Everything I Love Is Disappearing

In 2016, a mentor asked me why I was committed to collapse work and collective grief tending. What was the why of my body of work? I answered, “Because everything I love is disappearing.” 

Truly, I didn’t know what else to do as I was becoming more radicalized and sensitized to supremacy culture, becoming more aware of polycrisis, and carrying the anticipatory grief of knowing my sister was likely going to die in the coming years.

As most of us have experienced, the rate of disappearance and disconnection has accelerated. Species, relationships, hope, naiveté, places, ancestral practices, rest, they’re all becoming harder to find, easier to lose. So much has and is unraveling, vanishing.

For me, personally, since that conversation in 2016, I lost my sister, Ivy, on July 30th, 2019. She was a neuroqueer, artist who was chronically ill and disabled, a weaver of fiber and worlds. Her birthday was just a few days ago, on July 19th. She would be 45, but she never made it to 40. So many of our kin haven’t, and won’t, make it through this time of devastation. 

In the years directly after Ivy’s death, I went through a traumatic breakup with a close friend and co-facilitator. It was semi-public (well, she made a podcast about it), and I was quickly disposed of, not just by her but by several members of our shared community. Around the same time, I experienced acute mold illness that turned into a chronic illness I still live with. I almost, very truly, didn’t make it through those years, and feel like just in the past year or so I’ve emerged from the underworld, able to breathe and feel the sun on my skin, feel the warmth of being alive (and I’m so grateful to be alive in these times).

We’ve all lived through a global pandemic, worsening climate disasters, rising fascism, and accelerating genocides. Our grief is not abstract, and not only personal. It’s collective and political, touching every part of us. I say this often in my groups: at this point in history, all our grief and conflict live downstream from systems of supremacy. We have a responsibility to turn toward that truth. To tend to the relational web, rather than uphold the systems that are killing most of us while protecting a select few who are putting all of life at risk.

Capitalism, empire, and the ultra wealthy (those stealing from future generations, hoarding resources, and profiting off of collapse) try to convince us we aren’t impacted by or impacting each other as much as we are. This includes the beautiful, relational ways we affect one another, as well as the harmful, challenging ways we wound each other. Every day, in countless ways, we are told we shouldn’t feel as impacted by violence, losses, cancellations, ruptures, resistance, love, connections, and reconciliations.

I no longer feel embarrassed for (still) being heartbroken and angry about the ways I was disposed of or mistreated by people I trusted, the ways I was used by people less vulnerable and more resourced than me. And I will forever be impacted by the ways I’ve been deeply loved and seen and celebrated, particularly by my neuroqueer and interspecies kin.

I continue to get asked, though less often now, “What do you mean by collapse?” I mean ecological collapse, economic collapse, societal and spiritual collapse. I mean the climate crisis, polycrisis, ecocide, genocide, COVID denial, and the rise of fascism. Each of these is a way to name the long arc and inevitable outcome of colonization and capitalism.

I also mean this: collapse is not new. Many communities long targeted by empire—especially Indigenous, Black, Queer, and other racialized communities—have been surviving, resisting, and adapting through ongoing collapse for generations, across centuries. What feels like a novel horror to some is a familiar way of existing for others. We are not all entering this moment from the same depth of knowing, whether through ancestral connection or through present-day identity and privilege.

And, I’m speaking to the personal collapses that are now constantly shaping our lives: the traumatic relationship endings, the deaths, the loss of place, identity, and purpose. The ways we become ill, burned out, or even die because our bodies can no longer contain this degree of separation, loneliness, and denial.

What I want to say today, especially to those awakening to global collapse and the Long Dark, is this: when you stay with it long enough, when you keep showing up despite, or even because of, the heartbreak, something begins to move through you—from deep time, from Soul.

The overculture is killing us, but there’s an underculture waiting to nourish us, and be fed by us. When we acclimate to this time of the Long Dark and tap into the mycelial aliveness, we begin to feel what’s slowing, what’s quickening, what’s composting into form through us. We feel the world that’s waiting to be born from our re-membering and tears. I’m not talking about an apocalyptic worldview that awaits another realm, like the violent narratives of Zionism and certain strands of “new-age spirituality.” I’m talking about what’s flowing through us from the Dreaming Earth, here, on this wild, wondrous, and life-giving planet.

It’s been about fifteen years since I embarked on this work, ten of them fully devoted to collapse psychology and soul activism. Some of that time was almost too dark for me to bear, and it was also exactly the initiation I needed. I had to move through the experience and understanding of collapse with all its despair and devastation, there wasn’t a lot of beauty and light in my life for a long time. And I think this is something only those who’ve lived through deep, life-altering loss (which will be all of us at some point) can fully understand in an embodied, relational way.

I can share, from experience, that something alchemizes when we’re willing to be in the depths of grief for however long it takes. Hope begins to rise again, in its own time, not in a naïve or escapist way, but rooted in what’s real. Beauty becomes more vivid. Love becomes even more accessible, more… everywhere. 

As someone who’s survived sibling loss twice, a violent near-death experience, and years of leftist activism, I never expected to be writing about love and alchemy. It can seem kind of out of touch when devastation is permeating our lives. But after years of practicing collapse skills, grief tending, and cultural repair, I can say with some solidity: something deeper is stirring.

Collapse can’t reach what’s rooted underground. It may scorch the surface, but it can’t destroy what’s seeded in the dark, in the soil of soul. So that’s where we must go with each other, down into the depths.

And let’s remember: one response to despair is repair. This might be repair in your personal relationships, repair within your community, or re-pairing with land, animals, ancestors, and soul. Each act of re-connection matters. I promise you, it changes things. Maybe not always for us right now, but for our lineages, both backwards and forwards. For the beyond-human beings and Future Ones.

Around Ivy’s birthday, I usually share a poem she wrote that ends with, “this is my wish for every one of you, that today you will have a moment to sit down and realize how much you matter, in every regard.” These lines are still potent and true. Each of us is needed and necessary in these times of chaos and uncertainty.

This year, I’m sharing her poem Wilburta’s Anthem (below), which ends with: “because I, we, have been blessed with horror.” It’s a blessing in the soul sense. We’re marked by what wounds us and called into a deeper sense of purpose because of what we’re living through, because of what we’re witnessing and feeling.

I don’t know why each of our souls chose to be here for the collapse of this global Empire, including the unraveling of Zionism and destruction of racialized capitalism. I do know that we are each here for a reason.

May we keep tending what matters even, and especially, when we don’t know what will come of any of this, any of us. May we make micro and mega moves toward repair, trusting that each connection matters. Each act of beauty and love dis-spells the myths of individualism and supremacy, conjuring a future of shared power and collective liberation.

I don’t know when this happened for me, but I do know that I now deeply trust: We are not here just to watch it all burn; we are here to become the medicine, the magick, the stories, the songs, the sanctuaries, the warmth, and the firelight for what’s next. 

Wilburta’s Anthem
in the depth
of everyone elses happiness
comes your worst sorrow
as those rocks churn in your gut
and your teeth grind like gears
waiting
to know
is everything alright?
rarely
but this, these moments
are what make us alive
this is why
i can be the strongest person
you have ever known
because i
we
have been blessed
with horror
—Ivy Max Truhlar