Grief, Gratitude & Rage
Grief and Gratitude
Maybe those two words are the lesson for everything right now.
Everything in my life and everything in yours.
Grief that I’m shut out of the rooms and conversations I used to move through freely, gratitude that others with empathy still have access.
Grief that my life is shattered and lying in shards on the floor, gratitude that I have the internal skillset to turn those shards into Kintsugi and create a crooked vessel lined in gold for what’s to come.
Grief at the tsunami of pain I navigate every day to participate in life itself, gratitude that the pain is burning off the masks of survival I wear to participate in the patriarchy.
Grief at the loss of community and connection because of my condition, gratitude for those who stayed in my life and possess the grace to hold my rage.
Grief at being persecuted for relentlessly speaking my truth and grateful for the Filipino rage and artist lineage the flames allow me to access.
My lineage. A people who were colonized by the very country I now live within because my grandfather fought his way onto a boat to pursue his dream of becoming an artist in America. And he did.
A woman who was raised to assimilate into the culture of the dominant race in this country of immigrants. Raised to fit in because at the time of her conception, white men didn’t marry Asian women with brown skin without tipping off a hornets nest of chaos. But my father did. He rejected his family’s racism towards my mother’s lineage and they married for love and created a family of strong women who could navigate a patriarchal system in its last gasp.
And now we’re all tasked with burning off the trauma of being forced to live under colonizers for far too long. I wasn’t raised to embrace my lineage as my full identity, I was given a beautiful story of my ancestors, but it lacked a connection to me directly until I became an artist. In my mid 20s, I began working as a professional artist and I felt the chord of my ancestors connect with my essence in the present moment.
And now, at the mid point of my life, I cross into the parts of my lineage we didn’t have language for growing up. Now I’m tapping into the feminist rage of being a woman of some color forced to play the game of the colonizer for far too fucking long in order to be accepted into society. And while I’ve been rejecting most of acceptable society in waves for my entire adult life, this time is different.
This rage is different.
This rage manifests in my physical and chronic pain and turns into a not-so silent witness to ALL of the injustice surrounding me. The rage wraps itself around the grief and the gratitude and it must burn away in a gorgeous and precarious dance with Kali’s destruction so I can clearly see and embrace the grief and gratitude resting underneath.
The ashes from the violence that fuels such a rage creates the necessary emotions to compost the raw energy into useful passages that can help others feel seen and allows me to be the witness to my own collapse and rebirth, again and again.
I rage. I see the grief. I acknowledge the gratitude. I compost. I create art. That is my survival playbook and I am running it daily. Seeping into everything.
All tools that this left-hand path Tantrika uses to sit in the cremation grounds, weeping over what the flames burned away, picking over each bone with grief in one hand and gratitude in the other to reassemble a resilient self who can step fully into the lineage that burns through her veins.
A lineage that holds the folk magic of thousands of years that I have yet to unpack. A lineage that was carried to this land by a man seeking to express his art. Art that became a permanent sculpture celebrating a patriarch he never met but who founded the country he reached for to express his own sovereignty.
A country that now sees his art and his lineage as disposable. Patriarchs that now see immigrants as a threat to their white privilege and use fear and power to destroy the humanity that brought art to this country. A country founded on the enslavement of entire populations and the colonization of the indigenous who lived here for thousands of years.
A country rapidly devolving into destitution because it chose an economic system designed to fully extract the essence of its human layers. Again and again, until there is nothing left to extract.
We all clearly see the destruction on our doorstep. We all know the internal rage at being forced to play the games of normalcy while the ruling class hoards the wealth, hollows out the art and feeds it back to us through algorithms. We now all clearly see what happens when toxic masculinity becomes policy and when the most toxic among those cosplaying masculinity consolidate wealth and power.
We are all figuring out how to channel this rage right now. And all I can say is the channeling playbook is uniquely individual, but wildly necessary.
For I believe the rage wrapping around many of our hearts right now is also protecting us from the full scope of our own grief and gratitude. And if we find a way to navigate the flames and harness the heat, our hearths will be filled with a special kind of grief that leads to the beauty of true gratitude.
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