but did it?
did it really start with september 11?
it feels right to say it started then, it feels like what we all agree with. everything was moving along, and then september 11 happened. and then the world stopped and nothing was the same again.
but when i dig around under the grief, under the twisted memories and through the barricaded chest, i see other things. and i wonder, did it start there? or did it start some place else? some place less obvious?
like the time i lost my job? and went a year without work and couldn’t afford to clothe my children? or maybe it was the time my father told me i might have to quit school to work, the family was having a hard time staying afloat. my education would be the price paid for survival. or maybe it was the time i was sexually assaulted, and i found out that people were calling me a liar at work. i had no idea at that time that anybody even knew.
or maybe it was my first christmas after being kicked out by my parents, when i realized really and truly for the first time what it meant to be alone. or the first time i was called a slut while taking a walk, or the first time i couldn’t afford food or the first time i was assaulted at job that i couldn’t afford to quit. or maybe it’s the bigger picture. and it’s the first time a border was constructed or the first time a bullet penetrated that border or maybe it was when hitler was born or that time that some man whose name nobody knows shot some important person that nobody heard of and started the war to end all wars that hasnt ended yet.
or maybe it started with capitalism or mercantilism or the first time a priest called an indigenous person a savage. or maybe it started with the catholic church. or jesus. or the person who figured out how to mold steel into shackles that fit around even the slender arms of a small child not just her mother. or maybe it was the first time a man hit a woman.
does anybody know when this all started? when did that first domino get blasted away, starting the chain of explosions that have never stopped, like it was all meant to be? like there was just no other way for this story to be told?
does it really matter? if we figure out when all this started, will we be able to figure out how to end it? or is the desperate need to put a date on it all, to find a time when it wasn’t like this, more of a way to control the chaos? to make sense of the utterly incomprehensible?
how many religions, writers, artists, have tried to make sense of the incomprehensible? is there a reason we live through this? or are we all fodder for the war machine?
does it mean anything to be human?
i cling to the cold loneliness settled at the bottom of my stomach.
to feel, even something awful,
is to be alive.
up early that day, gritty eyes torn open by rambunctious toddler jumping and laughing on my bed. the child that never sleeps, joyful with life.
flipping on howard stern, i groan and creak my way out of bed. pregnant again, my body, heavy with life, is not so joyful as the toddler, who is already prattling in the cupboards of the kitchen, her job with me, finished.
as i brush my teeth, the rumbly voice of howard mentions that a plane crashed into the world trade center. but planes have crashed into the trade center before. nobody is worried. i spit the toothpaste into the sink.
i am in the kitchen cooking breakfast when the phone rings. i almost dont hear it because the toddler is banging pans against the floor and screaming with laughter. her lips are red and her curls bob. i make it to the phone on the third ring.
and that’s when it starts.
turn on the TV, says the frantic voice on the other line.
why? I ask.
just do it! screams the voice.
i remember to turn off the stove before i cross the small kitchen into the living room and turn on the TV.
the screen burns with fire, deep billowing smoke furls into the perfect blue day.
howard stern’s voice is suddenly crystal clear from the back room. they are debating if they should shut the show down. there more planes and we’re under attack and nobody knows what’s going on and my baby’s screaming and i can’t hear anything else.
and then the first building collapses and then the next and i feel my feet fall out from underneath me and my hands go to my belly and life and death and life and death and life and death swirl and mix and then there is nothing and everything and black dust blankets the earth that somehow keeps right on spinning even tho the world has stopped.
i pray
for all of us that are scared
for all of us that are lonely
for all of us that don’t know what to do
that can’t get up, not even one more time
for all of us
that are hurting right now.
for all of those poor mothers
and those poor children, motherless.
for all of the fathers
for all those who are struggling
compassion.
i am with you. to help you bear this burden.
i open my eyes
i find myself
in a field of corn. sacred maiz
our mother.
all of us that are lonely. blood drips into corn,
into life.
pray for us now, holy mother, in the hour of our death…
this ache has not gone away.
a family of deer peeks out
through dusk.
they feast on corn, our mother’s
gift.
it is the full buck moon tonight. announcing
the season of the deer’s growth.
i dont know what to do about any of this. the ache tears at my throat, my heart, and most days i feel like i can’t get up, not even one more time. 40 years of this is enough.
and i am a lucky one.
so far. one kid texts me she loves me. the other asks me what’s for dinner.
i am terrified for them. the only thing that calms me
are the whispers of the corn, our sacred mother-
to suffer is to be alive.
share this burden.
compassion.
the family of deer turn as one
fly into the woods that wrap around the field.
i watch them until they disappear, then turn back to the field
to find the moon, full
glowing
on the green stalks
dancing with with fireflies, like twinkly lights.
blood has given birth
to life. our ancestors
whisper,
we are here.
we will bear this burden
with you.
holy mother, pray for us now and in the hour of our deaths-
The other day I heard a gossip show host declare that one of Glenn Frey’s friends ‘still wasn’t over Glenn’s death.’ As the over-exaggerated shock of headline gossip news dripped from the host’s voice, I knew I was supposed to be feeling shock, maybe sympathy. But mostly shock. How could this man still be mourning for Frey? After all this time? I was not supposed to remember that Glenn Frey only died in January.
This idea that death goes away, that it stops hurting after awhile, that it is supposed to stop hurting, is pervasive in US culture. When a (not very close) relative died, my job at the time graciously gave me three days off. By the time the funeral and burial and wake and family dinner (and subsequent family fight) finally all wrapped up, I needed to take two more days off just to recover from it all. I wondered what people do when close family like parents or a spouse dies. How do you bury a loved one in three days? Do you need to take vacation days if you can’t squeeze dying into three days? What happens if you don’t have any vacation days left?
A dear friend of mine died five years ago this past April. She was the same age when she died that I am now. In our last conversation, she tried to tell me that she was dying and that it wouldn’t be much longer. But I had never had to look death in the eyes before, so I had no idea what she was trying to do. She said she was sick again, I said well thank God they found it before it was out of control, she paused, I said I love you, she said she had to go. My body flinches whenever I think about it. How I wish I could’ve been there for her. How I wish.
Death doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with your regrets. And somehow manage to go on living in a world where your loved one isn’t there.
***
What would your Prince tribute concert look like? What would you wear? What would your stage look like? What songs would you play? Who would be on stage with you?
The answers to these questions work their way out slowly. Friends and I share a thought here, a concept there. We build on each other’s musings. A friend says her outfit would be filmy, ethereal. Like what she know’s Prince is wearing in heaven. I follow up later that he’d be like the goddess Athena, with a bow and arrow to protect and defend musicians from unscrupulous music corporations. Neither of us is sure who says that the arrow would be shaped in his symbol. But we both know it is the plain truth. Prince is in heaven, and he has a bow and arrow. And his arrow is the Prince symbol.
We laugh a lot contemplating our tribute stage. We finally decide there’s no one perfect tribute outfit–we’d have to have multiple costume changes, just as Prince did in his performances.
Because there is no one look that encapsulates Prince. No one single style that pulls together almost 40 years of artistic theorizing, creativity, and work. People have tried to force Prince to be one single thing. Madonna is, sadly, not the only artist that tried to get away with some tired Purple Rain homage. It’s easy to understand that people have their personal favorite Prince era and it’s easy to understand why Purple Rain is the favorite era of so many.
But at the same time, what responsibility do we have to Prince as an artist? What responsibility do we have to 40 years worth of work? What responsibility do we have to a worker that may have sacrificed his body’s well being in the name of his work?
***
When Prince’s death was confirmed, I immediately pulled up his music, began listening and crying, crying and listening. Remembering. It was what I needed at the time.
But one friend felt overwhelmed by the flood of ‘remembrances’ when she’d only just begun to grasp that Prince was gone. She said she needed everything to slow down. Half of her tears came from being unable to accept what everybody else seemed to accept so easily.
Another friend said they loved seeing all of Prince’s music played on MTV, but that it was also painful. Once people got ‘over’ the shocking news, you’d never hear his music on the radio or tv again. The music would be gone, this friend said.
I couldn’t imagine that my friend’s words could possibly be true. There’s no way that Prince’s music would stop being played. Didn’t his death just prove how much we all loved him? How we couldn’t live without his music? I knew his music wouldn’t be played on a 24 hour loop, but to not be played at all? Unimaginable.
But my friend was right. There was a week of non-stop Prince…and then he was gone. And now you’re lucky to get Red Corvette on the oldies station. MTV has gone back to 16 and Pregnant reruns and eternal commercials.
But now is the time I need to hear those songs. Now, as the shock has worn off and I am finally getting used to the idea that Prince has moved on. Now is the time I need to talk to others. To sit with his music, to reflect on his artistry and skill. Honor his work through theoretical analysis. Reckon with his legacy.
Prince knew and talked about how music corporations took advantage of and even destroyed the careers of black musicians. What I know as a woman of color writer is that pop culture critics and academics have killed just as many careers by refusing to engage with the work of black artists or artists of color.
The desire to understand, the desire to interpret and integrate a piece of artistic work within the realm of ‘culture,’ the desire to ‘frame’ a person/their work so that they might be understood by future generations…this is part of what keeps an artist and their work alive, even after death. It is also what gives artistic work ‘merit’ or ‘value’ in a capitalistic world. If people don’t respect your work, you don’t get paid for it. And what shows more respect than interacting with and deeply thinking about an artist’s work?
A legacy is a “thing handed down by a predecessor.” There is a reason, a purpose, for the lack of critical interaction with the work of black artists and artists of color by the thinkers of pop culture. If no black children or children of color are ‘handed’ the legacy of black artists like Prince, how will they know they must and can take on corporations and to protect their name and work at all costs? How will they know brilliance started with them? How will they know they can do it too?
There is so much work to do in death. And when you’re in shock, it’s hard to face doing that work or even know which work needs to be done. By the time you’ve moved into acceptance and are ready to dig in, everybody else has moved on. Or worse yet, declared you ‘irrelevant.’
It took Eliza Hamilton the rest of her life–fifty years–to compile all of her husband’s letters and testimonies from friends/coworkers and finally get it turned into an analysis that could be handed down. A legacy. Fifty years for a legacy. Fifty years of work. Fifty years of work on Eliza’s part alone that informed the musical about Hamilton. 210 years of work by historians.
What does it mean then, that we’ve moved on from Prince after less than two months?
What does it mean when so few are willing to put in 50 years of work plus 210 years of work for black artists and artists of color?
***
My friend tends towards Prince’s ‘naked fairy on a flower‘ look for her tribute concert outfits. I tend toward his penchant for bold colors. The throbbing red accent on an otherwise drab stage. The burst of orange of the perfectly tailored suit at the Super Bowl. The color that makes you see and appreciate everything else all around it.
I love the quality of contrast of his outfits, the fine minimalist lines the contrast creates. But I love more that in the contrast of bold choices, you see the choice. You see that Prince made the choices that lead to the moment of orange bursting through rainstorms and television. You see that he made the choice to draw attention to himself without disrespecting the person he played with.
When the choices are visible, so to becomes the person who made them. I imagine Prince to be thoughtful. Playful. I see the way the red of his hat perfectly accents the red of the stage behind him, and I imagine he was probably a diva, like many stars are. Insisting on perfection. But I also imagine that he had a sense of purity about that perfection. A desire to make something beautiful, if only for a set worth of music. Perfection so that others can experience beauty. Because even everyday people have the right to experience beauty.
His early outfits where he shows off his glorious butt cheeks amid laced yellow, or where he accents his scantily clad nether regions with a diamond dew drop chain show the same thing. Even amid what was surely a desire to shock, to cause fear (a man that is willing to dress like we expect women to?), there is the playfulness, the beauty. A willingness to care about the details.
It’s easy to go for the shock and not care if people say they hate your shit. Our culture thrives on shock. The person creating the shock doesn’t need to actually care about his work because the work isn’t the point. The shock is.
But when you care about the details, you show care for what you are working on. You show it’s the work that’s the point. When you care about the the work, it’s then taking a chance to put your work out there for others to see and have opinions on. It’s taking a chance that nobody will like what you made the choice to create.
And it’s even harder to take a chance and put your work out there when you can get blasted as a ‘fag’ or ‘disgusting’ or ‘indecent’ or ‘pussy’ or any other of the multitudes of names we have for men who wear dew drop diamonds lightly embedded in the fringe of their pubic hair.
What risks Prince took. What choices he made. Over and over and over again for 40 years.
Fearless.
***
Death doesn’t just go away.
Another friend of mine was killed in a car crash two years ago. She was the sort of person that noticed the choices people make. She was the only one who noticed when I started wearing dresses. I was going through midlife exploration of Self and wanted to try something different. So I bought a few cute spring dresses at Target and did my hair up and sucked myself up into some Spanx. I felt uncomfortable and awkward more often than not, but I didn’t think anybody really noticed what I was doing, so I kept experimenting. But one day my friend told me that my entire aura had changed, and I was walking around looking sexy as hell in these dresses she’d never seen me wear. It got easier for me after that, to wear those dresses.
I never got to tell her how much I appreciated her words. I never got to tell her goodbye either. She was hit by a guy who was driving and texting one day, and I never got to see her after that. I’ve learned to live with those regrets. But I still struggle to live in a world where she is not here.
Big things, like the anniversary of her death, bring tears. But more often, it’s the little moments like when you hear a song. Or somebody posts a forgotten video or picture of her they found while cleaning out storage space. Or when you’re eating a grape and you remember the day you laughed for a solid 20 minutes over a joke about grapes with her.
The laughter that twists into a painful ache. Sometimes it lands in the throat. Sometimes in the chest. Then there are the tears that I can’t breath through.
I haven’t deleted the emails of my first friend. But I also haven’t read any of those emails since the day she died. Sometimes I search for unrelated email and an email from her pops up on my screen. Her name slices into me and I can’t breath until I scroll her name off the screen.
Maybe it’s less that you learn to go on living without your loved one, and more you learn to stay alive through grief.
***
Fearless.
It’s what I long to be. But it has taken me a long time, decades, to finally figure out that the fearless I admire is complex. There is the fearlessness of knowing you’re too powerful to fail, like Superman. And then there is the bold burst of color against a drab rainy night. The dew drop diamond against wet skin. The choices you make even though you know you can and probably will fail. Or that even if you don’t fail, nobody will support you and many will make fun of you.
When you make the choice to do it anyway, even when you are filled with fear.
Prince was that kind of fearless. My friends were too. It is what drew me to them, what made me want to be their friend. I still admire the hell out of all of their choices. Their fearless choices that brought out the best in others.
As my friend and I continue to imagine what our Prince tribute concert would look like, we start imagining what fearless choice making would look like in our own lives. Then like newborn kittens with weak heads and barely functioning eyes, we dip that first toe into the milk. We’ve both been taught to not make choices. We’ve both had our choices beaten out of us. Choices can bring devastating consequences in this world.
But to make choices is to become who you want to be. To make choices is to construct your ‘self.’ It is to be human. To be fearless making those choices is to be the best of humanity.
We’re both terrified. But we try anyway.
Fearless.
Fear.
Less.
***
I’ve been writing this essay for a long time. Weeks. Every time I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to say, another person dies. Then another. Then another. And then the mass murder in Orlando.
As I struggled through the day after, I spent a lot of time being appalled at what horrific human beings white supremacy creates. I cried and was angry, cried and was angry some more. I cried and got angry at the same time. By the time I watched the Tonys that night, I was a mess. I cried through most of the broadcast. But something was different. The opening number especially had me crying so hard I was choking on snot and couldn’t get words around the hard knot in my throat.
That could be me,
that could be me,
and that could be a lot of fun.
I went to sleep feeling more soothed, not realizing the soothing came from a cycle broken.
When I woke up the next day, I started to fall right back into that cycle. Crying, anger, crying anger cryinganger. But then I saw it for what it was. A cycle. A cycle imposed upon us all. I remembered the days after 911, the days when we were all so stunned and shaking and crying…and then George Bush told us to get over it. Go shopping. I remember how outraged we all were. What kind of a dick tells grieving people to get over it? To…go shopping??
Of course the answer is everybody. Everybody tells grieving people to move on.
there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting,
but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will
shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the
rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.
affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.
I took a breath.
And then we were at war, and then another war, and things never slowed down again. More war, more bombings, more shootings, more shopping shopping shopping. And then we were just used to it and forgot the olden days when we needed and expected time. Time to go to church and mourn and pray and cry. Time to be with friends. To light candles and build alters. We forgot that it used to be normal to mourn. To be soft. For many of us, we were forced to forget our mourning rituals long before 911. Centuries before. For others, 911 was the slap in the face that kept us down.
But now here we all are. No matter how we got here. We find out horrific news, we cry, we get angry. We demand something ‘be done.’ And then we move on. Even though it doesn’t feel quite right…Even if we didn’t get to spend enough time loving.
The music stops playing.
And we pretend not to notice.
In honor of the victims of murder, terror, white supremacy, toxic masculinity. I notice. In honor of a black man who made 40 years of fearless choices, I notice.
And I choose to take back my mourning, my grief, from war mongers and white supremacists.
I choose to become who I have forgotten to be.
And I do it with the help of my elders, who remind me that loving in the war years isn’t easy.
Loving in the war years.
We are at war. And I chose to love.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.
it starts in my abdomen, the soft whir of incoming waves building until it crashes into my ears.
my hands go to my body and I try to pay attention, try to see the sun from under the waves,
but my body relaxes
and i sink…
***
i went to california recently. and saw the pacific ocean for the first time in my life. as i hiked toward it on that first day in california, i kept hearing a sound–like traffic. like the roar of the freeways that you can’t escape in southeast michigan. semi-trucks crashing across lanes, car tires slapping concrete, the relentless sound digs into your ears, even when you’re inside.
anger shifts into rage as i walk closer to the ocean. i am staying at a former army barracks converted into a national park and just this once, i need to see nature, feel nature, hear nature, without the taint of roaring freeways in the background.
but then i break through the forest i am hiking through and see for it for first time. the huge endless ocean. that’s when i realize that the roar was not coming from the freeways–but from the ocean.
thick rolls of sound crashing into rocks.
on that day…slow. a comfortable rhythm.
my feet easily shift from angry freeway rumble to the relaxed roll of the water.
i don’t stop walking until i am on a large cliff overlooking the entire ocean. i see nothing but water. no land, no people walking on the beach, no military barracks. just me and the ocean.
the sound is everywhere
and i sink…
***
it’s been years since i was suicidal.
but in michigan, things haven’t been going well. i was driving to work the other day, on that freeway that i have a relationship with. i see death almost everyday on this freeway, in the form of animals mostly, but every once in a while, people too. usually you know something horrible happened not because you see it, but because the freeway is backed up for hours. that usually means that whatever accident happened is deemed too grisly for the average person’s eyes and they shut down the freeway entirely until it’s cleaned.
sometimes, though, you see it. maybe the cops/ambulances aren’t on the scene yet. maybe it isn’t quite bad enough to shut everything down. traffic creeps along slowly enough that you can see the traumatized people’s faces as they stand next to obliterated cars, only aware enough to be grateful that they are not the person in the ambulance. you spend the rest of the slow ride into work thinking about things. thinking about life.
i try not to think about my time on the freeway much anymore. i try to respond to fear with sensible responses. leave two hours early so you can go slow. travel in the middle lane so you don’t have to deal with merging cars on the right or out of control trucks on the left. kitty litter in the trunk in case you get stuck. phone charged.
go slow.
one day, as i was driving down the middle lane, i’m in control, i’m in control, i’m in control…
a car coming in the opposite direction flew into the median, flipped completely around from the impact of landing, rolled up the small hill of the median and crashed into the wire fencing on my side of the road. it all moved in slow motion, i could see exactly what was going to happen even as it was happening. it was as the other car crashed into the wire fencing that i was just starting to see that there was no way i could escape the collision, even by going slower.
if it wasn’t for the fence, i would’ve collided head first with the other car. but the fence was there. the fence was there.
once i realized i had escaped, i didn’t pull over, i didn’t call 911 to report the accident. i kept going my “safe’ pace down the middle lane of the freeway. breathing. in. out. in. out.
in.
out.
i am in control
of nothing.
***
it’s been years since i was suicidal. and yet,
as i sink, the water fills me, suffocates me,
i don’t fight.
***
i’m going to be 40 this year. it’s a momentous year, one that can point to my achievements, allow me to take inventory, and make the commitment to live the next 40 years as i haven’t lived the past 40 years, with intentionality.
but my boss started the year off with that talk. the “there is never any easy way to say this….this organization needs to make some changes….” talk. i knew it was coming. i had known for awhile. in a way that somebody always expects things to go wrong knows. i got the email from my boss on a friday, asking if we could meet the upcoming tuesday. i replied sure, and asked “why?” i never got a response.
so i knew. i knew what was going to happen before it happened. i almost hyperventilated as i waited for my turn to get fired (there were three other people fired on that day). i tried to text mr. toast for support–but my fingers were shaking too much. after almost dropping my phone, i gave up. took a deep breath. and walked into a room to face down a table full of board members and bosses.
“there is never any easy way to say this….”
can you be chicana and not have a job? a chicana getting a job is testament to the world that you are no longer a child, no matter how young you are. if you could bring home a paycheck, if you could help provide, you were grown. i’ve had a job since i was 11 years old.
what am i if i don’t have a job? what am i if i was fucking FIRED from my job? who am i allowed to be?
who am i?
***
i suffered for years from severe gallbladder issues. horrible attacks that completely immobilized me, drained me so much that i couldn’t get out of bed for days. after years of suffering, my body suddenly revolted and things got even worse. for three months i threw up everything i ate, had severe attacks constantly, and was mostly unable to get out of bed, even to work.
i finally convinced a doctor to take the damn thing out. i never felt more right about a decision–and yet, as the day drew closer and closer, i felt more and more backed into a corner. i’d be in bed, trying to doze, doing my best to quite my body, only to be awakened by dreams of people choking me, using my blankets to smother me. one day, the dreams were so bad, i finally forced myself out of bed and wandered around the house aimlessly, looking for something, anything, to distract me.
i found mr. toast working out in the garden.
he said hey as i walked to him and kept working.
i stood in front of him and made him stop.
suddenly, everything came hurling out. i just need to tell you in case i die from this surgery that i love you that i really love you and that i’ve loved you all these years even though i never really thought i did but i do and i need you to know that, to really KNOW that in case i die. i love you. i mean, i really really love you. i’ve never loved anybody else. just you.
he stood there for a minute and then smiled. i know you love me.
but i stopped him. no, i mean i REALLY love you. i’m not just saying it.
he paused. amused. so you mean you’ve just been saying it all these years?
yes, that’s what i mean. but i didn’t realize that i wasn’t actually just saying it, that i actually MEANT it. i really do love you. and i need you to know this. in case i die.
he laughed. and pulled me into his chest. his warm sweaty chest, that has held our crying babies for hours at a time, that i can perfectly snuggle my body into when he hugs me, my head resting in the curve of his neck, my body wrapped completely by his arms.
i know you’ve always loved me, bfp.
i needed you to know. in case i die.
he is kissing my face, my hair, my lips. you’re not going to die. and i love you too. i’ve always loved you.
the sky is blue. the warm air twists around us, holding us together.
i love you.
there is nothing like potential death to make a person brave.
***
the water floods my chest, i can’t breath.
i don’t fight it.
***
i don’t want to die. i’ve never wanted to die. even when i was suicidal.
but what is the alternative? it is near impossible to live life without love, without having been loved. i read this book by dr. gabor mate where he gave a case description of a man who doctors found had a serious illness. life threatening, but the guy definitely had a good chance. the guy, however, didn’t have a strong support team, didn’t feel like he was worth fighting for. so even after church members talked to him and his doctors talked to him and everybody talked to him and told him he had a really good chance of survival–the guy just shook his head. refused to fight, and eventually died. mate was using this story to talk about support systems and how having them can really help improve your chances of getting through a serious illness.
i took it as a testimonio. one that i could’ve written. what is the use of fighting, when there’s nothing to fight for?
i was that guy, and i didn’t even know it. a tale of two city’s unloved sydney carton. the lonely drunkard who was smart enough (hurt enough?) to know that it just didn’t make sense that the pure innocent lucie could love him. it didn’t make sense that anybody could love him. so he switches himself with a man about to be killed by a mob. sydney will be killed in his stead. the man sydney saves is the man who could be loved. the man who was dearly loved. who was not taking up space.
sydney does not send himself off to die from a sense of martyrdom (i will die so others can live!), but because there’s no reason to live. how could you be arrogant enough to take up space when you could never possibly be loved?
as a small child, i’d play make-believe and i was a beautiful and kind hearted girl who could see the good in sydney. so i loved him. and i’d plead with him to live, to please please live. eventually he’d be energized by my love, and i’d help him escape and we’d live happily ever after.
at some point, as i got older, i couldn’t manage to convince sydney that i loved him, even in my imagination. he’d look up at me sadly, shake his head, and turn away. eventually, i just stopped playing make believe. even my imagination couldn’t overcome reality.
***
water is flooding into my mouth, filling my chest. i can only see watery darkness.
i am safe.
***
i don’t want to die. i never wanted to die, even when i was suicidal.
and that’s why when i read that case study in that book that i can’t even remember the title of, i did not look away from the mirror. i studied what i saw for hours. shocked, not at the willingness to die, but at the comfort. the utter ease of drowning. the way i moved in it, as if with an old friend. no need to talk, no need to explain. understanding each other.
all these years, i thought the ease of my relationship with death came from a buddhist sense of resignation: death is inevitable. or maybe it was acceptance of my depression. depressed people are ok with dying. depressed people don’t want to die, but they can’t help themselves. they just have to one day, when it becomes too much.
as it turns out, i did not really have a relationship with death at all. lack of value was who i had formed the real relationship with. it made sense that nobody would want me in this world, that i wouldn’t want myself in this world. i stopped noticing how much sense it made, and it just became the norm. hegemony played out in my own body. complete and utter submission to “valueless.”
valueless wrapped itself around me, comforted me when things got hard. it makes sense that i messed that all up, i’m a fucked up worthless piece of shit, right? it makes sense that i don’t get recognition for work done, other people who work harder/are better than me deserve it more. who am i? and why should it matter that i get nothing? why *should* i get something?
i looked long and hard at all those thoughts. and i started to realize something. so much of my writing up until that point had actually verbalized all those thoughts and tried to reconcile, conquer, own, destroy, evaporate, make friends with, and control those thoughts– practically everything i had ever written in the past 10 years, if i was honest with myself.
and the more and more i thought about it, even when i moved outside of my blogging and into my school essays or my short stories or the letters i used to handwrite as a child–it was all the same thing. the invisible relationship that i thought i had never really noticed was actually a life long battle that i have been trying to detangle myself from since i was a small child.
somewhere in me, there was somebody who was actually fighting. somebody who kept pushing. somebody who was inside the prison, not sitting next to me, but sitting IN me. somebody who wouldn’t let go. somebody who, even in the worst of times, kept whispering–
but…but…where did you get the idea that worthless people don’t deserve life?
but…why does screwing that one thing up mean you’re worthless?
but…who decided you were worthless anyway?
but…why do you have to believe it?
somewhere in me (buddhists tell me it is my true self, the inner buddha that is in all of us), there was somebody who always knew better. and fought back through writing. i didn’t really understand that there was a fight going on. i couldn’t see it. maybe it was that i didn’t want to. because then i would have to take sides.
i never wanted to die, even when i was suicidal.
what i never knew was that i was actually suicidal because i never wanted to die.
and i thought that was the only choice i had.
reading the story of the man who thought his only choice was to die, because he was alone, worthless, valueless, i saw clearly that he was wrong. i saw this, because for the first time, somebody who had no vested interest in my own battle pointed it out. i believed dr. mate, because he never claimed to love what i knew to be unloveable. that’s the cruel irony of it all. those of us fighting this life long battle with “valueless”? we would never in a million years think anybody else didn’t have the right to live. we would never talk to anybody else the way we talk to ourselves. we would adamently stand up for the person being assaulted by the words and judgement that we inflict on ourselves. i have gotten into physical fights with men who treat women the way that i treated myself. i would destroy any human being who talked to my children the way i talked to myself.
so it makes sense that the time i finally paused, stopped, sat down and studied the mirror up in my face was the time when a person was pointing out my own actions in somebody else. when the person who was pointing out my own actions never claimed to love what i knew to be unloveable.
i still think about the man from dr. mate’s book. i am very defensive of him. i don’t want anybody to think that he was “stupid” for just “letting” himself die. that this about needing to “get a more positive attitude.” or “if you just believe in yourself.” or “if you would get out of the house more.” or any of the crap people who don’t know what is going on try to “help” with. i don’t know if what he (i) have is depression. i could make a strong case that it’s actually a bad case of oppression. but whatever it is, whatever this battle is about, “being more positive” or “believing in yourself” is not going to win it.
but because of him, i am not hopeless. something will win this battle, because now i know what is going on. for the first time, i believe this truth more than i believe the logic of “valueless.”
something will win this war.
and i will be there to see it done.
***
my dreams are shifting. i no longer want to be fearless or even brave. because now i know that they aren’t really the point. i want what others know, without question. without even noticing it. hegemony taking over their bodies. they are loved. of *course* they are loved. it is natural and makes SENSE that somebody loves them. hegemonic love. it’s ok to try new things and go new places and not be perfect and face down life with or without fear–because you are loved.
it’s ok to be happy, it’s ok to put your fists down, it’s ok to lay next to your life long loving partner who has been with you through all the war years, and not worry that he’s just faking it or there because of some mistake.
it’s ok to just relax. rest your hand on his alive beating heart, breath deep.
maybe it’s even ok to start itching back around that idea that formed so many years ago, that faulty logic. maybe it’s possible to love somebody like me. maybe loving somebody like me isn’t such an impossible concept. maybe…maybe.
“maybe” holds all the possibilities i have never imagined before.
***
in california, i read some of my writing out loud for the first time. i spent the whole time in california feeling awkward and alone and too afraid to say much of anything to anybody. i was still struggling with my health issues and i felt ill most of the time. so old and out of place among a group of young brilliant activists. it’s hard to be an introvert surrounded by extroverts–it’s near impossible to deal with social anxiety around people who all want to do “get to know you” activities into the middle of the night.
but on one night–the night where they did “open mic,” i decided to read something i had written. something about dancing.
that night after my kids got home, we started watching the opera Carmen. It’s a catchy opera that is a lot more accessible than other operas are, but even so, they both went upstairs after a while. I was ok with that, because as soon as they went upstairs, i got up—and at first just paced around for a while—but eventually, that evil little monkey thief took over. and i started to dance. i swirled and twirled and practiced holding my arms just so while looking in the mirror. i thought i was being quiet—but in that way that kids always do, within about 6 minutes they were back downstairs asking incessantly, what are you doing, what was that noise, why are you doing that, what is going on, i thought i heard something, what are you doing?
i stopped at first, and started to tell them to mind their own business—but then my body took over. that body that is the universe. that universe that i am learning to trust. and next thing you know, i was dancing.
when i was done, people stood and cheered for me. women surrounded me and hugged me. there were tears and love and laughter. it wasn’t that i was exceptionally moving, a writer above all others. it was that kind people knew i didn’t like being the center of attention and were genuinely rooting for me. it was that in that place, for once in my life, i decided i didn’t need to have both fists up worrying about what could happen. i didn’t need to worry about if i was taking up space i didn’t deserve to be in.
i deserve to be here.
my fists go down.
and i am alive.
***
i am standing at the top of a small cliff at the end of the world. the silvery grey ocean flutters in front of me, the sun dips into the water. the waves roll into me, roll into my abdomen, my ears, my cells. i spread my arms and allow myself to fall from the hill into the water, into the sun.
the universe i am learning to trust.
this body that is the universe.
my face breaks through the water,
i say hello
to the seagull that floats
next to me.
***
i am back from california and i am in his arms. i breathe in the smell of his chest, savor the heat radiating from his alive body. i am on top of him and waves are crashing. i have never seen him before this moment, never noticed so much about him. the way his face softens with (could it be?) love when he watches me, the way his calloused worker hands that have changed diapers and cleaned up my vomit hold me, won’t let me go. the rhythm rocks in my ears, flows through my body. i have never seen him before. in all these years, i never knew that he loved me. i never knew.
he is in me and through me and he knows how comfortable it feels to me to drown. but he pulls me up anyway. rubs the muscles in my chest, opens my lungs. so i can breath.
there are warm blue kisses and our breath in the sun and mr. toast whispering.
It’s been a long exasperating life I’ve lead for the past few weeks.
Chronic illness has really kicked my butt. There are days I can hardly move, but most days amount to just enough energy to get my work done and then come home and collapse. It’s been really frustrating for me, as I’ve really seen big improvement on the quality of ‘normal’ I live. To have ‘normal’ downgraded, well it’s been discouraging to say the least.
This time of struggling with chronic illness has coincided with a discouraging time professionally. I got asked to write an article on Flint recently, and I agreed. It was a complete thrill, I’ve long tried to break into the paid writing world. This would be a nice easy step. It wouldn’t be a difficult article. It wouldn’t be theoretical or making an argument. Just a short essay that explained the latest updates on the Flint water crisis for people who knew of situation but weren’t deeply involved. Easy peasy.
Easy peasy. Except–after I wrote my very best article and got the edits back, every single solitary thing I wrote except the opening paragraph was struck out.
I am very proud of myself for not sobbing, giving up, or moving on right at that point. Writers are a sensitive lot. Which is a really bad thing when the industry of writing is built on rejection. Most writers can pull out big files of rejection letters and have horror stories of sitting through workshops built on deconstructing everything about their writing. To be a successful writer, you must spend time thickening up your flaky pie crust skin into heavily calloused leather.
So I’ve done a lot of work on on myself. On handling ‘rejection’ in a way that doesn’t completely tear myself down. On taking ‘critique’ and turning it into my next fantastic essay. I was proud of myself when I didn’t break down or freak out or even complain to my W* after getting that heavily edited article back. I went out for a walk and came back feeling refreshed and relaxed. And I got right back to it. Rewriting, reworking, researching. Edit edit edit. Snip, tuck, move, insert.
Then I got another email. After consideration, it was decided the header needed to go too. I felt the doubt trying to find a crack to slip in through, but I pushed it aside and kept writing. Writing my very best. And after a few days, I felt happy with what I had and sent a clean shiny completely new article back in.
I got the edits back a few hours later–and this time, the entire article was struck through. Even the replaced opening paragraph was virtually unreadable under the dark red strikethrough.
This time, I cried. I may or may not have even helplessly fallen on the bed with my swoon handkerchief. I am a writer. I have a Master’s degree in writing. I tweet entire articles about Flint in an hour. I’ve been writing for decades. And yet, here I am, not able to even able to write a simple article giving simple updates about a city I love in a state I adore.
To make matters even worse? This write/send in/get back full strike through article cycle kept going for another week. Finally it was the due date and I couldn’t see straight and I sent in my final copy. I felt a sense of relief that it was finally done and completely convinced that I had worked so hard and so well that I surely would finally get the article/byline that I deserved.
But when I got the final copy, I didn’t even recognize my article. It had virtually been rewritten by editors. All that work, worthless. All that work, just not good enough.
In the middle of this completely demoralizing nonsense, tax season rolled around. My other job, the one that supports me, is contract work. Which means that I have a lot of freedom to do my work, and it’s work that I love. But it’s been one tribulation after another. First, because of bureaucracy, I didn’t get paid for over a year. Then, when I finally did get paid, I was so far behind on things, I prioritized keeping the lights on over paying taxes. A stupid mistake. Because sitting in the middle of chronic illness flare up, completely demoralized as a writer–I found out that I owe thousands in taxes. Thankfully, I was able to set up payments. But I’ll be paying for three years for this simple, stupid mistake that I pretty much didn’t really have a choice but to make.
And then the cherry on the pie of injustice–I’ll be paying for decades for making the simple stupid mistake of going to university. And I know this because yes, during all this drama, the school loan people caught me. And set me up on payments that will last well into my social security years. Which they informed me that if I don’t pay, they will garnish my social security.
****long protracted sigh****
I could say a whole bunch about what it means to be a woman of color business owner that doesn’t come from money, what it means to be chronically ill and dealing with guaranteed money stress for the next 30 years at least, or just being an experienced writer that can’t manage a 500 word ‘update’ article.
But at this point, the whole thing is just so ridiculous, all I can do is laugh. I am an experienced enough writer that I now have a pretty decent rejection story to tell. I didn’t just get my rejection letter like everybody else–I got the same article rejected by the same people countless times. And then they didn’t even print the final copy, but rejected it again and just wrote their own article. Top that one, my writer friends.
The good news is that I’ve been practicing a lot of herbalism during this time as well. Herbalism is the one thing that has helped with my chronic illness when nothing else has. Knowing that there are herbs that can help, that have helped eons of people in before me, makes me feel connected to humanity even if I’m stuck at home in bed. Other people have struggled with what I struggle with. On bad days, I send them prayers. And it helps, it really does.
I’ve also done a lot of reading. Including a fascinating book recommended to me about ‘whiteness’–The History of White People. I am working on an article about white people…an effort to continue developing my decade of work on the subject. I also have an article that I finished a long time ago, but I’ve since revisited and am in the middle of editing. I will make the original article available shortly.
And of course, there’s Prince. And everything I want to say about the artist that had one of the biggest influences on my life.
I am in the upswing. Life hits hard, and then life releases. And you get just a few moments to recover. Sometimes if you’re lucky, you get a few days or even weeks. I am getting better at recovering more quickly.
And I am happy to finally see that this is all I can ask of myself.
Ever since the Flint water crisis began, lead poisoning has been a top news story in national media. Most know the story of Flint’s water crisis by now. Flint was assigned an emergency manager that eliminated most democratic checks and balances in the city, including the power of the city council and mayor. The emergency manager then decided to change Flint’s water source. Changing the water source caused an erosion in the water pipes throughout the city, which in turn, caused the lead in the pipes to contaminate the water. Flint residents have been unable to drink water out of their pipes for the past two years.
Many people have asked what they can do to help the people of Flint. And rightfully, the top response has been ‘send water or money for water.’ But as the crisis of water access is being dealt with, more people are starting to wonder about how to help people suffering from poisoning. While the effects of lead poisoning are permanent, Doctor Hanna-Attisha, the doctor that wrote the report that made the increase in lead poisoning levels major news, has repeatedly pointed out that nutritious food is an excellent way to minimize the impact that lead poisoning can have on a body.
In food insecure regions that deal with high poverty, people very often count on high calorie/low nutrition food like fast food or gas station food to feed themselves. While the food is low in nutritional quality, the high calorie count can make living on one meal a day much easier. And very often the cheap cost of the food means that one meal a day can be flipped into two or even three meals. The problem is that those low nutrition foods often lead to some of the very same problems that lead poisoning does; short attention span, hyper activity, depression and lethargy, and even potential criminality.
So a high quality nutritious food program that is available to entire community would be an excellent way to not only feed people, but potentially minimize the effects of lead poisoning. And yet, there’s been very little conversation and even less action taken towards improving and increasing Flint’s access to nutritious food.
Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, petitioned the Federal government to increase it’s age limits on the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program from 5 years to 10 years. WIC is a supplemental food program that makes food available to low income pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women and their children.
Snyder’s petition was rejected almost immediately by the Feds, causing a bit of an outrage from the Snyder camp. Snyder released a statement where he stated that the Federal Government wasn’t acting like ‘much of a partner’ on the problems of Flint, and that in fact, because the Feds were a part of the problem they had a responsibility to be a part of the ‘solution.’
And yet, Snyder’s position on WIC doesn’t really make much sense when you dig deeper. WIC is a program designed to eliminate health problems women face when they are pregnant or breastfeeding without adequate nutrition. Thus, WIC is a program that can only be accessed by pregnant, postpartum, or breastfeeding women and their children. Grandparents, fathers, women without children, etc are ineligible for the program. Lead poisoning in Flint certainly hits young people very hard, but the entire population was poisoned. Increasing the WIC age will do next to nothing for anybody who is not pregnant or parenting young children.
The interesting thing is that welfare is a food distribution system set in place that is capable of reaching multiple populations of people, and is proven to effectively challenge food insecurity. But one of the very first things Snyder did when he got into office was to enforce a 48 month life time limit on cash assistance. Eventually he also signed legislation requiring students attend school or risk losing family benefits and mandatory drug testing.
When Snyder’s cash assistance restrictions were put in place, the three counties that saw the most people fall off the roles were Wayne (which is home to Detroit), Kent (Grand Rapids), and yes, Genesse (Flint). Getting people back on the roles would be something that Michigan legislature could easily do, seeing as Michigan legislature were the ones who took everybody off. The federal limit on cash assistance is 60 months.
But instead of immediately repealing the 48 month limit Snyder volunteered at a food pantry for a half hour and held an exclusive birthday party for his wife that included security, blacked out windows and an extremely expensive cake. It’s hard not to wonder what kind of a ‘partner’ Snyder is being with this sort of ‘effort.’
As discouraging as Snyder’s actions have been during this crisis, there have been small rays of hope. Dr. Hanna-Attisha has been a leader in organizing a research/medical response to the lead crisis, including putting together free testing clinics and and gathering/tracking data on lead exposed infants. But she also is working on nutrition as part of the program she is directing, the Pediatric Public Health Initiative (PPHI). She set up her clinic above the local farmer’s market that accepts SNAP (the food assistance part of welfare) and has cooking classes that demonstrate how to cook meals with the food bought at the market. Dr. Hanna-Attisha is quoted as saying, “We give out nutrition prescriptions (at the clinic).”
Michigan State University, the university that is sponsoring Dr Hanna-Attisha’s work, has also been instrumental in making educational resources available. This book of recipes is filled tasty kid friendly recipes that use ingredients that are targeted at improving the quality of a body’s response to lead poisoning. The booklet also explains what foods to look for and what foods are going to be most beneficial to helping to fight lead poisoning. There are multiple other resources at their website set up to address lead poisoning.
The Flint water crisis has the possibility of reinventing how we understand food in the United States. Is food insecurity a punishment we dole out to people that weren’t good enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Or is food a human right that we ensure everyone has enough of because of the way corporations have violated our environment? We need fresh nutritious ideas about food and justice, but we need those ideas to focus on meeting the needs of all communities. Where we go from here is up to us.
We are observers of the world, mostly because there’s nothing better to do. Making friends with loneliness during the day, tucked in by it at night. Unafraid of the melancholy of loneliness.
Daughters.
When we are together, the loneliness eases. She shares a story with me and I pull it into my imagination. I spend days developing a new story, filling up the empty space with vibrant life. I return to her storytelling at night with the eagerness of a hungry tiger. She and I are sisters, learning and growing together.
She is lonely for different reasons than I am. She is the loved daughter of an older widower who is of the generation that does’t play with their children. She is the loved younger sister of a brother who is growing out of childhood. Her mother is dead.
I am just the daughter. The daughter with a father that works to avoid home. And then comes home and takes his anger out on his family. The daughter of a very much alive mother that has no way or means to avoid home. And so takes her anger out on her family. The sister of an older brother who resists this home by being angry at the one person who can’t retaliate.
I am the daughter that learned to be good is to be quiet. To fold up into yourself. To not exist as much as possible.
Scout and I have little in common outside of our loneliness. But that is all we need.
2. The father
Trust
There was no where to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus’s vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth; his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing. (chpt 13)
Atticus Finch taught me how to father.
For all sorts of reasons, my father could not be who I needed him to be. But most of all, for all sorts of reasons, he didn’t know how to father. I used to resent him for this. Even hate him. But then I became a parent and I saw how hard it really is, and resentment and hate shifted into a question of practicality. How do I do this work? How do I give what I never got?
The first time I read that passage, I pause and reread it. Then I put the book down and think about it. To be that intimate with my father is incomprehensible. To hear his body shifting with his breath. To feel his breath on my skin. To feel the warmth of his skin against mine. To feel the comfort of releasing too adult worries into his adult hands. To feel the comfort of knowing without asking.
He will be there when I land.
For me to move into my father in a way that would lead to a hug or an warm embrace, is to confront the reality I’ve lived with my entire life but have kept hidden under the bed, only pulling it out during the long nights when terrifying dreams stalk my sleep.
He never really wanted you to begin with.
I am not old enough, mature enough, able enough to handle that truth being made visible in broad daylight. Not yet at least. And so I do nothing about the massive empty space between us, except pretend not to notice it.
But I read and reread Scout’s story. I study what having a father means to her like I study a planet I’ve never seen. There is proof it exists, so I know it must be real. But my trust in this proof walks on a tightrope. And soft breeze would be enough to push it off. It is only Scout’s constant reassurances that thickens the tightrope into the stability of a solid sidewalk.
I know it exists. And when I stare the question of practicality in the face, I know where to turn.
—-
My son is talking. I am sitting in a chair at the table and he is talking to other family who sit with me. We are a family of history, we talk often about old battles, ancient policy, the influence of culture on world events. This kid of mine finds ways to weasel into these complicated history conversations between adults, and he is the rare kid that the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ adults in the family don’t elbow out. He holds his own, even with adults.
As he chats back and forth with others about the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne’s folly in leaving the empire to his sons, he backs gently onto my lap and pulls my hands around him. Eventually when he grows too tired to keep up with the conversation, he leans into me until he finally falls asleep.
I say nothing, just breath his warmth in.
—
When I talk about it later with my therapist, I tell her that the thing that made me cry after everybody left and we tucked the kids in bed, is how he didn’t even look at me as he slid into my lap. He just assumed I would be there. He didn’t have to look, he didn’t have to double check, he didn’t have to worry. He took it for granted I would be there, and I would welcome him into my lap. He knew without asking that I was there for him.
The therapist didn’t say anything. Just sat next to me as I cried again.
—
…and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
It is incomprehensible to imagine a father like this. But once I read it, I know it exists.
My son crawls into my lap.
I knew it could happen.
And it did.
3. The Sunday Social
Courage
I am sitting at a booth in a small diner. My hands are sweaty, my stomach is a queasy mess. My father is at a different table talking to his friends. I don’t know where to look or what to do.
My father returns to the table, and slides into the seat opposite me. We don’t talk. My hands twist into a tight knot under the table. My father leans over and pulls menus out of the cluster of condiments at the end of the table, hands me one.
I can hardly breath as I take the menu. My mind races as my eyes flick over the different meals. I don’t see the words, I don’t know what I could possibly order that I could choke down anyway.
My father closes his menu, looks back over at the table of friends he was talking to earlier. I feel the familiar sinking in my body. He wishes he were some place else.
Happy birthday, he mumbles. He is still looking at his table of friends.
Thanks, my dry mouth manages to scrape out.
I look out the window.
And wish I was some place else too.
—
People like to focus on Atticus. They like to look at what they call the ‘climax’ of the book. Atticus, the brilliant lawyer, defending Tom, who is black and accused of raping a white woman in the Jim Crow South. Atticus, the defeated warrior, walking out of the courtroom after the inevitable decision finally returns. All the black people in the segregated balcony standing up as a sign of respect.
White people fetishize this moment. A white man as the hero. A white father as the hero. The Great White Father. And yet…
There is another moment further along in the book. A quiet moment. Scout is at a Sunday ladies social gathering that her aunt put together. Scout, who struggles daily with the strictures of womanhood, is cast by loneliness into a room of creatures as alien to her as a father is to me. Gossiping women.
She wryly notes that her Aunt Alexandra’s invitation for her to stay at the gathering was a part of ‘her campaign to teach me to be a lady.’ And at first, this campaign appears to be an abysmal failure, as Scout, who is stuck sitting next to a vapid gossip, declares that not only does she prefer the company of men, she finds women to be hypocrites.
It’s hard not to agree with Scout’s uncharitable assessment of white womanhood. Because as young as Scout is, she notices that there’s different expectations for her black maid, Calpurnia, than there are for her white aunt, Alexandra. And she notices that while the social club would never dream of inviting ‘white trash’ Mayella Ewell, the woman who accused Tom of raping her, to their meeting, these ‘ladies’ have their own ways of supporting Mayella that are almost as bad as Mayella’s accusation.
One of the women delicately and with much ‘lady-like’ dignity, notices that ‘some good but misguided’ people are ‘riling up’ the black community even though these ‘good but misguided people’ think they’re helping. She goes on and on about how ‘sulky’ some of the ‘darkies’ are getting and then concludes that she would’ve fired her maid if she had kept up her ‘sulking’ one more day.
Scout, not yet wise in the subtle (and often not so subtle) code language of ‘lady speak’ does not really understand that it’s Atticus these women are targeting. But the neighbor lady and family friend, Miss Maudie, does and with a few pointed words, cuts the conversation off. It is the first time that Scout begins to suspect that maybe there’s more going on in women’s socials than meaningless women’s chatter.
And then Atticus comes home and pulls Alexandra, Ms Maudie, Calpurnia and Scout out into the kitchen. He tells them that Tom is dead, killed by prison guards. He has Calpurnia come with him to help break the news to Tom’s family, leaving Alexandra and Miss Maudie and Scout to figure out how to deal with the group of unfriendly white women in the other room that would celebrate this murder with gentle eyebrow lifts and pointed nods. The group of white women that use language to enforce white supremacy.
There is a moment in the 6th Harry Potter book, when the hero Harry is contemplating what it means to fight a battle that is already lost. After 6 books and numerous battles against evil that never quite win the war, he finally figures out that the choice he is facing is not if he can defeat or win against evil, but how he chooses to face the evil. The passage reads:
“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.”
How you choose to deal with the unwinnable fight is the crux of the battle the hero faces on his journey. Luke Skywalker choosing to be killed rather than kill his own father. Simba choosing to return to his tribe. Jean Valjean choosing to let Javert go free. Harry choosing to die rather than allow anybody else to die in his name.
These are all critical moments in the hero journey, moments where the characters transcend the world they are in and symbolically give their lives over to the universe. And in giving their lives over to the universe, they become one with the universe. Eternal.
The problem is, we’re used to that moment of transcendence being dominated by men and boys. We’re used to Harry, Simba, Luke, Jean, Frodo, Neo, etc all being the hero. We’re used to looking at huge male figures like Atticus and assigning him the worship, the glory. We’re used to courtrooms being the arena were battles happen.
What happens when the hero is a lonely little girl? And the arena is a Sunday church social in the front parlor?
It’s no mistake that Scout’s gift is observation. She sees the plethora of choices singing to her almost from the beginning–the choices that somehow even readers often miss. She sees the white girl that falsely accuses a black man of rape. But she also sees her young white teacher imposing her power on the young people of her room and then being comforted by those same young people when she cries. She sees the drug addicted virulently racist old woman conquer her addiction only to die a few days later. She sees the hypocritical white women at the social gathering. She sees the white teacher who defends persecuted Jews to her students and snarls indignant hatred against uppity Negros. She sees the murder of an unarmed black man, murdered in the name of white womanhood.
It’s a battle that probably won’t be won, not in her lifetime and not by her.
But her choice is made.
She fights anyway. If Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I.
She is and will be a lady on her own terms. And those terms will unmoor the genteel lady speak of white supremacy.
She stops her shaking. And walks into the arena with her head held high.
A hero. On her journey.
4. Dolor hic tibi proderit olim–This pain will be useful to you.
Grief
There once was a little girl that was so lonely, she would cut herself just to feel something besides loneliness. Nobody ever noticed the burning red wounds. Nobody really ever noticed the girl. She had learned how to be a Good Girl very well. She knew that to be good meant to be quiet. To fold up into herself. To not exist as much as possible.
He crawls into my lap.
I breath in his warmth…
That Good Girl with the queasy stomach and the bleeding arms was on a hero journey. But she didn’t know it, not until she read the story of Scout. Scout, who was kind enough to share everything that little girl on a hero journey would need to survive.
I read about survival. So I knew it existed.
And I did it. I survived.
Getting to know myself better has brought about a lot of self-revelations. One of them being that I actually am quite a romantic. I haven’t celebrated Valentines day pretty much ever, though. Mostly because I don’t agree with this whole commercialization of love thing. But I admit to going through a ‘I don’t celebrate Valentines because there’s no one to love’ stage, too. I’m from the early 90s, folks. We found a lot to be really angsty about.
I’m ready to embrace this ‘romantic’ in me. But I am going to do it on my own terms.
Right now, I’ve decided that my terms include 1. a desire to fracture ‘love’ from commercialization as much as I can, 2. to focus on self-love rather than ‘someone to love’ and 3. recognize that ‘self-love’ means learning how to practice self love even during low energy moments of chronic illness.
I put together the following Celebrate Love on My Own Terms list (or: things that I can do to enjoy life and focus on self even when I don’t really feel good) and thought I’d share it.
Listen to a podcast. My very favorite is This American Life and a lot of people seem to like the related podcast, Serial. I don’t care for Serial, as the subject content pisses me off. But This American Life has a wide range of stories to listen to, from stories about Christmas to dolls. I also enjoy listening to podcasts about herbalism, herbalism, herbalism, and more herbalism.
Listen to a book on CD. This doesn’t have to be expensive, you can check out books on CD from your local library! I have every Harry Potter book on my computer, and especially on holidays, we like to sit around as a family and listen to these old favorites.
Find out how to do something you’ve always wanted to do on youtube. I taught myself how to cook with a cast iron pot by watching youtube videos. There were some that were pretty good and some that were super corny, but because I am interested in the subject, I found them all entertaining. And once I felt more like moving, I tried some of the recipes–and they were delicious!
Take a shower. But not just any old shower. An ‘attention’ shower. I got this idea from this book. When you get into the shower, direct your water at one particular area of your body. When the water hits that area, say ‘hello (area of body)!’ and spend a few moments with your entire attention focused on that area of the body and what it feels like with water flowing on it. Then you move on to the next area of your body, on and on until you’re done. In many ways, better than a massage!
Breath deeply. And remind yourself as you breath in and out that you are breathing the same air the dinosaurs did. Imagine yourself breathing in the essence of your favorite dinosaur. Tall, stately, elegant. Fierce, unafraid. Graceful. Harness the power of their breath.
Put on freshly washed lounging clothes. There’s nothing better than putting on a nice freshly washed outfit. If you can manage it, slip into the outfit straight after it comes out of the dryer. Or, conversely, if your clothes are too tight, too scratchy, etc nothing feels better than slipping into a well worn comfortable outfit that was worn just enough to feel like ‘you’ but not enough to be ‘dirty.’ Indulge in what you prefer.
Toast up some bread and put some peanut butter on it. If you have had time to think ahead, get some artisanal bread, if you didn’t, don’t worry. Regular old toasted bread with some peanut butter gives lots of protein, and tastes great too!
Drink water. But not just any old water (unless you like it that way!). Get some fruits you like (They can be fresh or frozen. Benefits of fresh, they will taste fresher, of course. Benefits of frozen, you can just rip open a bag and dump), a big container, put the fruit in the container and then fill the container with water. Put it in refrigerator if you like it cold, if not, letting it sit on a counter is just fine. After a day of sitting, you have perfectly wonderful fruity water that keeps you hydrated, is super easy to make and is a special treat.
Cuddle with your animals. Cat’s work especially well here, they love to lay near warm beings and with just a gentle touch from a human, they often turn into major purr bots. And purr bots are a gift from the Gods.
Read this book. No really. Read it. It’s ‘written for couples.’ And it’s written by a guy who I am pretty certain is probably pompous dick and has never had a social justice-y thought in his head. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a life-changing book. It’s been the single most influential book for me in recovering from childhood trauma. It’s not necessary for a partner to read it with you to get benefits from it and it’s not necessary for you to have a partner. Give yourself the gift of tools to negotiate life.
While your at it, read this book too. It introduces the concept of ‘shame’ in a way that isn’t talked about often and really details exactly how pervasive ‘shaming’ is in US culture. Give yourself the gift of tools to negotiate the destructive force of shame.
Do absolutely not one single thing. Remember that this is your body and your time and your life and no matter what, you are not obligated to ‘self love’ or ‘self care’ or ‘celebrate’ or do anything you don’t want to do or don’t feel like doing.
What ideas do you have? What have you done yourself? Leave your thoughts in comments!
my whole life
i have
ate my tongue
ate my tongue
ate my tongue
i am so full of my tongue
you would think speaking is easy
but it is not.
nayyirah waheed
-for we who keep our lives in our mouths
—
pt 1
Shame.
My arm muscles are locked up into tight knots, my fingers can’t move. My shoulders are scrunched up tight against my neck, and my legs have collapsed under me. At least I think they have, I can’t really tell where I am. My eyes have gone into tunnel vision and my brain is swirling. A tight knot of frantic twisting. Fighting to escape. Clawing to escape. I move a little and realize that my legs haven’t collapsed. I can still walk. But when I move my feet, I just walk in circles. Escape. I must escape.
But I don’t know how to.
My stomach heaves.
There is no escape.
—
I am watching the Last Airbender Series with my children. Their favorite character in the series is Toph, the smack-talking little girl who fights grown men and wins. Mine is Zuko. The kid who screams and yells at everybody and somehow manages to sabotage himself in every way imaginable. I identify with his frustrations and find myself just as confused as he is at certain points in his journey. How did he wind up here, again? With everything blown up in his face, nothing working out like he intended it to?
Zuko’s Uncle Iroh attempts to mentor Zuko, and in one fantastic scene, tells Zuko that he must let go of his feelings of shame if he wants to be successful at anything. Zuko protests that he’s not ashamed of anything, in fact, he’s proud. To which Uncle Iroh replies that the only ‘antidote’ to shame is true humility.
I watch and rewatch that scene multiple times, not really sure what it means or why or how ‘humility’ could possibly be an antidote to shame. How could being or feeling humiliated be different than shame? Much less an answer to shame?
Even as the scene brings up questions, I know it is the start of something for me. Because that word, shame? I know that word.
I know shame. Like I know my own heartbeat.
—
People are screaming at me.
My shoulders are tight, and I feel sick. They are right to scream, what I did was wrong. Unforgivable on many levels. I am shaking.
They are right.
—
Do you know how when you let your device’s battery run down too far, you can plug it in, but it takes a few minutes for it to finally register that it’s officially charging? On my Ipod, there’s this light mist of red over the charging bar, until there’s finally enough juice in the battery to click the screen into the green charging mode.
That space between the plugging in and the green charging is where I’ve existed for the past 5 years or so. Most people who’ve known me online for awhile have heard me talk about ‘the breakdown.’ After years of organizing, attending university, nearly daily blogging, two very very hard pregnancies, and living in poverty, I finally couldn’t force myself up to do it anymore. I withdrew from almost everything, organizing, blogging, even friends and family. I spent most of my time in bed, allowing myself to admit for the first time in my life that I hurt. My stomach was a knot of agony, my spasming gallbladder made me throw up multiple times a day, untreated hypothyroidism had me sleeping for 17+ hours a day.
I was the dead phone, then. The really really dead phone. The dead phone with not even enough juice to tell anybody that I was dead. But the thing is, even though I didn’t have the energy to tell anybody I couldn’t do it anymore, next to nobody noticed that I wasn’t there. When they did, it was just because there was something that needed to be done, and nobody was there to do it.
When I wasn’t there or stopped answering phone calls, they just called somebody else.
After months of healing, getting on the right medications, getting my gallbladder taken out, graduating from university–I finally started to feel bit better. Just a bit. I could turn my head without throwing up. I could even go on walks again, if I walked slowly and kept them short.
I felt a little better. So I did the only thing I understood as possible–I immediately announced to the world I was feeling better, and kept right on doing what I had been doing all along. Oh, sure, just to prove I had really learned my lesson, I stopped doing unpaid activist work. I found a job as doing an activist work and I assured myself that getting paid fixed most of my problems.
And it made sense, it really did, that as long as I was being paid, I would stay healthy. Occasional pauses in stress to gather myself back up seemed to work just fine. Being able to afford feeding my children was like massage therapy. Being able to buy a new bra for the first time in almost a decade was like heaven.
But for some reason, even with a paid job, I wasn’t shifting out of that that space between ‘plugged back in’ and ‘green charging.’ And I wasn’t anywhere close to being ‘fully charged.’ Even though I felt better, I’d still come home from work and collapse, unable to get out of bed, even to eat or go to the bathroom. I still spend big parts of my day at work attempting to cover up my spasming stomach and my head to toe pain. I spent so much pretending things were fine in every area of my life, not even my partner suspected things were as bad as they were. Did other people do this, I wondered? Was other people’s ‘normal’ spent entirely recovering from life so they could get back out there? Did other people hide in plain sight from their coworkers, their loved ones?
—
I made a goal to practice editing on my writing. Editing is an essential aspect of writing–when I was teaching writing at university, that was the mantra we’d repeat over and over to discouraged kids who had never written more than a paragraph or two during high school. Writing is a process. Writing is editing. Don’t edit in your head. Get the words out of your head, onto the paper. We can fix it easier there. Editing skills are what make a writer.
I was determined to finally give my writing the seriousness it deserved. I had spent so long not giving my writing credit. Not considering it any good, not valuing it, and so I rarely spent time editing. Looking back at old essays, I see some really great ideas that would’ve made fantastic essays if I had spent any time editing what I wrote. But I never did. What was the use of putting so much time and effort into my writing if I was never going to go anywhere or do anything with it?
I decided that I needed to do something with all this writing of mine. If I am a writer, then I need to start sharpening my skills. And I am a writer.
So I spent a lot of time gathering up and buckling down on old essays. Essays that I had forgotten I wrote, essays that I thought were pretty good, essays that made me cringe, even after all these years. I have spent so much time teaching others how to edit, assuring young writers that writing is a process, I thought it would be easy work to finally sit down and edit my own stuff.
Imagine my shock when I pull up and old article and am unable to make it past the first paragraph. I read the first few sentences, and my eyes blacken into tunnel vision and my heart races. I read a bit more, and my mind whirls as fast as my heart already is. Omg omg omg omg, what is this omg omg this is CRAP is what this is! I can’t believe I wrote this omg I can’t gather all this crap together so everybody can see it omg UGH.
I must escape.
But there’s no place to go. This writing is mine. It is me. And it is crap.
My stomach heaves.
—
It never gets easier. I am eventually able to make it through (very poor) edits on multiple essays. But a missing “s” on a pluralized word can send my mind whirling into blackness, a misshapen paragraph can knock me back so far the only way to pull myself back is to close the computer and go for a walk.
But even walks bring no relief. On normal days, walking is a joy. I get out into the open air, fill my lungs down into my abdomen and feel almost instant calm. Walking is where I have my best ideas, where stuck ideas get unglued, where new ideas are brought into the fresh open air. But if it is an editing day, I walk entire blocks and don’t have any idea what I am thinking the whole time. All I know is that I haven’t walked fast enough. I haven’t escaped.
Eventually I just go home. But the sick heavy feeling in my stomach is still there. That sick heavy feeling never seems to go away.
—
I was fired from my job. It’s coming up on two year mark in February. I was fired from a place that called it’s workers ‘family.’ We’re all ‘family’ here, we’re a ‘family workplace, we believe in ‘family.’ I believed them too. I, the poor orphan, kicked out of my family as a teen, had lived life without family. So it felt good to be brought under the wing of a ‘family’ that cared about things I did. That worked towards the same goals, that believed the world could change. It felt good to just be accepted, for once. To be missed when I didn’t show up.
But then the ‘family’ came under financial crisis and the organization wanted to move in a new direction. And suddenly the dreamy cloak of family evaporated and left us all staring at what we really were. Workers. And so, expendable.
I wasn’t the only one let go that day. It worked like an assembly line. We all sat around waiting for our time. And then one by one we walked thru the door. Comparing notes later, we found out that we heard the same thing: Because of these hard times, we’ve had to make difficult choices…
Assembly line family firing.
Driving home, I called W*, my partner, my love, my life. I hadn’t cried in the office. I hadn’t cried walking out of the building or in the car. But as soon as my partner answered the phone, the control collapsed. I cried so hard I couldn’t breath or talk. I could only hear his voice telling me to pull over. Pull over until you feel better. Pull over. Pull over until you’re ok.
I pulled over and we talked. Him, calmly even though I could hear the worry in his voice. Me, hysterically. They fired me what am I supposed to do now?
An orphan again.
There is no escape.
My stomach heaves.
—
People love to talk about ‘boundaries.’ Especially in social justice circles. Healthy boundaries make healthy people. Unhealthy boundaries cause violence, destruction, chaos. Healthy boundaries for healthy healing.
It’s next to impossible to miss the articles assuring us that ‘lighting candles’ and ‘journaling’ are good ways to ‘keep boundaries.’ And even Oprah is all over ‘gratitude journals.’ This is where you’re supposed to write down all the things that you are grateful for every day, and then when you go back and read it from the beginning, you’ll stop feeling resentful and know how to lucky you are. And that helps grow your boundaries.
Or something.
One of the very few things I am good at is being grateful. I’m the child of an immigrant, and the immigrant I am a child of is the kind that is ‘just grateful to work.’ Grateful to the great United States for blessing us with the lowest paying grungiest job that no white person would ever do. Grateful to be allowed the bounty of America.
So early in my life, when a lot of the problems that I am dealing with today were tadpole problems, I gravitated to gratitude journals. It was so easy for me to come up with stuff to be grateful for. I even emailed Oprah and got myself a free journal when she was giving away journals. Oprah told me that gratitude journaling was ‘me’ time. And having a nice journal showed myself that I was worth it. I wanted to be worth it. God how badly did I pray to be worth it.
The very first thing I wrote in that journal? Was how grateful I was to Oprah for all that she’s ever done for me.
And then I got busy writing page after page of gratitudes. The sunny sky, the cool day, the full tree in front of our house. There was nothing I couldn’t show a little gratitude for. After a while though, I began to realize that I wasn’t feeling much better than I had before, even after months of gratituding. My entire attitude didn’t change like Oprah said hers did. I didn’t get rich. I didn’t feel better about life. Eventually, I stopped and never did it again.
That is, until I was fired.
When you are fired (or just out of work) you exist in a weird place where there’s a ton of ‘self help’ expertise floating around, but all you want to do is punch all that self help in the face. But after it helps you, of course. Because you need a job and there’s nothing in the world worse than not having a job. Especially when you’re a child of an immigrant who is just grateful for the right to pick berries for 50 cents a bucket.
I started reading all that self help, looking frantically, desperately for the answers. What was I going to do? I live in Michigan, where the most reliable work is the restaurant industry. I took out thousands of dollars of loans so I could go to school and escape the restaurant industry. What the hell was I going to do?
Self help told me to meditate. To drink coffee. To use the firing as a way to decide what I REALLY wanted to do (what happens when what you really wanted to do is the job you got fired from?).
To keep a gratitude journal.
I know how to show gratitude, I tell myself. I know how to do something. Maybe this will work this time. Maybe…
—
People are yelling at me. I don’t understand why. I didn’t do anything wrong. They yell and yell.
My shoulders are tight. I am flushed and sweaty. I didn’t do anything.
I say nothing. There is no escape.
They keep yelling. And finally,
I apologize.
—
I am watching a documentary on Henry Ford. Henry is a dictatorial tyrant. I could go on for days about how terribly he treated his workers, how he degraded the environment in SE Michigan, how he almost destroyed his company rather than give an inch to the unions.
But what interests me in this documentary is the relationship he had with his son, Edsel. Edsel was the only child of Henry and was groomed to take over the company. Only Henry had no intention of giving up control of the company. Especially not to somebody like Edsel.
See, Edsel somehow managed to be raised by this dictatorial tyrant, and at the same time, turned out to be not that bad of a guy. He was by all accounts, a kind man, one that didn’t have the stomach to treat others the way his father treated them. It was Edsel that negotiated the deal between Ford the company and the unions. It was Edsel that absorbed the disgust and anger of his father so that others didn’t have to. And as a result, his father had not a shred of respect for him.
There is a story about Edsel. He wanted to relieve overcrowding in the building where he worked, so he decided to build an addition onto the building. Mind you, at this point, he was president of the company (by his father’s design), and he was the head of the plant that he was working at. He, along with his father and mother, owned the entirety of the shares of Ford. He had every right to build an addition onto this building, even without getting his father’s approval.
They got as far as digging out the foundation before Henry saw what was going on. When Henry asked Edsel about the work, Edsel told him that the accountants needed more room to work. Henry, the dictatorial tyrant, fired all the accountants, and then told Edsel there was plenty of room. Edsel agreed to stop building the addition and said he’d have workers pour in the foundation. To this, Henry told him no. Leave the big hole, just as it is. For everybody to see.
Every single day after that, Edsel had to walk by this unfinished hole–a little reminder to him (and the entire plant he was the manager of) from his father. That his decisions were nothing. That his needs were nothing.
That he was nothing.
I’m not surprised to find out that Edsel developed stomach cancer. That he spent years suffering through what he thought were ulcers, only to find out it was cancer. I’m not surprised to find out that Edsel didn’t tell his father that he had cancer and that it was terminal. What could Edsel’s illness be but another failure? Another thing he couldn’t do right? Another hole to carry in front of the whole world?
A colleague of Edsel and Henry summed up the difference between father and son. Henry felt that he knew best what was best for the public. Edsel, on the other hand, would try to give the public what they wanted.
Try to give the public what they wanted.
My stomach heaves.
I can’t escape.
—
I read in a book about ‘boundaries.’ In it, it tells how the body and mind work together to read cues from others. It’s a type of mind reading, almost. Our bodies are miraculous things, designed from babyhood to notice cues from mothers/caregivers. It’s a survival instinct as babies. Mother’s cues let us know that we are loved, that we are cared for, that if we act a certain way, she will respond with food, if we act a different way, she will respond with hugs.
As we get older, our ability to read other people’s cues becomes more refined and gets incorporated into areas of our lives that are not so survival centered. The book points out that the reason your own fingers traveling across your body don’t feel the same to you as the fingers of another person is because you already understand your intentions with your body. That is, you know where your fingers are going to go and what they’re going to do when they get there. If you’re blind folded, on the other hand, and a loving partner tickles your body, that brings about a sensation in you that is in part, based on your inability to read your partner’s cues about what they intend to do to your body.
But for many of us, there is a dark side to this mind reading as well. When you have a sick parent that alternates between rages and gross depression, just walking into a house after school can give you clues. You don’t need to talk to the parent, you don’t need to even see your parent. You can read the signals in the air. Are the lights on or off? Are the curtains open or closed? Is the house quiet? Or can you hear sounds of movement?
By the time you actually encounter the parent, you already generally know how to handle the parent. You read their cues to make sure you’re not wrong, and then you follow your playbook. Mind reading is a great technique of survival. But when you become hyper vigilante as a mind reader–you start to associate reading minds and situations successfully as ‘who I am.’ This is ‘who I am.’ I am a person who reads other people and makes them feel better. I am a person who knows without being told what to do. I am a person who takes care of others. I am a good girl.
But being a good girl means you spend hours and hours monitoring the cues of people who have never once hurt you. It means you take off running from the very safe home that you intentionally created at the slightest sign of other’s displeasure. It means you keep insisting your fine over and over again because you can read the cues of others and you know it’s what they want to hear.
It means that eventually, you forget that your spirit, the person that you really are, the person who has desires, needs, dislikes, integrity, is not there anymore. That there’s no room for that person you really are to exist, so it floats over you, attached to you by a thread that grows thinner and thinner with each act of hyper vigilant mind reading.
That’s when you end up in that space between dead and ‘charging.’ Assuring the world you can do it, not because you can actually do it. Not because you actually want to do it. But because you know it’s what they want to hear.
When you’ve gotten so used to the rush of adrenaline that comes with knowing that you are safe for that one moment that somebody isn’t mad, angry, disappointed in you, the idea of ‘boundaries’ is simply a foreign concept. Like trying to explain rotary phones to teenagers or geophysics to a normal person.
You know that boundaries are important. But they make no sense. You can’t even conceptualize what boundaries might look like. When your entire identity is based on meeting other people’s needs, your boundaries are their boundaries. They build them, define them, and you learn them so well, you feel like those boundaries are yours.
Is it even possible build a boundary around a floating spirit?
—
I am the most depressed I’ve ever been in my life. I can’t move. The cold grey engulfs me, strangles me. I can see no way out. When depression has come in the past, I had enough experience to know what it was and ride the wave. But now. I can’t move. I can’t breath. I can’t escape.
So I pick up my pencil and journal and start writing.
I am grateful that I woke up today.
I am grateful for the kids.
I am grateful for W*.
I am grateful for…
I am grateful for………..
…
…
My brain twists. My stomach is uncontrollable. I don’t know what else to say. I toss my pencil to the side. Close the journal.
—
That’s when I start watching the Last Airbender Series. And when I see Uncle Iroh tell Zuko about true humility being the only antidote to shame. It doesn’t hurt to type in ‘shame’ to the search engine. It doesn’t take much energy to type ‘guilt vs shame.’ So I do, and in between sleeping and watching the Last Airbender, I go back to those open tabs and surf through some of the links.
Just like the endless self help articles, articles on shame and guilt are often endless and filled with bullshit. Hippies and Buddhist hippies especially love to talk about shame. And to suggest using positive thinking or crystal therapy to get rid of it. But then I came across this.
Brene Brown on the differences between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’:
“Based on my research and the research of other shame researchers, I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.
I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.
I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.”
Because it isn’t too much work, I rent a book by Brown from the library. Then another. Books on CD, so I don’t have to move. But they start to unlock doors.
I already know about shame. But what I know…it doesn’t sound like what Brown was talking about in her books. What I know is ‘slut shaming’ and ‘body shaming’ and ‘fat shaming.’ I’ve seen untold number of articles written by *F*eminsts saying they were done with slut shaming. Articles calling for the end of body shaming. Articles critiquing how the latest movie or tv show was fat shaming.
Shame as I learned it from *F*eminists is an individual experience. A type of bullying. Shame is something that happens to an individual, and is an act committed by either one person or a small group of people. In worst case scenarios, an entire town does it to a survivor. Or ‘the internet’ does it. It doesn’t happen to everybody. It happens to certain types of people. Sluts. Fat people. Women. Victims of rape.
Shame is not something that is systemic. It’s not something that’s generational except in how an individual mother shames an individual daughter, or an individual father shames an individual son. It’s not the cesspool of capitalism we are birthed into and then repeatedly drown ourselves in until we die. And it’s not something that we learn so well, we barely even notice it. That we just grow to accept as ‘normal.’ Normal to feel tight and scrunched up. To always feel punched in the gut. To apologize endlessly for things you never did. To beat yourself up for the things you did do. So others don’t have to.
For some reason, as I worked through the books on shame, I returned to that gratitude journal. And I noticed something. I was very clear that I felt gratitude. But who was I showing my gratitude to? When I said I had gratitude for my kids, surely I was talking to God. But when I said I had gratitude that my kids hadn’t gotten sick or been killed–who was I showing gratitude to then? The police for not killing them? The state of Michigan for not taking them from me? The ‘family business’ that offered insurance until I wasn’t family anymore?
The more and more I parsed thru ‘who’ I was showing gratitude to, the more it kept hitting me in the face. I was almost always grateful to some abusive violent entity for not destroying somebody I loved. But even when I had gratitude for the sunny day or the deep red flowers that managed to grow next to my house, I started to notice that gratitude kept me in a position of passivity. I was not the agent, the person doing things. I was the ‘good girl’ that was busy mind reading others to keep them happy.
Can training a person carefully shamed into passivity to show constant gratitude to abusive institutions be an act of justice? Or liberation?
Can it truly heal me? Heal us?
—
‘no’
might make them angry
but
it will make you free.
–if no one has ever told you, your freedom is
more important than their anger.
~‘salt.’ by nayyirah waheed
—
pt 2
Integrity.
When I get home the day I am fired, everybody is there. My partner, my kids. I walk in and head towards the bedroom, intending to lock myself in and hide until people forget I exist. But my partner catches me. He signals to the kids, and they came over to where he and I are standing. The three of them pull me into their arms and hug me. I feel my kids hands patting my back, I feel the warmth of my W*s breath against my face. I am sobbing. They don’t try to talk or move away from me. They wrap around me, holding me, whispering ‘we love you.’
We love you.
We love you.
—-
The big secret about ‘healing’ is that there is no magic trick. There is no one single ‘thing’ that allows you get back up and be fine and healed for the rest of your life. Almost everybody wants that single cure. There’s tons of pressure on healers and writers who talk about healing to say that there is a single cure. There’s a linear narrative around healing that says that you get sick, you admit you’re sick, you take some time out to do what you need to do, you’re better.
That’s why there’s listicles and ‘how tos’ and endless self help books, people don’t have time to heal, not really, so they look for what they want to hear. If they meditate or exercise or do gratitude journaling, their lives will be fixed. One healing strategy to rule them all.
I couldn’t tell you what has been my magic bullet of healing. Was it a particular book I read? Was it the time I finally said ‘no’ and didn’t feel guilty? Was it Oprah, who sent me a nice book to journal in? Was it disillusionment with all the listicles? Was it getting my gallbladder removed?
What if the answer is that it was all of these things, plus more? What if the answer is that the biological nature of humanity leans toward healing and we’re all going to figure it all out at a certain age no matter who we are?
What if there’s no social justice movement in the world that can ‘heal’ a person? What if there’s no such thing as ‘healing’–only life?
Are we ready to struggle with life? Are we ready to struggle with life for no greater cause or purpose than ourselves?
—
I start by hand writing letters to friends.
I struggle with the slowness of writing at first. It is hard to slow down to hand writing pace when you can type as fast as your brain thinks. I practice slowing down by paying attention to the rituals of letter writing. The date up in the corner. The page numbers on longer letters. The time down the side next to where I stopped or started back up writing. I realize that the time stamp tells people who know me a lot of information. Information I didn’t know about myself. I get my best work done in the afternoon, but I get the most work done in the morning. I am fried in the evening and rarely do much of anything then.
I am writing a letter to a friend one day when I find myself remembering free writing time in elementary school. I am sitting at one of those old wooden desks with the curved steel bottoms, the kind that always made my too long legs knock against each other. A long line of cursive letters are taped across the top of the table. Rain is splattering against the high glass windows. I am wearing a stiff wool sweater that clings too tightly to my neck and makes it hard to sit still in. There is a record player scratching out quiet music and the lights are off.
It is the smell of the blotchy ink on pulpy wood flecked paper that links 40 year old me to elementary school me. It’s a smell that not only calms both versions of me down, but that all of me loves.
It’s a small thing. It’s not the holiness of the smell of a baseball glove. Or the rejuvenation of a piney forest or the saltiness of the ocean.
It’s a small thing. But it’s a start.
—
Integrity is who you are. It’s a ‘state of being whole and undivided.’ It’s what is questioned when you do something somebody else (or you) doesn’t like. It’s what everybody tries to impose on you. It’s what is shamed as a way to control.
It is your morals. But it’s more than that. It’s what that ridiculous Julia Roberts movie points to with the ‘egg eating’ experiment. Julia’s character starts off the movie eating any type of eggs that the person she is dating does. Part of her character arch is learning which eggs she likes.
Integrity is learning what kind of eggs you like–but it is also not changing/shifting your likes based on other people’s opinions. Maybe your individual taste is such that eggs are not any big deal to you so you’ll eat whatever’s right in front of you. But the point is that it’s your individual taste, and that you made the decision of your own free will (not because you’re partner would think less of you or your mother is threatening you). Integrity is who you decide you are based on well reasoned thought (as Grace Lee Boggs might say) you’re own likes/dislikes, you’re emotions/feelings, etc. It is not deciding who you are because there’s no other choices available to you, because somebody is threatening you, or you’ll be enmeshed in life long poverty if you don’t do it.
At first, integrity confused me. I’ve made lots of choices. I’ve made lots of decisions. I’ve been going to rallies and organizing meetings and marches since I was a kid. I’ve been called ‘outspoken’ and ‘mouthy’ and ‘feisty’ and ‘sassy’ since I can remember. I’ve been called ‘fierce’ and ‘bitchy’ and ‘overbearing.’ I’ve been all the things that would make you think that my egg choice would never be in question, much less decided by anybody but myself.
What I never counted on (and I’m sure none of the people who called my feisty or sassy ever did either) was that organizing came easy to me, that fighting for what was ‘right’ came easy to me, because I had been so well trained to take care of and prioritize others. That organizing as it plays out far too often in the US, encourages and admires good girls to ‘fight for others’ to death.
I know somebody who died recently, and in a memorial written about this person, the author said how greatly they admired the person who died because on their deathbed, this person was making phone calls and advocating for others. The last thing this person did was make a phone call for somebody else. Then this person died.
This is what organizers admire. Sacrificing yourself to death. Pushing and pushing and pushing yourself so that even on your death bed, your very identity requires you to push aside dying and mind read the needs of others.
It makes sense, then, that even as I was busy being sassy and feisty and all the other names, I was busy carrying around my massive Edsel Ford hole of shame. Unable to fathom what a boundary was, and getting sicker and sicker everyday for it. I know now, that I was not the only one collapsing at the end of the day, unable to move. That I was not the only one hiding my inability to move, my desperate illness, behind the image of what I thought I was supposed to be.
That Edsel Ford and I could both have such similar life experiences points to exactly how common what I was going through really is.
Having integrity is a state of humanity. It is what God or the Universe or your ancestors or the Spirits slipped into your body before you were born and put you on the earth to develop. It is being human. It is uncontainable. It is the antithesis of everything our culture wants from us.
—
As I continue to hand write letters, I also scratch out a few notes and plot lines of a story that’s been swirling around my head for about three years. I’ve never given this story serious consideration, even though I alway said my goal was to write a book. I never took this story seriously because nobody else I knew took my story writing seriously. This makes me wonder: Is writing something I actually want? Is it something I need? Did I actually like to write? Does writing empower me?
I keep jotting down notes here and there while I think. And then I let the questions go. I am tired, and I realize for the first time, that sometimes you don’t have to have the answers blasted out to a fine point instantaneously. Sometimes, the urge to have everything figured out is just another way of making yourself more digestible to others. Just another way to be good girl.
I put away my writing and go for a walk. I figure the answers will find me on their own, eventually. And the only thing I need to do is rest until they find me.
—
It’s taken some time get used to this slower pace of life. I was diagnosed with ADD years ago, which is characterized by an inability to pay attention. But now, I’m beginning to question that diagnosis. The world has existed as one swirling huge frantic screaming mess of hysteria for so long, I thought it was normal. Just the way it was. Hysterical tunnel vision. I could hardly pay attention to anything because I was hyper focused on the only thing that counted, making sure nobody and nothing could ever ever be disappointed in me. Shame prevention. Anti-Shaming Hysteria.
This new world I exist in is slower. I keep noticing things I’ve never noticed before. Layers of colors, the texture of sounds. Little things, but things that grow me into a new person.
This is one of my favorite songs of all time, but when listening to it in a state of Hysterical Tunnel Vision, I only heard it as a heartbroken song of a former lover. Now I pay attention to the gentle decrescendos, the lingering over harmonies, the lyrics. Drown in my own tears–I let the words slip into me as they are, slow, quiet, almost a hum. They gather intensity and then taper off, losing the words in sound. Then I hear what I’ve never heard before. The self indulgence. The person telling this story of death through tears enjoys noticing how sad he is. To the point, there may even be a bit of playfulness in his words. An indulgent husband accentuating and exaggerating his longing for his wife on an endless Saturday night. A husband performing his desire and love for his wife. A man pulling a woman closer to him with his longing.
Foreplay.
I smile as I close my eyes and drown in this song I’ve never heard before.
—-
November hits, and everybody in my feed is talking about Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month.
Before I commit to big plans, I usually spend a lot of time obsessing and thinking through those big plans to the teeniest detail I can find. I make sure that all the things that could possibly go wrong are accounted for. And what usually winds up happening is that I spend so much time obsessing, the big plans pass me right by.
When I see that Nanowrimo is here, I don’t think about anything. I know without a doubt that this is the answer I’ve been waiting to find me.
I start writing. The world needs my novel, I’m told. I know this is true. But even more so, I need my novel.
Writing so much for an entire month is not easy. It’s more than I’ve written in years, and there are times that I feel like my fingers will crack off or my brain will implode on itself. I even fall into a wave of depression for a while and don’t write at all. But the depression crests and I feel better, and I get back to it.
I don’t hit the 50,000 word mark, but I get close. I write the novel that I have always said I wanted to. I notice the teeny flame of integrity budding inside me, and as I get stronger, I fan it. Not enough to kill it or to push it out of control. Just enough. So that it is warm and cozy and a place that I enjoy being in.
I never enjoyed anything so much in my life. And I never felt so proud when I was finished.
I did it. I did it for nobody else in the world but me.
I did it.
—
The other big secret about ‘healing’ is that having boundaries is not always joyful, peaceful or smooth. It feels good to say you are saying ‘no’ as an act of respecting your integrity. But the reality is that not many people enjoy being told no, and I like saying it even less. My early attempts at saying no most often saw me falling back on what I was used to–hysteria. Somebody would ask for something, and instead of just saying ‘no, not this time,’ I’d yell, or more often, cry. I wanted people to just understand without me having to tell them, like I did for them all those years.
I also spent a good long amount of time really pissed off when it turned out that one grand show down with ‘no’ wasn’t going to be the end of it. That I would have to keep saying no, over and over and over again, for the rest of my life.
But I’ve stuck with it and kept practicing. It’s still not that easy for me to say no, but the hysterical self-defense is almost non-existent now. I am more confident with my boundaries, and I have created ways to protect them that are filled with my own sense of integrity. Old patterns are slipping away as I birth a new me.
Even so, I’ve gotten in more fights with W* than I ever have in my life. But they aren’t like the old fights, me slamming a door or doing the silent treatment. Those things were me not feeling like I had the right to say no. So I was letting W* know I was mad, without telling him no.
W* is who I practice saying ‘no’ to the most these days. And sometimes he says ‘ok’ and moves on and other times we fight over it. But now, our fighting is the two of us standing up for our boundaries. It is the both of us figuring out when our integrity will allow us to adjust our boundaries and when adjusting our boundaries will betray our integrity.
I understand what Uncle Iroh meant now, when he said ‘true humility is the only antidote to shame.’ True humility is not self berating or self abuse (or: just another version of shaming.). True humility is knowing yourself, your boundaries, your integrity so well that you don’t have to impose yourself on anybody or anything to know who you are or that you are allowed to exist in this world. True humility is having such a strong sense of integrity that it doesn’t matter how anybody tries to impose themselves on you, you remain true to your own self and your own value system. True humility is being alive to your own self in the deepest most spiritual sense possible.
It’s not easy work, to be alive. But to be alive is to notice the smell of ink on paper, the sound of rain on glass. It is the pure joy of hearing a beloved song with new ears.
And so it is worth it.
—
I think back to that day I came home from being fired often. There is something in that day that I spent 40 years on a desperate hunt for, but was unable to feel, even when it was wrapped around me. When you’re filled with shame, you are filled with gratitude to others who are willing to take a moment to relieve that shame just a bit. On that day, I was filled with gratitude to my family for relieving the shame of being fired.
But now…I see that day differently.
The arms, the warm breath, the gentle pats.
Whatever comes. Where ever we go from here. However this changes things. Whatever way you choose to fill yourself going forward. We love you.
I don’t believe in God. But the sublime universe is there in that moment. It wraps itself around me and us and whispers, you have permission to be just who you are.
For the first time, I can see the universe. And I believe what it says.
