the Empathy List #60: Woke Up

What comes after the Derek Chauvin conviction?

Hey friend, Liz here.

This week, a Minnesota jury pronounced former police officer Derek Chauvin, the man who knelt on the neck of George Floyd, guilty of every charge brought against him.

For anyone with the slightest “woke” bone in their body, this feels like a miracle.

In fact, anytime justice occurs in the universe, that affirms my faith in real deal, hippy dippy, woo-woo, out-of-body, supernatural miracles, offered from the hand of God itself.

Which begs the question… what now?

What comes after the miracle? If anger empowered the march to justice on behalf of George Floyd and so many other victims of police actions, what emotion leads the recovery? What does “recovery” even look like?

But first, I want to sidestep those questions for a moment and focus instead on the question of pain, because it deserves extra emphasis: medicine tells us that pain looks different within every human body.

During my time as a birth doula, I watched 20 babies enter the world through the hard work—the swea…