When pain rises up
On Thursday night, I reheated our pasta pomodoro and set the table for two while I waited for my boyfriend to return home. As I saw him trudging up the garden path with his bike, I went to the front door to greet him. I love seeing his eyes crinkle into a smile and welcoming him back into my life after a day of living our separate lives. But on Thursday, he greeted me with a frown. ‘Have you seen?’ My stomach dropped to the floor. Saying ‘Have you seen?’ to someone with a vivid imagination and an anxious edge only conjures up the wildest images and most horrifying scenarios. ‘What?’ I said, with what I assume was a look of sheer terror. ‘Russia’s invaded Ukraine.’
I stopped doing the daily news doom scroll a few years ago during the Brexit negotiations. I found the news cycle, with its love for quick, dirty stories and gossip unnecessary and stressful. I was devastated, like many people, about leaving the EU and the peace and freedom that it represented, and I didn’t want to watch in detail the fuck-up that was the Conservative Party making attempts to leave it. Living in New Zealand, where no one talks much about Brexit, I found I could completely ignore it. While many wouldn’t agree with that decision, I found that it was right for me at the time and instead poured my reserved energies into reading books and listening to podcasts that educated me about the world, about injustices and about the experiences of marginalised groups. I stopped the clickbait and I listened to people, not news outlets.
Anyway, with that in mind, I wasn’t aware of the imminence of a Russian invasion into Ukraine. The horror shook me, but I still hadn’t looked into it myself and without the images and the words, pain and suffering still feels somewhere out there. I was upset, but I was also angry. I was angry that one human could wreak so much havoc for no reason other than a pathetic, long-held grudge. I was angry that his only job is to protect his people, but he was choosing to look elsewhere and destroy another set of lives.
It wasn’t until the next day that I checked the news. And it couldn’t have been worse timing. It was 9am. I had a meeting at 9.30am and I opened my app for a quick check. Immediately, I saw an image of a woman, face covered in blood, looking straight into the camera. The tears came almost immediately and the pain coursed through. That I was helpless in the face of such suffering was unbearable. While the pain I was feeling was obviously not a shred of the pain of those in Ukraine, I felt that human-to-human connection, that invisible string that binds us all. That people all over the world are outraged, angry, devastated and in pain is testament to the love that human beings hold for one another.
I am angry that humans continue to inflict such pain on one another, but I am buoyed by the love that cannot and will not be extinguished. We need to love each other harder. As humans, it seems we will never stop inflicting pain, causing wars, tearing countries apart, being cruel. But our capacity to be good, to be loving, is, too, innate. We can spread love and kindness. We can take loving action. We can give money. We can volunteer at our local food shelter. We can seek out people’s stories to try and understand. We can take time to tend to our pain and see it as a connection to other humans, not dismiss it because we are too fortunate to cry or because it somehow makes it about us (it doesn’t). We can take the pain and do something with it. We can smile at our neighbours and help out a friend. Love is a courageous act and we must not forget to use it.