Over the past few months, there has been much time to aimlessly fall into the hole of social media. While I would like to say that I have made sure to get up in the mornings, pray, make my bed, read, tend to my teaching duties, and eat three balanced meals; it is safe to say life has been not that. Some days I win in this season and some days I lose. Most days I’m trying to find whatever I can to keep my mind on that which won’t make me lose it.
The Internets are and can be a wonderful place: full of zoom parties, baking classes, and the occasional workout. All very great things that I should be doing more of. The internet can also be a place of doom where following the hashtag can lead to vicarious trauma and hours of numbness because you have no clue how to fix the ills of this world or how to heal. I know, and I say I know because life has proven that anytime a hashtag is led by “Justice for” it can only end in a painful picture or viral video etched into my very detailed photographic memory.
As I’ve grown older, I realize that the hypersensitive woman that is me tends to check out of this world when I cannot find a solution. I have seen so many hashtags in the clearing of our smoke-filled lives over these past two months. I feel like I am grieving for my black and brown people daily. I am grieving for this world. I grieve for myself, who has had endless hours since March to think about my own trauma; more than I’ve thought on it in my short thirty-something years on this earth. I am thankful for therapy weekly to help me walk through all the things that have been stirred up in my soul from a hashtag.
Yet, very often I wonder what can I do beyond the hashtag of the people who have died due to murder— and I say murder because I watched the video. They won’t see the revolutions of many but we are in it or we are watching it. One of those great revolutions being our educational system and the rapid plunge in which we are seeing daily. As an educator, I see these things up close. I also see the great class divide between the minority communities that I teach within, and the neighboring counties that look at this as an extended family vacation. What can I do and what will we do beyond the hashtags of today. What choices or decisions will we make that will change future generation’s perspectives about the year 2020. The year when the world slowed down enough for you to hear birds in the city and amplified the sound of community wailing.