I'm curious as to how different people feel about this thread now than they did when I wrote it... Two weeks ago. https://twitter.com/absurdistwords/status/1240752918787174401

I have been wondering because I have begun to realize that as we begin to grapple with the reality in front of us, we are all going to experience grief.

And we don't like to think about it much, but we're going to have to get good at it.

As we look at forecasts and projections, it is clear that families all over the nation will be grieving, but as a whole, it occurs to me that we will simulteanously be mourning the loss of a configuration of society that we had grown accustomed to.

And will have to endure stages

You may have heard about the stages of grief.

They are:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
And Acceptance.

What people often misunderstand about these stages is that they aren't always linear.

Sometimes we loop through them in cycles or hit them out of order.

Sometimes navigating those stages won't look like what we might expect them to.

It's going to be really important to make a lot of emotional space for one another because we won't all be hitting these stages at the same times.

And that can be jarring if you're not expecting it.

Some people will be deep in the denial stage while others are embracing acceptance, and this can cause friction.

Still other may be wrapped in anger while others are bending under depression.

It is important to see each other.

Even more confusingly, people who have embraced acceptance early may still find themselves moving to bargaining or even to denial as they contend with the ramification of accepting and embracing a new reality.

To make things more complicated, we will be without some of our key tools for navigating grief -- community and activities.

So we would do well to begin thinking about how we can as a society, compensate for that.

We are navigating deaths without funerals, loss without family.

We were never good at grief as a nation to begin with.

We can't even abide movies without happy endings very well.

So we have a lot of learning to do in a short time.

We are going to need each other in a way that we never have before and while being isolated in a way we never have been before.

So perhaps let us think about what barriers between us we can safely let go of.

Now would be the time to look inside ourselves, at our interpersonal conflicts and do triage.

Figure out what's actually important and what isn't.

Which walls are load bearing and which are just convenient.

We are going to need to fundamentally re-evaluate what is really critical in our lives and relationships and what isn't.

What is performative nonsense and what is necessary?

The time to shed all the bullshit and get real with ourselves is now.