Bearing Witness in Difficult Times

latest issue of Ask Guerrilla Femme

Welcome to Ask Guerrilla Femme. First thing’s first: I’m not a doctor. I’m not a therapist. I’m just a person who knows some stuff or at least knows how to find information (hi, librarian!)

As always, if you have a question, please submit here.

How do you deal with living in the current moment? I feel sickened by everything going on in the world. I’m horrified by what I’m seeing happening to Palestinians and the October 7th attack on Israeli Jews. How do you keep going?

-H.K.

Dearest H.K., thank you so much for asking this important question.

First, I will say: I’m glad to hear you are looking/witnessing the atrocities that are happening in our world, specifically the latest (and ongoing) atrocities happening to Palestinians as well as Israeli Jews and the uptick of antisemitism that Jewish folks across the globe are experiencing. I think bearing witness is the first thing we can do. Too often, people want to look away from pain and horror, but we mustn’t. It is part of our being human to look at the pain straight-on. I immediately think of this quote from Aurora Levins Morales:

The only way to bear the overwhelming pain of oppression is by telling, in all its detail, in the presence of witnesses and in a context of resistance, how unbearable it is. If we attempt to craft resistance without understanding this task, we are collectively vulnerable to all the errors of judgement that unresolved trauma generates in individuals. It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility.