We don’t talk about Bruno
I haven’t even seen all of Encanto yet, but this song has been like really loud wallpaper in my brain for the last few months. My 11 year old daughter sings it every day, asks Alexa to play it, and sometimes hums it at the dinner table without even realizing what she’s doing. She knows all the words to the song…I only know the tune and maybe the chorus. It’s a freakin’ catchy earworm.
It’s also kind of a reflection of life. There are so many things we don’t talk about. We acknowledge that they’re real…or at least that they’re real for us. Everyone has experienced them in some form or another, whether personally or as a witness to others. But we don’t talk about them. It’s scary. Or we’re superstitious. Or we feel like we need to put on a brave face. Or we believe that the social stigma/cost of speaking up is too great, and we don’t want to rock the boat. Or maybe it just hurts too much to admit to ourselves…that yeah, it actually does hurt.
If we can’t bring ourselves to talk about hard things, then we’re always going to think we’re the only ones experiencing them. So here’s a radical idea. Instead of talking, if that doesn’t feel right, maybe we could sing about them…like the Family Madrigal does with Bruno?
We don’t talk about miscarriages…no no.
I really need to know about workplace micro-aggressions…
Not a word about manic depression!
I never should have brought up my grief!
I don’t know. But FUCK. There’s so much unspoken pain out there. And in here. And if we don’t acknowledge it or share it, how can we ever process it and and move through it? In Buddhist practice, and many other studies that embrace Eastern philosophies, we’re taught that fighting these feelings only makes them more insidious. We need to feel our feelings. Get curious about them. Invite Mara to tea.
This whole Everything I’m (Un)learning project is about talking about things I’m too scared to talk about. It’s hard and it’s tiring and I exhaust myself sometimes by being in my heart and my head too much and I just want to sip a freakin’ Old Fashioned and take a nap.
Would it be less exhausting, though, for each of us individually, if we were doing it all collectively?
Please, please, please talk about Bruno with me.
I opened up comments on the blog yesterday. I am new at this and I don’t know if anyone will comment or not, but the invitation is there.
In any case, I wanted to say thank you for all of the love and support you’ve shown me over the past few days, after I shared this project on LinkedIn. You’re really good at uplifting others. I would like to help uplift you, too, so we can carry all this hard stuff together.
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PS: This is a really good article from Slate on all of the complexities of the Bruno song itself. There’s a lot of subtext about intergenerational trauma, family expectations, etc. woven into the lyrics, and the movie narrative as a whole. I guess I’ll actually need to watch the whole thing one of these days.