Just One Thing with Kimaya Diggs

Kimaya Diggs’ essay “Jump In” confronts the pain of grief and the pull to reinhabit her body. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘Jump In’ is the seventh piece to be published from a full-length memoir/essay collection I’m currently finishing.

It’s interesting to notice how grief changes and evolves over time: there were the moments depicted in this piece, then the moments in which I reflected, the moments of writing and editing, and now, more than four years after my mother’s death, the publication of this scene from a previous iteration of my grief. I feel lucky to have had all of these moments, for it means that I continue to be alive.

Since writing this piece, my chronic illness has worsened and my relationship with my body has changed immensely. But the impulse to self-destruct is ever-rarer, and if I was resilient before, I’m whatever’s stronger than a diamond now.

The “one thing” about this piece is that it was born out of a desire to understand how to endure grief as big as the sky while stuck in a finite body. The tension between the big grief and the small grief has only amplified in my spheres as brave souls put their fallible bodies on the line to stand for the immense injustice and tragedy of the genocide in Palestine, the vanishing of so many of the rights that bring people happiness and safety, and so much more.

It’s hard to find a way to feel the big and the small at the same time, and if your response is to hurt yourself or to turn to substances, I want to let you know that there are always other options and that you’re stronger than you know <3”