like going to a concert is a waste of money because my mind takes me on a journey and out of listening. I envied friends who seemed wholly immersed by the moment, riding the waves of emotion evoked by the music.

    What I most longed for, for much of my life, was some way to escape this mental prison that kept me out of my experience. I turned to meditation and discovered that the key to freedom is accepting that there is no escape. Trying to escape the experience of the present moment causes suffering. The quickest shortcuts to numbing the heart and shutting down the brain are the substances that cause problems when abused—drugs, alcohol, media, food, sex—in truth, any substance abused will create problems. None of them make problems go away. They might take your mind off your issues for a moment, at great cost: the cost of your innate ability to be with pain and still live in integrity, and the myriad costs that such patterns of self-abuse inevitably create.

    “A wretched man with an approaching depression; represented by encroaching little devils.” Wellcome Images.

    Instead of getting out, we find freedom when we learn to be with the difficulty, which starts by going in. We cannot become free with anger, for example, without letting ourselves experience and work with anger. It would be like trying to learn how to ride a horse by reading books about horses, watching movies about horses, watching other people ride horses, but doing everything in your power to avoid actually touching a horse.

    The language of becoming “free of” or “free from” something implies that eventually we can get rid of it, which further chains us to suffering. I would rather be “free with” something. The more I try to get rid of these songs in my head, the louder they seem to get. The more I fight with these songs, the more irritated I feel about the situation. I try listening to the recorded song and get a moment’s relief, but then they’re back. It’s like having mental hiccups.

    This is a minor example but not irrelevant to other “sticky” feelings. If I wait until I am “free of” these songs before I can go out and live, I’ll be waiting for a long time. I’ll have given the prison keys over to these random neurons in my brain that are wholly out of my control. I would rather be free with the songs. I hear the songs, I feel irritated, and I am typing this blog post. I hear the songs, and I am breathing. I hear the songs, and I am listening. I notice that I get caught by distraction, and bring my attention back. I forgive myself, and I return my attention. The song continues. The practice does not end.

  • Refilling the Empty Cup

    Recently I have begun thinking that I’ve lumped together several different needs and cravings into this larger mental category of “needing to rest”—or, more typically, “feeling overwhelmed.” Feeling overwhelmed and depleted is perhaps the worst time to develop a plan of self-care, given that the experiences labeled thus often leave me wanting to go for immediate cravings or numbing activities. Expressions such as “work/life balance” or other “balancing” type phrases address this from the end of reducing tendencies of overworking, but I have lacked a rich vocabulary for what I need in the times when I’m not working. At times, I have dutifully made “to-do” lists of self-care activities intended to make me “better” and make life fulfilling, which in some ways is effective, in other ways leaves me further in automaton mode, simply doing the next task and feeling this concern that I’m not so much living my life as performing life tasks.

    All of which is my personal expression of a pattern of avoiding my experience in the moment. I experience things that I label “tired,” “cranky,” “overwhelmed,” or clusters of emotions that I group together as “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Over time I’ve developed go-to habits to soothe or avoid these experiences, sometimes in ways that feel healthy and supportive, other times in ways that feel even more draining, disheartening, or numbing. Coming home from a long day and sitting in front of the TV for hours—not really watching anything I care to watch, just whatever’s on—feels like one example of numbing activity. Other times I might come home and snack on a bunch of high-calorie, low-nutritional foods.

    The Ace of Cups from the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck.

    When I hear people say things like, “I need a drink,” or “I need to get laid,” I suspect they’re coming from a similar place of avoidance or numbing. It’s the “I need” that gets my attention, the way we describe activities that are pleasurable as though they are basic needs like food, water, or sleep. When I was drinking a lot of coffee, I would get to the midday energy crash and find my thoughts fixated on “I need more coffee,” when drinking more coffee ended up leaving me feel even more tired and depleted. One day, someone told me to try drinking water when I thought I needed coffee. I started to experiment with this and was somewhat shocked. Not only did drinking water leave me feeling more energized than the coffee, but I could almost feel my body relaxing and saying “thank you.” Now I wonder what other habits I’ve developed as poor substitutes for what, at a deeper level, I truly need. When I come home and want to snack on junk food, I might really just need to take a nap. A need to “get laid” could mask a deeper need to connect emotionally to someone. It’s not that people are “bad” for wanting or needing these things, it’s that doing anything to avoid feeling something means we neither enjoy what we’re doing nor get our deeper needs met.

    All of this has come to bear when I think about my relationship to rest. When I feel depleted and overwhelmed, I become fixated on this need to “rest” and become fairly passive. Sometimes I feel like I’m either in “work” or “rest” mode. But I’m coming to see, “rest” isn’t really rest. “Rest” might be letting myself be passively entertained by TV, zoning out with a video game, or checking social media repeatedly, none of which actually allow my mind and body to relax and be—and if I do either too late in the day, the light and stimulus interferes with my ability to sleep. I’m starting to think that “rest” might be too big of a bucket into which I’ve placed a number of needs—a need for genuine rest; a need for play or fun; or a need for inspiration. The new project is learning to discern between these three and other needs.

    What are your needs?

  • Revolutionaries are Sexier than Revolutions

    Revolutionaries are sexier than revolutions. We know their images, their hand-selected quotes, the steady curation of image that comes particularly when the revolutionary and their revolution is no longer a threat to the modern-day. Though their ideas and images continue to live, the dominant culture tends to take what is most palatable and discard the rest—unless the revolutionary serves a better purpose as the villain, in which case the culture takes what is most disturbing and elides the pointed critique.

    Parthenon, by Thermos

    There’s something magnetic about the marriage of the idealized vision and deep, transformative passion. The eyes inspire love or hatred, devotion or utter opposition. That depth of passion creeps through all that is joyous and heavy, loving and ferocious, creeping into the most crooked and unsettling parts of the human heart and brings it into service of the grand vision, the dream of a better society, a better life, a more egalitarian world. With this ferocity of dedication, all manner of ills suddenly seem all too easy to rationalize and use. Intoxicated by this passion, we see revolutions that become even more repressive than the tyrannies overthrown—the suppression of religion, free thought, the removal of liberties and “decadent” cultures.

    When faced with the possibility of change, often the emotional parts of us that want safety and stability will push back hard, to clamp down, to become ferocious and punitive. Our systems of protection, feeling under attack, permit themselves to push back harder, crack down more fiercely, take on heavier firepower. Suddenly a simple disagreement becomes an ideological battle in which lines must be drawn and people must swear allegiance. We forget that our ideals are always and ever imaginary visions to which we aspire and cannot be effective laws to rule a species so diverse and contentious as humanity. Something will always rebel under the yoke of such legislation.

    The heart of fervor could also allow room for the heart of deep love and compassion for the beauty and weakness of fellow humans. When this heart comes into contact with pure intellectual vision, those sterile guidelines can begin to relax. Instead of demanding our fellow humans adhere to a standard of morality that is devoid of humanity, we can bring those grand visions and ideals into an experimental practice. We can strive for equality while recognizing the inescapable tendency toward hierarchy. We can admit that our new ways of thinking and acting must by necessity overturn someone else’s world, a world that to them was perfectly suited to their nature—or at the very least, their nature had come to fit the world. We can recognize the distress of the privileged when it arises to meet the changes we push to see in our lives, our relationships, our civic communities. Change is coming, and for some it will be painful and arduous, while others might find themselves more free, more empowered.

  • The Angel and the Sun

    A certain amount of social grace is useful: the ability to make small talk, to build connections between others, to find points of commonality and bring them together. We need people who knit us together as much as we need people willing to confront what is unspoken or unjust in community. We need those who quietly take part, finding a place among the throng, offering a simple contribution that makes sound the greater whole. As much as we love paying attention to the famous, the celebrity, the larger-than-life, it would be exhausting and unworkable if every person we met burned with the same fire.

    Even still, we might feel some longing to stick out in some way, to be seen as divine even if only by one person. We might have some need or want that demands attention. A feeling of urgency arises, demanding action. “This matters to me, and it should matter to us all!” But the mind responds with a quickness, providing hundreds of completely reasonable arguments about why we should keep this to ourselves, why expressing it could disrupt the group and our place within it, why this is not the attention we really want.

    Chumash Sun-Child-Adult, color-enhanced photo by Millennium Twain

    Underneath these numbing arguments is the anxiety that comes when the instinct to act meets with inhibition. This anxiety says that if I do the thing I really want to do, everything will change and I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage the changes well. Maybe things will change in a way I like, but I cannot guarantee it. The mind thinks that offering these soothing reasons will be enough to convince our wants and needs to lay down quietly and go back to sleep, but these needs and wants are like insistent young children. They do not understand reason, they only understand their urges.

    If we do not allow ourselves to admit to our desire for attention, we find ways to push away and undermine the efforts people do make to recognize and praise us. We get uncomfortable, shy, awkward, or put ourselves down. We make the person attempting to praise us uncomfortable or wrong.

    When this want to express and be seen gets repeatedly ignored, they’ll begin to act out in ways that cause more problems than possibly would have happened in the first place. Instead of graciously accepting the attention we receive, we might become resentful and toxic toward those who naturally receive attention and praise. We might gossip, destructively criticize, or undermine those people who seem “too good for themselves.” We might try to get attention by completing negating ourselves, martyring ourselves in the hopes that if we suffer enough someone will finally see it and pull us out. We might cling to our problems and magnify them with the energy that we could have spent creatively.

    What wants attention today? What today feels in conflict within the self? What in the mind is limiting the ability to take action? How do our impulsive behaviors undermine the ways we think we want to carry ourselves?

  • Comfort and the Push for Change

    At times, something in the self grows wary of revolution. Even when one feels the way things are do not work, the current system of self-management or social management are harmful to well-being, there is still a fear of what will happen in the gap between the old and new systems. Revolutions are rarely without cost, and the cost is felt for all. Huge moments of change open up possibility and free a chaotic kind of energy that cannot be easily tamed and directed. Indeed, this energy is available to all, and might run counter to one’s intentions.

    A part clings fast to comfort and stillness. When this part is not aligned with the change at hand, it saps the energy and will one needs to bring forth the change. We grow bored and resentful at our jobs and dream of a life of radical independence, but when the time comes to take the step, we look at our lives and wonder, “How will I pay for all this? What if I lose the comforts I have? What if what happens next is worse?” But if instead we denying this need to stop, to be still, we tear the roots of the self and distress the entire organism.

    Der Stier, by Franz Mark

    This stillness provides space for the imagination, giving it room to root into the soil and experience the change needed to bring vision into manifestation. Instead of narrowing our focus to a rigid view of what we think should happen, stillness brings a broadness and softness that helps us to adapt without losing the core of our vision.

    This need for comfort pushes against the desire for radical change. We need a place for stillness, a place where we can rest and receive pleasure. Instead of pushing this away, how can we include this in the life and world we are attempting to create?

    Many goddesses of love and pleasure are also known as goddesses of war: Freya, Aphrodite, Ishtar. Is love and pleasure included in the change we want to enact? Are the animal needs of our bodies given due honor, or are they shamed and suppressed? Even a vow of abstinence must allow space for the energy of craving and lust, else those urges sneak out in unexpected and unfortunate ways. Denial of the needs and wants of the body is a poor foundation for a revolution.

    Our bodies and instincts offer power to the vision. When aligned to a sense of purpose, the body can tolerate incredible adversity and deprivation, but it cannot escape its own basic needs. Instead of attempting to assert “mind over matter,” bring the mind into the body. Feel your creatureliness, your pleasures and pains. Invite your mind to truly know and inhabit the body. Breathe into the places of tension and resistance, letting yourself feel what is happening without commentary from the mind. Exhale, allowing that tension to ease and space to expand. Within the bones and muscles is power and stillness.

  • Dreaming the Impossible

    The season shifts slightly after harshness, high expectations and demands and a lingering sense: “Is that all there is?” Outward conditions seem much the same, but our awareness begins to shift away from that sense of constriction to dreams of life as we think it should be. For some, that image of “life as it should be” is not a mere fantasy but a thing in itself, so obvious in its elegant workability that the failure of others to see so clearly leaves the dreamer feeling alienated.

    Those dreams seem so tangible and real that one feels tempted to simply turn aside from the rote necessities and compromises of the world as it is and invest wholly in the dream, to push for a radical alteration in outer conditions to make possible the vision. “All I need to do is push, and others will see.” So fixated can we become on the change we want that we might begin to withhold from ourselves or others any information that complicates or undermines the effort, which in turn renders the effort more vulnerable to problems related to this information. Think of a politician striking out a bold new campaign with a secret lingering in their history, a secret they pray is never made known. Now the secret is a land mine waiting to go off, where the politician could consciously defuse the mine and control the narrative by revealing the secret in their own way.

    Our beautiful imagined city could never exist in this world because the mind is capable of imagining infinite possibilities while removing inconvenient laws of nature or emotional realities from its estimation. When we allow ourselves to be seduced by an elegant and simple vision of humanity, we have likely neglected to account for important realities that will certainly crop up and interfere with the work. Others will rebel or dissent and their disagreements might make no sense to us. Many of the most heated intellectual arguments between people become fixed and unresolvable because they do not account for the underlying emotional complexities. Two people may essentially agree on a vision but stay stuck in their conflict because parts of them are afraid of being left out or oppressed if the other person “wins.”

    We need our dreams, nevertheless, and our beautiful perfect fantasies to lift us from the morass of accepting life as it is, particularly when life as it is feels unworkable, unjust, or painful. Dreaming allows us to imagine possibilities that are not immediately practical. Dreaming accesses the spark of inspiration that feeds action and sets things into motion. What is within yearns to mix with what is without. When we risk putting our dreams and inspirations into a form, to bring them into being, then we begin the alchemical process of transforming self and world.

    What vision of life have you not yet dared to dream? What kind of society would you want to enact? How can we begin to share our visions and hopes in a spirit of building coalition and spinning together a communal vision of possibility?

  • Smoldering Hopes in Wintertime

    At times, all feels frozen, stuck, or fixed. Looking around, the mind sees only impossible circumstances with impassable obstacles. The pond is ice-still and the trees are bare. Yet a sharp, painful hope continues to stir and disrupt what otherwise would want to become numb and resigned to misery. This feeling arises, this longing for more, this longing for movement and flow, which the mind shuts down saying, “There is nowhere to go. There is no way out. Nothing will ever change.”

    Even still, parts of the self are waking up and wanting attention. Old fears and wounds, shame, guilt, passions or hopes stir at some unheard alarm and sit up. The longing returns, to be whole, to be healed, to be free of these burdens and patterns and create a life only dreamt of. What if these awakenings are the gift that will lead to this liberty? What if we could stop waiting for the world to give us what we think we need for freedom? What if we did not need that special person to save us from this situation?

    Himalaya Lakes, by Liran Ben Yehuda

    We need a daring that defies the logic of stuckness, the logic that narrows the gaze and keeps  focused on what has failed, what has not succeeded, what doors are shut. The stirring inside is the fire that could fuel a kind of faith in the life desired, a feeling of being that we crave. Perhaps at this time this faith is only an idea, an image, a wish that is scary to name. If we are not willing to name this for ourselves, the world has nothing to offer us. We do not have to know the entire wish, the full intention. Perhaps all that is available is this spark of desire and a glimpse of what step to take next.

    The mind says this feeling will only appear when we get a new job, a new lover, a new haircut, more money—all things that could be useful supports but cannot create within the feeling desired. These wishes for outer changes are a way of avoiding the truths arising within the self. We need to learn to make room for this discomfort and discord.

    Within us is a yearning that defies the reasoning of the mind, though it needs the mind’s reason as an ally. It needs the mind’s capacity to adapt, to loosen its attachment to how an outcome will occur. The image of the dream will never be the reality, and the mind cannot accurately know what will happen with every step, but the mind can anticipate, can research, can plan, can prepare. All of this can be done in service to the yearning to dare, the willingness to stalk across the frozen lake, to stand beyond the stuckness and begin calling in a new kind of joy, a new kind of blessing.

    Breathe in space for the self, making room for all the disagreements and doubts and hopes, and allow them to speak. Breathe in a new openness, a willingness to make new possibilities. Imagine the quality of life you would like to live and, today, face each situation as though you already possessed that quality.

  • All that passes…

    The wheel continues to turn.

    from John Lydgate’s Troy Book and Siege of Thebes

    In times of success, there looms already the presence of failure. Times of misery are limned with bliss. The longest night of the year is the gateway for the return of light.

    Sometimes our strength is too fragile, and needs time to rest and become strong enough to overcome our weakness. Sometimes our weakness is exactly what is needed to stop our strength from becoming tyrannical.

    If you are in misery, call to that part of yourself that remembers joy, that can envision a time when things are better. Let that enter your body, fill you with its sense of being. If you cannot fathom such a part, then send out your wish to know it.

    If you are in joy, remember that part of you that suffers, that feels outcast, that feels hurt or exiled, and send it some love. Imagine that time is a circle and you can reach across the expanse to bless that which needs blessing.

    All of this will pass and return and pass again. Within us is the center around which all things turn, that emptiness upon which the wheel depends. If you can, breathe into that stillness, that emptiness, and let it expand. The wheel continues to turn around you, within you, and you are there.

    From this place of presence, call upon those extremes within you, all your love and hate, your joys and woundedness. Gather the reins, and choose who you will be today.

    This will be my last post of 2014. Thank you to everyone who has read and shared my work and let me know how it has affected you.

  • Broken Integrity: “We have to show him our way works!”

    A while ago, my uncle loaned me the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. It took me a while to sit down and read it, but seeing ads for the movie reminded me that it was on my list. In the past few weeks, I’ve read it with increasing interest. (Some spoilers to come.) A significant portion of the book details the brutal treatment and torture POWs received while imprisoned by the Japanese. As I read about the abuse, neglect, and psychological torment suffered by people who needed compassion and care, I felt myself getting angry. The most reactive part of me wanted to direct my anger simplistically, against the Japanese soldiers who tortured, to make them into bad people.

    The irony, of course, is that I was reading this only a day after the release of the CIA torture report. Having only heard about in the news, I realized I now needed to sit down and begin to read through it, slowly. And I discovered what I already suspected: the horror inflicted upon these people I’d grown to care about in a book, my country had inflicted upon others in our names. It seems cliché but nevertheless necessary to note that the way the US’s enemies in WWI were able to dehumanize and degrade their POWs is the same way that the US’s people were able to dehumanize and degrade their prisoners, both sides justifying it as somehow for the greater good of their cause. One of the key differences is that Japan lost, and history was written by the victors, while the US continues to lumber forward with a defiant belief in its own unspoiled goodness.

    Inside Alcatraz, by Daniel Ramirez

    When I was a kid, I thought American ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality were meaningful values that held our country together. As a white male Midwesterner, I was not exposed to the ugly realities of inequality and oppression that other kids had to experience early. I was lucky. Eventually, I started to hear weird stories, like how the CIA had supported coups and revolutions in different countries and set up puppet dictators who ruled tyrannically, but it didn’t matter to the USA because the rulers deferred to us. At first I thought these were lies or taboo secrets that no one else knew. I encountered them often enough to be convinced that they were true, but still I could not fathom how my country would allow these things to happen. If people only knew!

    As I became older, I learned that not only were these stories not lies, they weren’t even really secrets. A number of citizens of the USA felt these were completely legitimate uses of force to promote our interests. This is the same thread of culture that today justifies our torture because “Americans need to be protected,” who say that the police should not be criticized for killing unarmed civilians over petty crimes because they have hard jobs and need to “protect us.” This is the thread of culture that says that the values of equality, democracy, and freedom are less important than personal safety, secure property, and maintenance of our “way of life.” And then it’s the same thread of culture that denies privilege—and of course it has to deny privilege, because these systems of brutality exist to create that privilege.

    As a therapist, I believe it is healing and liberating to really see and know one’s own shadow. Not only believe, I have experienced this, I have witnessed this. It takes time and sometimes major crises to awaken to our own shadow. We need the courage and willingness to look at our shadows, our cultural shadows, our national shadow. We need to look at how our personal freedom has come at the cost of the liberty of others, not as a historical accident or passing moment but throughout the history of our country to today. We need to look at how we treat those we consider our enemies or those considered the worst among us.

    There’s a Batman graphic novel called The Killing Joke, in which the Joker kidnaps and brutally tortures Commissioner Jim Gordon. The Joker’s agenda, it seems, is to demonstrate how easy it is to drive a person insane and cause them to betray their own values. Once Commissioner Gordon is rescued, he demands that Batman bring the Joker in “by the book.” “We need to show him that our way works!” This character could be the part of us with unflinching integrity, who knows our deep values and urges us to rise to our integrity no matter what.

    This is the part we’re missing when one of our leaders justifies torture by saying, “He’s in our possession, we know he’s the architect [of the attacks], what are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks? … How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 people on 9/11?” As though there is absolutely no middle ground between kissing someone on both cheeks and waterboarding/force feeding/sleep depriving/humiliating/beating anyone we suspect of having intelligence we want.

    This is the part we’re missing when we say, “He shouldn’t have talked back to the cops!” to justify an unarmed person being shot or choked to death over a petty crime, or often no crime at all.

    This is the part we’re missing when we say, “This is what they have to do to protect our freedom and way of life,” without reflecting deeply on whether our way of life is worth this stain on our souls.

    I know in my own heart is the same capacity for fear, anger, and evil. I know there is a desire for safety and security and a fear of confronting the roots of that security. Because I know this, and accept this, I can bring this into confrontation with that within me that aspires to integrity, to a moral investment in personal liberty, autonomy, and compassion. There are no simple answers, and our desire for a simple answer brings us back into the same danger of dehumanization for the sake of our own comfort.

    Let’s breathe together, and remember our humanity.