On a rainy night, after sleep had eluded me for the third night in a row, I picked up a book I have been putting off reading for a while and learned of the Hebrew word, neshama. I never heard it before yet this amazingly simple word seemed so familiar to me, so comforting like it had been waiting for me. Neshama refers to the Jewish notion of spirit or soul, something I have been grappling with for some time now.
One’s soul, their spirit is how we make sense of our world, how we try to manage life when the unimaginable happens. We guard it well, protecting it from breakage, damage and tainting, it is our very light. Since I came across this word I have been thinking about my light, and if the many emotional beatings over the years have affected my neshama. I have also been thinking about the emotional baggage of my surroundings and the people around me. The struggles that we as a society are currently facing, the way in which we hide ourselves, our neshamas so that the world can’t get at our light.
2020 and its cousin 2021 have been clusterfucks, that is true, but I have always held the view that it is better to be cautiously optimistic about these things than hide away. At least, I was. The latter part of 2020 and the first innings of 2021 came with more complications than I had anticipated, I should have known better, a friend remarked to me when I vented in anguish that once again the pandemic stays pandemicky. The more problematic thing was I didn’t see what it was doing to my neshama. From health issues, betrayals, to loss and disappointments it was all affecting me so fundamentally that I began to lose myself.
In trying to fix or cope with the many changes and revelations that were coming my way I began to retreat. I wanted my life to be mine and all private, but it wasn’t just privacy I wanted, I wanted to hide. I wanted to take all the hurt into a dark hole and the people that brought them in there with it. My joy was gone and rather than find it again, I wanted to be alone in my pain. Choosing to exist in this complex world apart from everyone, even those I cared about the most was, is difficult. I didn’t want them to see my neshama because what if they saw it, really saw and all they saw were the broken pieces.
More importantly what if they didn’t like what they saw. What if it’s edges being so bruised and so battered by pain, loneliness, anger and sadness was unrecognisable. What if that is what being locked down this terrible pandemic has taken from me, my spirit? Even more terrifying, what if I didn’t know how to put it back together? These broken pieces. So in hiding, I went to work building my wall and defenses, I began retreating not through absence but through loss of voice, loss of agency, hope, faith and confidence by hiding from the world and the people I care about, I could be safe from scrutiny.
Somehow, unexpectedly people I thought weren’t looking saw me. They saw my neshama, all of it and they didn’t recoil. They saw me in ways I didn’t think about, ways I haven’t dreamt about for many years. Often it is easier to hide, retreat and build walls as high as the eyes can see. For women, and even more so women of colour our vulnerability often comes at a cost. We are afraid that we may come across as weak. We labour precious hours in our day wondering how this supposed weakness will be used against us? Is it better to wear our armours, and try to cover who we are so that they don’t get to see us? Do we in protecting our soft shells hide our much stronger neshama deep where even we don’t know to look?
Do the horrors of our past and the pains of our present define our futures or do they just inform us of where we came from, where we are and the unwritten pages of what is to come?
“I am going to give you some tough love,” a good friend firmly said to me recently. I had called here to help me get out of my own head. Something had happened and I worried I had reacted in the wrong way and as life in the pandemic as come do show me, I was in tears. Barely able to get two sentences between my sobs, she listened patiently as I narrated the incident, what I had said and how it had made me feel.
She was silent for a moment, thoughtful and careful with her words as always then in genuine exasperation said, “Stop!” “You have to stop this nonsense, how much more will these people take from you? Can you not see you are not you anymore.”
Her words knocked the breath out of me that I had to remind myself how to breathe. Her words rang in my head like an alarm bell with no off button: “Can you not see you are not you anymore.”
If I wasn’t me, then who am I? Did I hide my neshama so much that I didn’t know myself? Do we lose our souls in trying to placate the perceptions of other people about us. Are we allowing the emotional scars of our daily grind to grind us down? Also if one loses their light, their sense of self, their neshama how do they find it again?
Can you not see that you are not you anymore? If the world stays pandemicky, will I allow the voices to win? To find our’s light in a time that seems so dark we must be willing to come out of the shadows.