You'll have to bear with while I squeeze this topic to death; I was obsessed with this article when I first read it, and reread it more than once.
To continue:
Around the time the piece came out, Han was listening to Edith Eger's The Choice (he likes Audible). Edith Eger is a Hungarian survivor, but she didn't practice a particularly religious life; when she came to America, she tried to deny her experiences, attempting to make herself as American as possible (but I must say, her attempts to beat the Hungarian inflection from her speech was not successful).
She didn't want to be identified as a survivor. Han noted that her experience must have been different from that of our grandparents, who dwelt in a religious community who were primarily survivors. My grandmother's idea of small talk was "So, where were you in the war?"
I guess that's the logic of support groups. Being amongst other people who have also dealt with your experience can help us bear the burden.
After first reading the article, I had felt this burning need to track down Brodesser-Akner and pour out to her my own story. She'll understand! And yet I know that sometimes sharing pain is not what some want to do.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin wrote an article following Hersh's murder that, in essence, begs people to not approach her with their pain:
When my girls and I are having a moment walking, breathing and smiling, and someone stops us and starts crying, they are robbing us of a moment of respite from the horror we are digesting. When I am walking alone, with a hat, sunglasses and my head down, it is me saying, “Please, oh please, let me breathe for a moment without having to also carry your pain. Your pain is as real as mine, but I have no strength at the moment to carry yours too. I love you and am endlessly grateful for you loving Hersh. I love you for loving the hostage families. I love you for trying to help. But please, if you want to help me, let me go on walking. When you see me and our eyes cross paths, please, oh please, just smile and wave. My knees are buckling from all the wounds people are sharing. I am just not formidable and powerful enough. Not yet.”
Sometimes we do have to sit with our discomfort, and gauge first whether others are willing to share that pain. People are often at different stages of their grief journey, and maybe they can't always go there.
Another comment to Brodesser-Akner was how sometimes in our need to fight the trauma, it can negatively overtake our lives. The commenter said that her mother also had a traumatic birthing experience, and became a focused advocate of home birth. Yet, her daughter said, her book writing and agenda so overtook all that her children were neglected. This reaction to her trauma may have seemed healthy—after all, she's fighting for change—but it in turn traumatized her children.
We also have to be mindful of collateral damage, which can happen in numerous ways.
The article ends off that Brodesser-Akner concludes with this awareness:
It happened. It will never not have happened . . . after all your attempts at healing—when you finally realize that you are forever changed—you can allow yourself to embrace your trauma. You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you're given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you.
It's sort of like with people. We sometimes wish that a person in our life was a little less this and a little more that, but people are an entire being; you can't pick and choose what parts we want to keep and what parts not.
It's not that the stories of our lives are stuck in only one point in time. Our grandparents accepted their experiences, but they didn't allow them to define their lives. It was but one year amongst many.
I sometimes meet young, bright things, who haven't yet hit that inevitable bump in the road, and I know how small their perception of life is. Because knowing grief, I feel, gives me a more complete perception of the human experience. Before, it was narrow and shallow; now, while it may be more painful, it is more accurate and true.
