Our Collective Howl

These conversations that I have through my job as a therapist, they’re sacred. Yes, they include pettiness and mundane topics, and – at the same time – they glimmer with hushed truths. They ripple with new understandings, and they draw a thread through our humanity.

While I’ve been in my role at Lyra Health for 9 months now, the week following the dismantling of Roe was palpably different. Over the past months, I’ve heard from my clients about the devastation of the Marshall Fire (just 50 miles from my CO home), the horrors of Uvalde and Buffalo, the agonizing experiences of family members and colleagues in Ukraine, and many, many other collective traumas.

Something was different in that week when Roe officially toppled. Something broke in us as a whole in a way that I haven’t heard before, and I like to believe, it broke us open. Almost universally, the content of that week’s sessions turned to the end of Roe. Individually, I heard despair, fear, and deep, deep unsettledness. Collectively, I heard a roar. I didn’t hear determination – yet. The ferocity may come later. Instead, it sounded to me like heartbreak, a guttural cry for our divide and how painfully we’ve lost one another. “How have we come to this?” it seems to weep.

In my bones, I know that we’ll find our way back to ourselves. How, how exactly do I know? I hear it in the voices of the people who share their most intimate secrets. There’s a universality to our pain, a bond that cannot be severed and that – I hope – will bring us back together.

This photo is one that I snapped on my recent beach visit. I made it my background screen on my laptop to remind me of our shared primal beauty. May it give you the same hope it offers me and may we all move towards healing, metaphorically flying in the same direction.