…The world will always need more than I can ever be — so just be. As someone invested in social transformation, I often felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the work. Early in my career, I developed chronic insomnia because my mind raced with everything that needed to be done. I believed I could somehow “fix” centuries-old systems of injustice. Accepting that it’s not my sole responsibility to change the world (and the idea that it was came from ego) allowed me to let go of that burden. I realized my role is to contribute what I can while prioritizing rest and sustainability. Deciding who and how I choose to be is doing enough…
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Breeshia Wade. Breeshia is the author of the 2021 publication Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, which was recognized as one of the best nine books on grief and is currently required reading in multiple graduate-level courses. Breeshia draws upon her background working in hospitals and hospices to use grief or social transformation.
She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. She also completed a two-year Buddhist Chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center.
Breeshia has been featured in prominent publications, including Reviewed: USA Today, Metro.co.uk, Cosmopolitan, Shondaland, and Fast Company, among many others.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series Breeshia! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up across from a cemetery in a rural town in SC. I had a close relationship with my grandfather as a baby. When I was around 1.5 years old he suffered from an aneurysm.
According to my mother and uncle, as they were getting ready to go to the hospital I suddenly arose from my nap, and said, “Uh oh, E-R,” my fumbled attempt to say his name. Moments later, they received a call that he had died.
I remember all of my dreams until the age of 8 because I always had the same three. In one of them, I would sit peacefully on my rocking horse in a blindingly white room. Every time I woke up, I knew that the room I was sitting in was my grandfather.
My grandmother worked 12-hour shifts at a local factory to send me to a private school.
I was the only Black child at school, and I suffered for it.
My grandmother knew grief, and she saw mine. It was the form of grief that forced her to choose which aspects of her granddaughter’s identity to let die at the hands of White supremacy — and how — so that I could get an education that might give me a future, enough time to stitch myself whole.
By the time I was 17, I had touched enough death to not know fear. Through the eyes of a dying woman who grieved the disembodiment of her rage. To the closed casket of a man who suffered mentally, and died alone. My story began with life, grew with love, and deepened through grief.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
Around my 12th birthday, I encountered the quote, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” I was told it came from Dante’s Divine Comedy, although I later learned it was misattributed; its origin remains unknown. Growing up in a conservative Christian environment, the quote reminded me of Revelation 3:15–16: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
Those words resonated and made me curious about the relationship between commitment, compassion, and justice. I often felt that the rigid, dogmatic teachings in my upbringing lacked those qualities. Curiosity led me to read Dante’s Inferno. In hindsight, doing so may have been my initiation into my lifelong exploration of philosophy and religion.
My work today encourages people to explore their relationship with grief and fear of loss to create positive societal change. I believe unaddressed grief and fear often drive harmful behaviors. Taking responsibility for our relationship to fear of loss helps prevent us from pushing our future fears onto others, thus causing them to experience concrete grief. Unattended fear of loss at a mass scale leads to various forms of social oppression.
Many Christians conflate belief with faith.
As I grew older, I began to see how many Christians use belief as a coping mechanism rather than an expression of faith. Belief is rooted in certainty, and shields against the discomfort of ambiguity. It stems from an ego-driven, fear-based response to the unknown — a way to create a false sense of security in a world where loss is the only guarantee.
Faith is about commitment without the need for outcomes or guarantees. It doesn’t rely on external validation; it is born from trust and surrender. If “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” it cannot coexist with certainty. Trust and hope require vulnerability, and certainty undermines both.
Those who lead from a place of rigid conviction are frequently driven by their unresolved grief or fear of loss — whether that loss pertains to family, stability, security, or health. This fear manifests as a desperate need for control, and often blinds them to the deeper, more transformative aspects of faith.
It’s funny–I’m realizing that my life path may have been significantly influenced by a mistake.
That quote misattributed to Dante planted the seed that true justice, compassion, and moral action begin with inner ethical and spiritual integrity. These values demand active engagement with ourselves and others. Justice is not an abstract ideal but a practice of inner attentiveness for the collective good.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
To be honest, my first mistake was being too honest. I was working with a talented graphic designer, and I asked him to create a photo for an event. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how Photoshop worked — I thought you could start with a blank sheet and essentially “create” an image from scratch, like magically conjuring a beach scene that looked as real as an actual photograph.
So, I asked him to Photoshop a few objects together to capture the essence of a talk I was giving. It was supposed to be the main visual — the big picture for the event. He was great at his job, but that particular week, I later learned, he had some personal things going on and wasn’t as attentive as usual. Normally, he’d ask clarifying questions to make sure he understood my vision. This time, though, he went ahead and gave me a design — and it was appalling.
I was honest about my feelings, and told him it looked like something straight out of Bikini Bottom. His eyes widened in shock. The conversation got awkward, and it eventually dawned on me that I was too honest. I apologized, and thankfully, we ended up laughing about it later.
The Fourth Precept in Zen Buddhism is about “right speech.” There are multiple components of “right speech,” one of which is giving feedback in a way that someone is able to receive. Opinions and preferences aside, your words can be factually correct at the time–not to say mine were–but your speech may not be “right” if someone is not in a place to receive your words..
The lesson? Honesty is important, but not as important as right speech. Feedback should be constructive, not just critical. It’s not just about what you say but how you say it, especially when working collaboratively.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
My book aims to create a significant social impact by introducing the concept of Elemental Grief, an often overlooked form of grief rooted in our collective fear of loss. This fear — whether it’s of losing loved ones, identity, safety, or resources — drives systemic oppression, including racism, sexism, and classism.
Typically, discussions about grief and marginalization focus on the grief of the marginalized. However, my work challenges those with social privilege to examine how their unprocessed grief and fear of loss contribute to and perpetuate harm.
Education alone cannot resolve these issues. Even if racism were to end in the U.S. today, it would take humanity three seconds to invent another way to subjugate others. It’s easy to view the past 400 years as the entirety of history, but humans have been subjugating one another for millennia. Sexual slavery, for instance, is the oldest known form of oppression.
The root of systemic oppression is fundamentally a spiritual issue. It lies in humanity’s unaddressed relationship with grief and fear of loss.
That’s why my work isn’t technically about racism — that’s simply the lens through which I explore the deeper principle of fear of loss.
I also examine how groups experiencing marginalization are not inherently virtuous because they suffer disproportionately. We are born into social positions where our unexplored grief does not have large-scale consequences by chance. If we were born into privilege, there would be nothing preventing us from inflicting harm on others in the same way we’ve been harmed.
Systemic oppression stems from a deeply human struggle, transcending cultures, societies, and time.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
One of the most interesting stories in my book is about my struggle learning to swim. Despite taking lessons multiple times as an adult, it took years for me to learn how to float. I could swim laps by frantically paddling, but I knew that if I fell into deep water without immediate access to land, I wouldn’t survive. The breakthrough came when I realized that my fear and anger directly prevented me from staying afloat. In a way, I was fighting the water instead of trusting it.
This struggle deepened when a friend, who had learned to swim as a child, tried to teach me in the ocean while we were in Cuba. She hoped the buoyancy of the salty water would help, but as the waves surrounded me, I felt my body resisting. The fear of water felt deeply ingrained, almost like ancestral trauma — a legacy of growing up in South Carolina, where slavery and segregation had historically denied Black people access to swimming pools and other public spaces.
During that lesson, my friend urged me to stop resisting the waves and let the water carry me. She encouraged me to submit to the ocean’s natural rhythm instead of trying to control it. This moment helped me understand power in a new way — not as something to conquer or own, but as something to align with and trust. True power flows through us when we let go of control and learn to work with the forces around us.
This story ties into the central theme of my book: how systemic oppression and fear are rooted in our collective misunderstanding of power. Society teaches us to dominate, resist, and control, but real transformation comes from trust, surrender, and vulnerability. Learning to float taught me that strength lies not in fighting against life but in trusting its flow. This shift — from fear to trust, from control to surrender — is the kind of transformation that can heal both individuals and society.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
The “aha moment” that led me to bring my message to the world wasn’t a single event but a series of realizations spanning over a lifetime. But, I will condense it to a decade. It’s a bit of a winding road, so bear with me.
I began writing this book when I was 21, not fully realizing what it would become. By my late twenties, I found myself finishing it during a severe depressive episode. At the time, I was grappling with unemployment after a long bout of underemployment — a reflection of systemic sexism and racism. Despite being highly qualified and experienced, I was often hired at lower levels and paid significantly less than White peers with fewer credentials. I watched as they built stable lives and families while my own faith in myself and my ability to thrive steadily eroded.
The weight of these experiences became unbearable as I started to get seriously ill. It wasn’t just the financial and professional inequities — it was the constant burden of protecting myself from White people’s discomfort with my truth. Speaking openly about my struggles threatened their sense of self as “good” people, and their fear of losing that image of themselves often felt more dangerous than the suffering I endured.
The realization that this dynamic wasn’t unique to me but part of a broader systemic pattern came sharply into focus during my work as a Zen Buddhist chaplain in hospitals and hospices. I saw the connection between death and marginalization most clearly with lower-income Black families, where generational inequities and grief were deeply embedded in their narratives. I began to understand how fear of loss — whether it’s the loss of privilege, identity, or security — drove White staff members to make decisions that had life-or-death consequences for Black women and children.
When I realized I was writing this book — a decade after I started — I felt like I was grieving my own life. It was as though I’d reached a point where I could see the world’s script for me, one rooted in limitation and elimination, but I refused to accept it. Writing was an act of self-love. Like Tupac’s “Runnin’ (Dying to Live),” I found myself asking, “Why am I fighting to live if I’m just living to fight? Why am I trying to see when there ain’t nothing in sight? Why am I trying to give when no one gives me a try? Why am I dying to live if I’m just living to die?” The book was my way of answering those questions for myself — like an echo, reminding me that I was still alive, even when it felt like no one else could see me.
In weaving together my narrative with the collective stories of grief and systemic harm, I began to see how these patterns are not just personal — they are structural, historical, and deeply human. I started eeling less alone.
My book became a way to shine a light on these truths and to offer a path toward transformation, one rooted in addressing grief and fear of loss rather than avoiding them.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
l collaborated with a hospital because their predominantly White staff wanted to improve how they supported Black and Brown patients through grief, aiming to bridge empathy gaps and ensure more equitable care.
In response, I proposed a workshop focused on how the staff’s relationship with grief and fear of loss affects their ability to empathize with and support marginalized communities, particularly Black communities. The core idea was to help participants understand that the fear of making mistakes — of saying or doing the wrong thing when interacting with BIPOC patients — often stems from deeper grief. This grief could be related to fears of losing connection, reputation, or self-worth.
One individual in the group, a seasoned healthcare worker with years of experience, shared how they had always struggled with engaging deeply in conversations about race and grief. They admitted feeling paralyzed by the fear of not knowing the “right” thing to say to patients from marginalized communities, worried that any misstep might cause harm. Through the workshop, this person began to recognize that their fear wasn’t just about saying the wrong thing — it was rooted in their unresolved grief around issues of race, privilege, and loss.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
When interpersonal or societal injustices arise, the call for accountability is often loud and urgent. Yet, if I were to ask most people what accountability truly means, the response would likely be unclear. More often than not, people aren’t seeking accountability or restoration — they’re seeking retribution. They want to see someone suffer, believing that suffering will somehow make amends. But no punishment will ever feel like enough. The desire to tear someone down often comes from a place of deep discomfort — other people’s mistakes act as mirrors, reflecting the parts of ourselves we struggle to accept.
I’ve learned that what I resist in others often reveals what I resist in myself. By cultivating self-awareness around these patterns, we can move toward self-acceptance, accountability, and ultimately, a greater responsibility to each other and society.
My call is for individuals–the foundation of community and society–to shift how they approach fear of loss, grief, and the concept of accountability. Here are a few examples of how to do that:
- Cultivate Self-Awareness: Much of the harm we perpetuate stems from unaddressed grief and fear of loss. Mindfulness helps us recognize the sources of our internal distress. This self-awareness is the foundation for breaking cycles of harm.
- Embrace Self-Acceptance and Accountability: True accountability begins with self-acceptance. When we resist retribution and focus on restoration, we confront the truth of who and where we are. Accepting ourselves helps us understand that our judgments of others often mirror what we struggle to accept in ourselves. From this place of understanding, accountability becomes a conscious, internal process where we choose how to act and who we want to be.
- Act with Responsibility for Societal Good: Self-awareness and accountability are internal processes. Responsibility transforms our self-awareness and accountability into external action. Is fear of loss driving our actions or informing them? By consciously choosing actions rooted in self-awareness and accountability, we can act in ways that minimize harm, creating a more just and compassionate world.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
My definition of leadership aligns more with support. I take my cues from the people I support, allowing them to navigate while I drive, until they inform me of their arrival. When they are ready, they take the wheel.
Leadership is about supporting people to live in alignment with their authentic selves. One way I do this is by showing up authentically in my relationships, creating the space for others to embrace every aspect of themselves, including the emotions that often carry shame.
Everything in life is about relationships — whether it’s with other people, the environment, or even something as simple as sitting in a chair. The chair supports us, and we, in turn, trust it to hold our weight. Leadership functions similarly: it’s about creating trust and mutual support, allowing others to feel secure enough to be themselves.
For example, as a Buddhist chaplain, I often encounter people during some of the most difficult moments of their lives, such as the immediate aftermath of a loved one’s death. In these moments, leadership becomes about guiding others as they navigate a fractured relationship — shifting from a connection with the living to one with the memory of the deceased. This transition leaves a void that grief fills, often accompanied by complex emotions like anger.
Anger, in particular, can be challenging. I’ve worked with people who’ve hit walls, yelled, or said hurtful things to me. While these actions aren’t about me personally, my role is to support them in processing their emotions and re-enter “right relationship” — with themselves and with others. In Buddhism, the precepts guide us toward this balance, much like the Ten Commandments in other traditions. In other words, the Precepts and Ten Commandments are all guidelines on how to have healthy relationships although many people tragically use religion as a means to destroy connection.
For example, allowing someone to vent anger through hitting a wall (if it’s not harmful to others) can be a healthy expression of that emotion. However, directing rudeness or aggression at me is not a healthy expression. It can fracture relationships and create unhealthy patterns. I am not a professional punching bag, nor is my role to pacify or “fix” someone’s grief with temporary comforts that dishonor the depth of their loss.
Leadership in this context can mean making hard choices, like stepping away from disrespectful behavior. Walking away isn’t about punishment — it’s about giving the other person an opportunity to sit with themselves, reflect, and recognize healthier behavior patterns. This process can help bring them back into alignment with their authentic self. It’s not guaranteed, of course; not everyone chooses to take that opportunity.
Ultimately, leadership is about creating space for people to reconnect with themselves while maintaining integrity in our actions.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started” and Why?
1. You don’t have to be perfect.
Perfectionism often accompanies high achievement, and it can be paralyzing. When I first began writing and speaking, I would obsessively revise the same paragraphs, stalling my progress because I feared imperfection. It’s important to focus on quality. But in the words of a graduate school mentor, sometimes it’s “better done than good.”
2. It’s okay to live without constant revelation.
I used to feel pressure to extract meaning and insight from every experience, turning my life into a series of profound lessons to share. When my book first came out, this expectation was amplified by peers urging me to grow my Instagram following and produce a steady stream of content. But this approach felt inauthentic and exhausting. It taught me to set my own standards for showing up and sharing. Living without constant revelation allows me to simply be present, which is often more powerful than any curated insight.
3. Strive to be your own “problematic fave.”
People tend to idealize public figures, projecting their aspirations onto them. But when that illusion shatters, it’s often met with disappointment or resentment. Early on, I felt pressure to maintain an unblemished image. Then I realized the importance of self-awareness and accountability. Instead of focusing on others’ flaws, I began embracing my own humanity. By doing so, I’ve learned to accept my mistakes, which is not the same as being complacent, becoming my own “problematic fave.”
4. Stop searching for redemption in others.
As an extension of number three, I often looked to others to embody the qualities I aspired to. I placed people I admired on a pedestall, and when they fell short, I felt betrayed. For example, I had a teacher who was well-known and well-respected, but I did not agree with a lot of her actions. I felt hurt and disappointed. Over time, I learned to reflect on what drew me to that person and recognize the seeds of ego and power within myself. This practice of introspection has helped me stop searching for redemption in others and find peace within myself.
5. The world will always need more than I can ever be — so just be.
As someone invested in social transformation, I often felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the work. Early in my career, I developed chronic insomnia because my mind raced with everything that needed to be done. I believed I could somehow “fix” centuries-old systems of injustice. Accepting that it’s not my sole responsibility to change the world (and the idea that it was came from ego) allowed me to let go of that burden. I realized my role is to contribute what I can while prioritizing rest and sustainability. Deciding who and how I choose to be is doing enough.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
We say a chant at the end of evening meditation in the Soto Zen tradition called the Evening Gatha. It goes: ‘Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.’ — Ehei Dogen
I believe the quote speaks for itself.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I’d love to meet Jane Fonda. Ageism and issues related to dementia are deeply personal to me as a Buddhist chaplain. I was raised by my grandmother, great-aunts, and even my great-great-great aunt, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 106. Growing up surrounded by these incredible women gave me a profound appreciation for the elderly, especially those navigating dementia.
Grace and Frankie felt like a tribute to these experiences. I deeply respect Jane’s work, both on-screen and off.
For years, I’ve dreamed of starting a project specifically for African-Americans impacted by dementia, and I imagine she could offer incredible insight or inspiration.
Plus, she’s hilarious and has good sense in a world full of foolishness.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Feel free to follow me on Instagram @breeshiawade or visit my website breeshiawade.com
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Breeshia Wade Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.