Chris Duffy

It is an alien chewing its way out.

It is a tornado somewhere beneath my lungs.

It is breaking me and somehow people can't see.

I want them to see and I'm terrified they will see.

And I am both of these things at the same time being pulled in opposite directions like there's a team of horses attached to each end.

Except somehow, unbelievably, I am stronger than the teams of horses and I do not get torn apart.

That is such a unbelievably accurate description of grief to me and yet so incredibly specific.

And that's the personal side of grief.

And then I just want to pair it with something you wrote at the beginning of the book, which is you say.

I've covered social movements for the better part of two decades.

And one thing that the ones that stuck had in common was that they provided solidarity in a material way.

They offered care that was physical food, a place to sleep, masks and hand sanitizer during COVID-19.

They offered life even when protesting a death.

We lack a word in English for this kind of life making like the missing middle voice.

And to me, those two quotes...

really capture so much of the beauty of this book and also the thread that I had never seen someone else draw between that intense personal suffering and the way that we can find a path forward together, that it isn't something you solve on your own, that it is actually something you solve in community.

Anyone who has been through grief and through suffering understands that one of the things that it does, and you say this explicitly, is that it just erodes your ability to take bullshit.

You have zero capacity for the way things are, for people saying, what's going on?

Nothing much.

You can't do that.