Why Some Lives Are Grieved and Others Ignored

What makes one person’s suffering worthy of compassion while another’s is dismissed as deserved? In this solo episode of Find Your Freaks, host Tonya Kubo wrestles with the haunting question: Whose suffering counts?

Building on her conversation with Rachel Allen in Episode 4, Tonya explores how society decides whose pain deserves acknowledgment, and whose lives are treated as disposable. From incarceration and addiction to miscarriage and clutter, she traces how secrecy, shame, and the us-vs.-them mindset shape our capacity for compassion.

At the heart of the conversation is belonging: every human has the right to be seen and valued. But when we withhold grief from some lives, we shrink our own humanity in the process.

Episode Highlights

• [03:09] The haunting question that keeps Tonya up at night
• [08:05] Us vs. them: How we assign compassion
• [14:25] Why belonging must include criminals
• [20:10] How society teaches us whose lives are “grievable”
• [24:27] Propaganda, dehumanization, and historical echoes
• [37:16] Serving in your lane: belonging through gifts and talents
• [40:23] A reminder if you’ve been told your pain doesn’t matter

Whose Pain Deserves Compassion?

From childhood, Tonya noticed contradictions in how adults talked about life and death: pro-life but pro-death penalty, condemn an abortion but dismiss an execution. These contradictions sharpened into a lifelong question — whose suffering counts, and why?

Dehumanization Then and Now

Drawing on history — from WWII propaganda to modern prison conditions — Tonya shows how entire groups are stripped of humanity so their suffering feels less urgent. Whether it’s incarcerated people, immigrants, unhoused neighbors, or people in the throes of active addiction, society quietly decides their pain doesn’t warrant compassion.

But every story deserves witnesses. Every life deserves grief.

Pull Quotes

• “Perspective is what separates compassion from condemnation.” — Tonya Kubo
• “Every story deserves witnesses. Every life deserves grief.” — Tonya Kubo
• “Community is an act of resistance against systems that say some people don’t count.” — Tonya Kubo

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

Links & Mentions

• Episode 4: Belonging Behind Bars with Rachel Allen
• Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? by Judith Butler
• Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith
• Beyond Broken podcast by Rachel Allen
• Engineering Consent in 1940s America: The Role of Propaganda in the Japanese-American Internment by Tonya Kubo
• Episode 3: Kindness First, Clutter Second

Support the Show

If Find Your Freaks matters to you, help us keep it ad-free by buying us a coffee (or two!). Every dollar goes to production so more weirdos can find their people.

You can purchase Find Your Freaks merchandise online through Abilities and Attitudes.

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What’s Next

Next week, we’ll talk about how finding your people doesn’t always mean starting a group. It can also mean using your unique gifts on behalf of others. Stay tuned for Episode 6.

Hey, Anita, Tanya here. This is episode five, finally. Working title at this point is Which Lives Do We Grieve? I should have pulled this up. I should have put this on the date. I am thinking this is actually gonna go live, you know, one, two, three, four, five. September 1st, Labor Day. I can't think of a better time for this particular topic. I'm gonna get going in five. Ooh, let me fix this. This is not cool.

I don't know if this I don't think this actually appears, but it helps me to know what show I'm on Already five four three two one Hey there freaks Tanya here Welcome to episode five which is Potentially a little bit of a heavier episode You know why not episode five why not get the heavy stuff?

right out of the gate. That'll let you know if this show is for you or not. But in all seriousness, this one may go a little bit more academic than some of our shows, but that really is part, you know, a main message here behind the show is that, you know, everybody, everybody's looking for their freaks. And for some of us, that's in super high brow areas and for some of us, that's in super low brow areas and everywhere in between.

for all of us. So back in episode four, I spoke with Rachel Allen, who is the host of Beyond Broken. So Beyond Broken is a short term podcast that is about the federal prison system here in the US. And when we spoke, know, Rachel and I go way back. She's a former client of mine. I am a current client of hers.

We were talking about incarceration, talked about isolation and what all of that does for families. And I really encourage you to listen to that episode. know, initially I was thinking, you when we were recording, initially I was thinking what I would want to talk about in this solo episode is how scared Rachel was to talk to me.

and tell me the truth about her husband being incarcerated because of her prior experience with other people in her life, you know, when he was arrested and eventually convicted and sentenced. Because I thought that was really profound, right? How scared she was to talk to me about it, how she was, she didn't say anything until it was one of those things where like, what do I have to lose? Prepared for rejection. But since we recorded that episode, what I actually can't get out of my head.

is a deeper question. I mean, honestly, it's haunting me. And that deeper question is whose suffering counts? know, whose lives are considered grievable? And if you've worked for me in the past, you know, I've said that a few times over the years in some of my work. That is part of what drives me toward community building is this observation, and I have to be honest,

I probably first noticed this when I was about 12 or 13. Not because I'm a brainiac, but just because I like alignment and I always have, okay? I like things to be consistent and congruent. And so ever since I was young, I very quickly could pick out when somebody said one thing and their actions said something else or their actions proved what they said to be wrong or a lie.

It's just gotten more pronounced. of course, the world has changed since I got the sight of 40 as well. Not to mention I'm married. I have kids. You know, didn't have any of those experiences before. But this idea of whose lives are grievable and whose suffering counts, those questions like they burn, they burn for me. They are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night. They are the kinds of questions that I wake up at 2 a.m. wondering about.

These are the questions and the explorations that invade my dreams Because when Rachel like I said when Rachel told me that her husband had been incarcerated Right because she had voxed me if you haven't listened episode four She sent me a message and it had to do with our business relationship letting me know she was gonna be late with a deadline and letting me know it was because she was driving from one state to another state and Because she was sending me a message at like

one, two in the morning. She felt the need to explain, you know, to make sure that I knew that she didn't really expect me to be listening to her at that time of night. And also she was not going to make a habit of talking to me at that time of night. But she had a plan that as soon as she got home, she was going to go to bed and she didn't know what time she'd wake up. So as she's leaving this message, and if you're familiar with the Voxer app, it is asynchronous. She is she has already talked herself into the fact this may be the last time we ever speak.

that I may cut and run from our business relationship as soon as I hear this. And, you know, I mean, that says a lot, right? So she thought somebody who she had given money was going to give her that money back simply because her husband was in prison. And, you know, for her, she found herself surprised by my response. And what I want to do today is I don't want to

rehash episode four, right? If this piques your interest at all, I definitely want you to listen to episode four. I want you to come to your own conclusions. What I want to talk about today though, is I want to explore sort of that moment, but through a bigger lens. You know, which, and that lens is a big one because it's, you know, it involves secrets, perspective.

and the way in which our society decides who deserves compassion. our society, and I'm speaking from a US-centric perspective, because that's where I live, that's where I was born, I have not lived abroad. But I also think that there is some global truth to this as well, right? It's just the experience that you center in

This story just varies based on where you are, who you know, who you identify as and all of those things. But the ways our society decides whose pain deserves compassion is something that I think is worth discussing today. And I think the first part of it is there's so much secrecy, right? Because when we have

this us versus them mentality, right? Like us, people who are part of the us, people who I identify with, think they, know, whether it's they look like me, they think like me, they believe like me, they work like me, they, you know, have the same hobbies as me, however I define the collective us, right? Us and we deserve compassion. We are good people. We do the right thing.

We, you know, even when we make bad choices, we have the best of intentions, right? We expect grace, we expect compassion, we expect accommodation to some degree, right? When we are part of this collective us. And then there is them. And them do not make bad choices for the right reasons. Them do not make good choices. Them are not good people, right? Them.

get what's coming to them and even then probably not as much as we think they should. Right? And that's, you know, based on our perspective and we get camped into this us versus them sort of scenario. And, you know, when I think of the Incarcerate, let's start there because that's where episode four explored, you know, I deserve all the things that I have because I am a good person.

who obeys the law and honors people's rights and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And those people behind bars do not deserve good things because they made bad choices, they broke the law, they are suffering the consequences of their actions. They made their bed, they need to lie in it. And it's very easy to sit in my two bedroom, one bath home,

that has central heat and air and a fridge of food and a pantry and indoor plumbing and all the awesomeness to think, well, whatever is happening in a prison, what do I care? What does that have to do with my day-to-day life? know, Rachel, like Beyond Broken, the podcast that Rachel did,

A lot of the essays she's written lifts the curtain so that we can't ignore what happens behind bars, what happens in those prisons, or at least in one specific prison and prison system that she has experience with. And yet, you know, does it matter? The average person, are they really thinking about what happens to those who are incarcerated? And, you know, one of the conversations we had is I asked Rachel, said, you know,

So I know people are listening going, so what? So what? They broke the law, they made bad choices, they're getting what's coming to them. Why do we care? Why are we crying over what's going on? And her response was, what do you have to do that's so bad that you would deserve rotten food to be starved? Which are some of the...

examples that she mentions in episodes in her show. What would you have to do that would be bad enough to warrant dying while being mocked simply because the right paperwork wasn't filled out? my response to Rachel and her advocacy on behalf of the incarcerated and their families is

likely very different from yours because before Rachel ever told me about this, I had been working on an advocacy project for county jails in my state. So I was working with a public health agency and that public health agency was passing some policy around pregnant and lactating women.

who were in county jails because where I live, have overcrowded prisons and so people sit in county jails much longer than county jails are typically designed to keep them. And so because of that experience, I had a different perspective on people who were incarcerated. had different, kind of just a different perspective on even the buildings and the facilities, right? I had an understanding that just because of how things happen nowadays,

You know, some of these buildings aren't meant to house the number of people that they're housing. Some of these facilities just don't have what they need to safely harbor the number of people they have and all of that. And so that that knowledge shaped how I responded to Rachel, which, know, also makes me wonder because I am not the type of person who goes around thinking I'm a perfect human. I'm just not.

mainly because I'm so not perfect. So not perfect. If you're perfect, please write in. Let me know. I need to meet a perfect person. So I wonder, you know, would I have responded differently if I had met Rachel and had that conversation five years earlier than we did? Would I have responded differently, you know, in my 30s or in my 20s when I really did believe only bad people went to jail? Like, I really used to believe

that every single person behind bars was guilty of the crime they were convicted. Because I didn't know, right? I barely watched TV growing up. So it's like I didn't even have like fake stories of that to lean on. And just makes me think of...

Perspective being what separates compassion from condemnation.

Right? it's, and what I mean by that is...

At 20, I probably would have had all sorts of judgements of what type of person Rachel's husband was to be in jail and therefore what type of person Rachel must be to be married to a man who is currently in jail.

because of the perspective that I had or in this case didn't have. But because, you know, I'm over the age of 40, I actually know people who have been convicted of crimes, done time, and are now out in the world as business owners and, you know, rebuilding their lives or have successfully rebuilt their lives and, you know, you would never know it. I have, you know, friends who have.

partners, ex-partners who have struggled in and out of incarceration for various reasons. So now, with those experiences, right, comes a different perspective and it is much more natural for me to have compassion for everybody involved. And, you know, when I think about belonging, right, I'm really thinking and

You know, the core message of this show is that every human has the right to belong. Every human deserves a place where they can show up and be accepted just as themselves. And that includes people who have committed crimes. Right. It's that whole love your neighbor and even that person you can't stand. They're also your neighbor, too. And that's hard. Right. Loving people is hard. It's hard for me. It's hard. It's hard for a lot of people. But I do believe.

that everybody deserves love. Now, that being said, not everybody deserves my love. That's true too. Probably true for you as well. But the first thing that hit me is that, you know, I think it's perspective that separates a compassionate response from a condemning response. And...

Next, you know...

There is the secrecy part, There's the part, and this speaks to the greater topic of belonging, which is, there's a saying a friend of mine uses, and I'm sure she wrote it in a book somewhere, or a self-help program or something, right? But we're only as sick as our secrets, right? Because it's secrets that keep us in bondage, because we will do so much to protect a secret. Talk to anybody who struggled with addiction, and they will tell you the links that they have gone through to protect

the secret of their addiction, also to protect their addiction. And people who enter into recovery by choice, because not everybody enters into a recovery program by choice, but people who enter into recovery by choice oftentimes do so because the secret has gotten so heavy, it has isolated them from the world. So what they thought made them fun, what they thought gave them friends and a peer group and made them included suddenly starts making them feel excluded and separate because

They're so desperate to protect the secret. And a lot of people I know in recovery, a lot of people I know who have been harboring some kind of secret when they come clean will oftentimes talk about the freedom, feeling like a burden has been lifted. But a lot of that freedom does come from the reaction they get when they finally speak the truth.

I think it's why recovery communities have such loyal participants, right? It is a place where you can walk in, speak the truth about your addiction and how you feel about whatever your substance of choice is or whatever your, we'll call it a vice of choices and have nobody in that room flinch because they all get it and everything you say makes perfect sense to them and maybe they thought it themselves. That's...

one of the most freeing experiences ever. we all know this, I am somebody who's really struggled with a lot of obsessive behaviors in the past. episode two, we talked about the Clutter Free Academy podcast. And in that community, right, my mom was a hoarder. I...

will always struggle with clutter to some degree. It's better, right? But being able to talk about it so that I don't have to worry about what people think when they come into my house, because I don't care how hard I've worked to clean. Somebody is going to judge it when they walk in, right? That has been freeing. I entertain more now than I ever would have thought I would simply because I don't feel like I've got this dirty little secret that I have to keep under control.

And, you know, so okay, so we've talked about incarceration a little bit, crime a little bit, we've talked about addiction a little bit. I'm always going to talk about clutter. That's just, you know, that is a big part of my lived experience. Which then, you know, as we go toward this whole like whose pain deserves compassion, whose lives are grievable, it's really

The question of why are some truths...

Why do some truths lead to acceptance and lead to deeper community while other truths trigger exile? Why does one truth get empathy and another truth doesn't? And I think that you're gonna have your own opinion on this based on who you know and what you do and what they do. But I wonder, you

I whose truths we allow that we find palatable, whose truths we find easy to swallow, tells us a lot about whose lives are valued. And I would go so far as to say, when we think really long and hard about whose truths are allowed,

whose perspectives, whose stories that we want to hear and whose stories we believe versus whose stories we don't believe. It will tell us a lot about whose lives we individually value, but I think it also tells us a lot about whose lives society has taught us to value. Because I don't go, I don't move about the world, excusing my behavior by social conditioning. I tell my girls all the time, right? I don't.

We don't go out there and not commit crimes because we're scared of going to jail. We don't commit crimes because that's not how we roll, right? We make good choices. We try to be good humans, okay? Law, law be damned. If stealing was legal tomorrow, I don't anticipate I would start stealing because that's just not who I am.

So I don't go around saying, I do this because society tells me to or because society allows it. But I do know that I cannot control how my perspective and my thoughts and my beliefs have been shaped by what I read, what I see, and what has been normalized for me. And, you know, that's where I think we have to...

acknowledge that some of this idea of who gets to be grieved comes from. And, you know, I think part, well, I can tell you honestly, part of why I chew on this so much is I feel like I have seen it play out in different ways over the years. So, you know, in high school, I was very confused by people

who said they were pro-life, meaning anti-abortion, but were also pro-death penalty. Because I was like, well, you're either for life or you're not. Right? Back to, had this very, like, I just hunger for alignment in everything. So I'm like, so how can you say you're pro-life if you are in favor of the death penalty? How does that work? You know, and people had all sorts of reasons. Well, you know, baby hasn't been born yet. Baby.

is perfect and has all this potential and da da da da da. So that's a life that gets to be protected, that deserves to be protected. We have to do everything we can to protect that life. But that person who's out here living and breathing, who's made bad choices, they don't get protection anymore. Nope, nope. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, make your bed, you have to lie in it in so many contexts in the 1980s. And so it's like, okay, so we can't, we get to be sad.

Four.

in a lot of our conversations. Death Penalty, Roe v. Wade, keep in mind I was a kid during the Reagan administration, this all makes sense if you're over the age of 40. If you're under the age of 40, it probably doesn't make sense. Thank you for listening anyway. But.

I remember thinking, okay, so I also didn't understand how somebody who was newly pregnant and really excited about being pregnant would be asked about their baby. But in spaces where people were talking about abortion rights, people were very specific about it's not a baby until a certain time, it's a fetus, know, they did whatever they could to impersonalize. And that's...

That's where the us versus them comes in. Not specifically to abortion, but I think it's a great illustration of this us versus them philosophy. And it goes to, so when I was in grad school, I actually wrote about this, so that's like 2017. I wasn't super young when I was in grad school. But I had encountered some literature.

along these lines. So there's a book called Less Than Human and of course I'm forgetting the author's name at the moment but the-

Middle name Livingstone, last name Smith, just forgetting his first name. But he wrote this book called Less Than Human, which talked about how armies are trained. Talks about how in order to get an army, in order to get good people, strong values, know, young people who have been raised right, raised right enough to where they would volunteer for the army.

you have to break down their value system in some way. And one of the ways to do that is to dehumanize the enemy. And so in this book, it talks all about the words that are used in these us versus them conversations to get soldiers to think of the enemy, the people they are fighting, regardless of their age, gender, or anything as

not human because if you can get them to think of them as something other than human then killing becomes easier. Right? Fighting becomes easier. And I wrote about it in grad school because I was very interested in the role of propaganda in the Japanese American internment. I was in grad school after I was already married to Brian. Brian's Japanese American. His grandparents were in the internment camps in the US. And one of the, you know,

When you look at the propaganda from that time, you'll see Japanese Americans, Asians in general, were portrayed as vermin. They were given in illustrations, they were given rat-like qualities. They were illustrated or drawn as mice, rats, pests to be trapped, to be fumigated, right? The war effort was looked at, was kind of portrayed as like a fumigation, pest control.

In some illustrations, they're portrayed as apes. And, you know, so when you think about that portrayal, everybody is being surrounded by this kind of illustration. Pictures of Asian people as vermin. And then you're talking about how we are going to move all of these people into these camps, right? Like the media.

and the government was very, very careful not to use the term concentration camp. But internment camps, you when you read the news articles from the time, you read the San Francisco Chronicles article from that time, it sounds like they were being sent to summer camp, like to go vacation. When in reality, they were shipped off to fairgrounds, one in my town that I live in right now, forced to muck out horse stalls that they then slept on. So many.

So many died of typhus and dysentery and all of those things because they were, you know, bedding down in animal feces. But when, you know, we already had months and years of programming that equated Asians to animals. So all of this, you know, the average person is thinking, that sounds pretty good. Sounds like they're being treated pretty well. I mean, when

in multiple places throughout centuries, at least decades. And I think today, know, 2025 when we're recording, right, we see the echoes of that perspective, of that dehumanizing people who make different choices than us, live differently than us, all of those things. We see that in the treatment of incarcerated people, as Rachel pointed out in episode four, as she points out in the Beyond Broken podcast.

We see it in the treatment of immigrants. We see it in the treatment of addicts, especially addicts that are not in active recovery, right? Addicts who are, you what you would call inactive addiction. We see it in the treatment of those who are unhoused, right? The homeless. And, you know, when these people die, right? Their deaths get framed as inevitable, as deserved, as invisible. How often do we hear stories

of somebody who is a known addict or somebody who's been in and out of homelessness goes missing. And it's really hard to get law enforcement to take that missing person report seriously. It's really hard to get law enforcement to direct resources to the search of them. And, know, we could beat up, like verbally beat up on law enforcement all day long if we wanted to. I don't think that's productive.

The reality is, is law enforcement, like anybody else, right, suffers constrained resources. There are so many people missing in certain places. There's only so many people to search for missing people and they're prioritizing.

But the point of what I'm saying is that they are forced to prioritize which is true and they are prioritizing according to a social construct of who is more important. Like intentional or not intentional, right? That is what we are all doing. We prioritize our grief. We prioritize our attention, right? Which tragedies do we pay attention to? Like there's only 24 hours in a day.

None of us can stay sane and watch the news 24-7. So if we only have an hour a week to give to the news, what news are we giving our hour of time to? Are we giving it to celebrity gossip that makes us happy and feel good? Are we giving it to genocide? Everybody's gonna make a different choice.

There is a another book and it's called frames of war when is life grievable I want to make sure like I did not invent the question right other people have been asking this question and Exploring this question for years by Judith Butler and she talks about the frames of Grievability right which is our social cultural cues that tell us whose lives matter enough to mourn right are you know and I think of this a lot of times with miscarriages because I

You know, you hear that all the time. I know when we announced our pregnancy with our first, we got a lot of people who told us that we needed to be careful because like, what if we lost the baby? And I said, well, if we lost the baby, we'd be sad. And I would want people to understand why I'm sad. So, yeah. But, you know, that hiding the information until it's publicly acceptable to share because then it's publicly acceptable to grieve. I saw so many expectant moms struggling with that.

And even when I've had friends who've had miscarriages, when they talk about it and somebody will say, oh, well, how far along were you? if they say, oh, I was like 20 weeks or 24 weeks, it was late term miscarriage, people are like, like you actually lost a baby. But you know what my friends who had miscarriages at 16 weeks, they feel like they lost a baby too. Same for the ones who lost babies at 14 weeks.

You know, they get to grieve what they get to grieve. It's not on us to tell them. But society has some clear messages. And I think that...

I don't want to excuse the behavior, right? But I think we all have seen examples of this us versus them thinking. And I think part of why we're okay dehumanizing certain populations or certain segments of the population, whatever reason, they're a different religion than us, they're a different economic class than us, they're a different race than us, they're...

you know, like in the case of the incarcerated, they made different life choices than us, whatever it is, I think part of why it's easy to write them off as, or dismiss their experiences, dismiss their pain, dismiss their lives, is because we view them as already lost, right? Because once they're no longer part of the we, the part of the us, once they become part of the them, it's like,

Well, they're already gone. There's nothing we can do about it, right? So they're lost. They're in prison. They're already shut away. mean, Rachel shared a really awful statistic about the small, tiny percentage of people in federal prison who ever get a visitor, whether they're married, they've got living parents or not, right? So we've already lost them to imprisonment. You know, we've lost them to unemployment.

You know, they're already on the streets. We've already lost them to the streets. We've lost them to hunger. We've lost them to addiction. We've lost them to homelessness. There's like no going back, right? They're already past the point of no return. And I think there's a part of this, not so much that we treat grief, but know, resources are like pie. And if anybody gets too big of a slice of the pie, there's not enough pie left for the rest of us. So we also think of, we've got

to dismiss the incarcerated, the homeless, the addicted, the immigrant because they're stealing, you know, they're taking resources for us. If we want enough for us, if we want to protect our lives, our livelihood, our lifestyle, it has to be at the expense of them. And that's, to me, that's cognitive dissonance. That may not be the accurate term, right? But it's a huge disparity.

And it's that disparity, right, that contributes to what it is that opens our eyes so that we feel horror in a circumstance. Outrage, guilt, loss, even righteous indifference. You know, whether that's in war or even in everyday life, I mean, we think back to, I think it was 2020.

when we all watched George Floyd die, like on TV, like there's no doubt in my mind I watched a snuff film when I saw that the first time. We all saw that. Some people were horrified. Some people had never seen anything like that in their lives, did not know that existed. Some people were like, that has been happening for so long.

Like, I am disgusted by the fact that you are shocked now. Like, why weren't you shocked before? And then there's a whole segment of the population that starts justifying why that's okay in their mind. Right? And it's back to this idea that inside of us, we have made determinations of who is human like us.

who's on the same level of humanity as us, who is not, whose lives are worth grieving and who doesn't deserve our time or our attention. My conversation with Rachel. Rachel's work in advocating on behalf of people affected by the federal prison system and the current state of the federal prison system, rehumanizes the incarcerated, rehumanizes the people who make it a point to go and visit their loved one behind bars.

You know, she makes a point that these people are people, right? Just because we locked them away in institution doesn't mean they cease to exist nor does it mean that they cease to be human. She shines a bright light and says these are lives worth grieving.

My question for you is which population do you want to shine a light on? Which population are you called or compelled to draw attention to so that the world sees that their lives are worth grieving? Because I think all of us, all of us feel that way toward some segment of the population. And then the follow-up question of that is

Can we extend that passion, that feeling of connected humanity toward that population to those that we don't identify with, those that we feel differently from, those that quite honestly we don't agree with how they live, we don't want to live like them, we're not even sure we want to live near them. Can we extend that kind of humanity to them? Because

I mean that is community, right? Community is that we all come together. We don't get because we do, we get because we are, right? It's intrinsic worth, intrinsic value. And community is an act of resistance against systems that say some people don't count. That's a hard pill to swallow. Especially if you listen to this and you think

Yeah, but and insert whatever noun you want. You don't mean them. You don't mean those people. I just saw something like this blow up on social media the other day. You know, talking about Jesus says love your neighbor. And then there's all like hundreds of comments of like, yeah, well, Jesus didn't mean this person was my neighbor or that person or that person. And

It's exhausting, like truly exhausting. And it's also understandable when you think of how much we have been conditioned to view certain people, certain lives worth living, certain lives worth saving, and certain lives not worth living, not worth saving.

And finally, I just want to say, and this was something kind of Rachel mentioned, but I think it's a good one, which is you, whoever you're passionate about, whoever you want to feel seen, known, loved, right? You get to serve them in your way, right? Rachel uses her gift of persuasive writing, her gift and

interest in research and podcasting to shift perspectives toward the incarcerated. She didn't start a Facebook group. She didn't start a membership. She didn't create an online advocacy course. You know, she's not creating meetups for prisoners' wives or anything like that. You know, she's not hosting coffees and teas and lunch and learns. So, you know,

She is evidence that belonging doesn't have to always be about creating a physical space, a physical container for people to come and visit and inhabit.

Sometimes creating community can be as simple as making the invisible visible. Simple as bringing light to what other people want to disappear. You don't have to build community in the traditional sense. You don't have to build community like I do online or in person like other people may to make belonging possible. So whatever your lane, right?

If you have the gift of storytelling, if you have the gift of art, sculpture, painting, drawing, if you have the gift of activism, of policy, driving policy, if you're that person who does not mind testifying in Congress or doing legislative visits, whatever your lane is, lean into it and it can widen the circle.

whose lives we refuse to discard because if we've got Rachel out there shining light on the humanity of those who are living behind bars and we've got Susie, you guys all know I love to pick on Susie, Susie over here shining a light on the value of the lives of people who live on the streets and you've got me shining a light on the lives of people who just look at different than you.

me using my voice, my platform to draw attention to the fact that just because people don't look like us, live like us, doesn't mean they don't deserve to be one with us, right? Then we can truly unify around our shared humanity. So if you haven't already, please listen to Rachel's episode. I do think it's worth it. It's worth it. It's like 45 minutes. Totally worth it.

And I want you to be thinking about how it makes you feel to hear the words that every story deserves witnesses and every life deserves grief. Now, if you've been told directly or indirectly that your pain doesn't matter, whatever your pain is, maybe you've lost a loved one to suicide and somebody told you you shouldn't feel badly for them because they chose it or whatever. Like I've heard some of the most awful things in some of the communities that I have led or that I've been a part of.

So if you've ever been told or it's ever been implied that your pain doesn't matter, I hope today reminds you that it does. It does. I don't have to understand it to tell you it matters. I don't even have to know about your pain to tell you it matters. And if you've been taught that somebody else's suffering isn't worth your grief, I really hope if nothing else, you just take a beat and ask yourself,

What does that viewpoint say about my own humanity? What does that say about our collective humanity?

because

You shouldn't have to shrink.

And when we expand our circle of grief to include the lives others dismiss, we can reclaim our own humanity too.

That's the thought I want to leave you with today. And I look forward to having you back when we get to episode six.