… at a time where I was particularly vulnerable to the concept of evolution, a peer from my hometown—whom I’ve never met but felt indescribably connected, inspired and moved by, sent me some unreleased work on a day my usually absent subletter offered to smoke me out. After a few hits and easy conversation in his beautifully decorated room, I came back to my rooms wooden floors lit with the afternoon sun. Stazi was sitting on the beige ottoman in the corner and the 40 minute track was approaching it’s near-end. The song was revolving in the air, bouncing off the chandeliers and high walls as I walked through the tall doors.
I was stunned.
High, but mostly stunned. A drunken speech bred from love soon came after. My words were slightly slurred, the thoughts becoming too quick to transcribe clearly as I was feeling inspired and the weed was making me sentimental. So, I admitted out loud that my favorite feeling to offer my loved ones was admiration, to the point of devotion. That I’d rather collapse into it than hold myself back. It hit me, that I had felt devoted to you and them. I wasn’t questioning why the love in me almost always poured out like religion but my tears were big and fat, pleading to be sent on their way. I recalled all the ways I fell in love, all the people I’ve loved deeply, to the point of shame.
I fell in love with creation, with lovers and friends and just about anyone who could understand why sea slugs could bring tears to the eyes if you sat on the thought long enough.
Evolution made me want to sit on my wooden floors and cry until I remembered.
There were memories deep in my bones of lives before this one and when I loved them, when I loved you, it felt like returning to myself.
Written by a 24 year old Zoé in his New York Summer Sublet, 2019.
Desireen’s Daughter
I was pleading with the unseen at 24.
Staring at ceilings, blue skies, cemented buildings that scraped skies, the same way as I was begging for reprieve at the tender age of 20.
In the writings of my precocious early 20’s I am consistently inquiring about some innate concept that kept gnawing at me. Some long, lost information stored in the marrow of my bones that made it hard for me to sleep. I briefly entertained astrophysics and quantum physics in between my university classes to coo the questioning; the enormity (and microcosmic essence) of it soothed for a semester but not quite.
It is January 14, 2016 at 6:19 am on another night I can’t get any sleep. I am most likely at my graveyard shift at my dorm front desk from 4am-8am with a 10 am docent shift at the campus Art Museum or I have an 8 am class on the far side of campus, near the architecture building, which means a laborious 20 minute walk or a 12 minute coast if I feel like bringing out my longboard. I am 20 years old and I hate university but it’s my mothers only wish for me, one that has grown up alongside me since I can remember. My mother drills into me that I will go to college and live out her dream of finishing university (she dropped out of teachers college and never lets me forget it). I am deeply involved on my campus, taking on a string of leadership positions, even joining a sorority but I am extremely out of place for many reasons; my search for information stored in marrow being one.
In the present day, I have 4,553 notes with the first one being created on May 4, 2013. My iCloud has over a decade worth of jottings. My whole youth from the years 18-29 documented and archived.
As I do most nights that I cannot sleep, on January 14, 2016, I write:
I want to go home.
There’s a place tucked away deep in my bones that feels like sacred grounds and ancient lives. I want to go there but this world is pulling me to stay. When I think of the lifetimes I’ve seen and experienced, each very true to my soul but always undoubtedly unknown to my mind—my worries feels like pebbles thrown out at sea.
They feel small and easily carried away by the currents but this world tells me to worry.
To worry is to care.
Another belief swirling around in my head. My mother tells me the universe always provides and I believe her most nights.
Tonight I am far from worried but I am not sure if anything is real. All my memories feel like smoke and glass mirrors and I’m not sure if anything I’ve felt in the past is true and that scares me but it mostly makes me sad. To think all my memories one day will become dust makes me fearless but also fills me with a deep sense of pointlessness.
I want to crawl deep inside of myself. I miss the humming of my heart. All the wise men say we are never too far from ourselves but right now I feel like a piece of drifting wood out at sea. The shore is still in view but I have no energy to swim back. I’m not oceans away from myself but it’s enough distance to make me want to cry.
The sea is dragging me further and farther away.
She whispers “There are lessons to be learned”
“There are lessons to be learned.”
Nine years has circled itself around me since the sea whispered tongues to me that late night/early morning. Five years have drifted along since the ‘Last Good Year.’ The year we built a house of pearls out of our commitments and blooming friendships. I have had to erect many boundaries to protect that tenderness that revealed itself countless times through out my youth, the tenderness that still spills out of me.
There are ways our empathy can be weaponized against us.
There are places our empathy can be exploited, which is a thought I didn’t fully let register until my 27th year of life.
I find out in my mid 20’s that although all ‘kin folk ain’t skin folk, I am blessed, even more emboldened to have the enemies I have. I feel a current of integrity within me that I am firm enough in my interpretation to not let themes like identity reductionism keep me from casting heavy waters between my adversaries and I, even the ones who look just like me.
I can understand the seed of someones abusive tendencies stemming from a place of unmet needs, usually as a child. I can intellectualize and hold empathy for children who grew up being physically abused, especially children who grew up with an emotionally immature parent, especially vulnerable children who grew up void of safety because of neglectful guardianship and still I must feel, feel how the pain of your youth has lashed onto my skin like a whip. In the name of all of our lineages and with love to my and your ancestral counsels, I don’t have beef with them, I have beef with you and how you’ve allow whiteness to reverberate through your bones, echoing, whipping around like the very ones who are bent on subjugating us.
Let me be clear, I love your ancestors the same way I love mine.
We all have internalizations of fascisizing elements. Checks and balances help us to soothe the ways we have been instructed to desire our own repression. I have beef with the way you have no curiosity about what lies beneath these surfaces.
These institutions have a smell and if you wade in them long enough, the smell collapses into itself and becomes the air that you breathe without foresight that it indeed smells like rot, chattel, swarms of fecal matter stained on 16th century stoned grottos. If you wade in them long enough, you wont even realize that the decay you have become accustomed to breathing is the bodily fluids of your enslaved ancestors. I have beef with your firmness that this is the freshest air we can breathe. I have beef that a step away, there is fresh air outside of these institutions, there is inalienable life outside of the Door of No Return and you don’t have the courage to step out and see for yourself. On top of everything, you call me a mad man for taking the necessary steps to go breathe air not congested with the fecal dust of our loved ones.
Whiteness believes itself to be impervious; but it is susceptible to slippage, to the inalienable goop that seeps from our ancestry. Black Indigenous sovereignty is only a matter of time and you are an obstruction because of your dedication to these institutions that glamourize you as a bronze token.
Errare humanum est, (sed) perseverare diabolicum
To err is human, to persist is diabolical
inspired by Erraree Humanum Est by Jorge Ben Jor
There is no resolve, not even nature works that way.
It is a capitalist pursuit, whiteness whispering in your ear to keep it “down,” to suffer silently, to die with the words barbed & wired around your throat. It is whiteness whispering in your ear to tell someone to stop feeling or to move on from the pain bred by your own dedication to dishonesty, abuse and complacency.
We all have to travel through our own meaning and hopefully, as is the case with myself, we are eventually reborn. We can beam with the meaning assigned that reminds us there is life, so much vigor and care, after loss. I am brand new with my take aways, as I knew I’d arrive once the pain had done it’s sojourns. I salivate and clench my nails thinking about a New York summer, thinking about long days and long nights. I am hungry for for endless pastures, running in them and laying in them, breathless while polyrhythmic kick drums beat through my chest. I am once again, born again, from the pressing inertia that comes with love, heart ache, death and thank goodness, the comforts of touch. Resentment settles and eventually relieves itself once the lesson is learned so I must thank my steely resentments for holding me down as I circle another cycle of ripening feelings so sweet in the cavities that once held massive, massive pain.
My anger fades, replaced by a thankfulness so sweet it threatens to rot my molar teeth. A root canal is in order because even too much kindness (sweetness) can bring decay and I hold that sentiment closer to my ribs than ever before.
I have learned so much since my 24th year. Since my 20th year.
I have let so many questions wash over me since then. Questions riffing on what is outside of the fashion industry? What is outside of the music industry? Academia? Where are the spaces that have yet to be industrialized?
The questions burn themselves into my posture— I turn down licensing deals, tours and collaborations with the wonderings centered. I am stubborn about the Atlantis of my music-making dreams. My art begs for a place to be out of the rat race. I decide, that it must still exist. I know I am not letting myself imagine wide enough if I find myself within the same confines but just a different tentacle of it. I don’t want to be in a fish bowl of the art world, I want to be free.
I read a lengthy, journal-esque entry from Alice Sparkly Kat, who’s concentration is a post-colonial lens re: the cosmos. They recount a strong reflection,
A friend of mine told me this recently: people in power have no imagination. They only care about protecting their own power.
I wonder what it’s like to be the Biden’s, the Trumps, the Obamas, and the bushes of the world. You climb into this position of power by constantly strategizing and calculating your next move, by constantly being on guard to defend the power that you have acquired. Maybe that’s what it takes to be a president. You have to train yourself to be on guard so that you defend your position. Because you are not invincible, you learn how to narrate your pain only in ways that increase your clout.
In an industry, visibility serves as a ouroboros. I have watched myself, and others, become indentured servants to the social capital our talents afford us. After a near decade of growing social capital, stemming from my Rookie Magazine photographer & contributing writer days (I have lived many, many lives), commercial photographer shooting campaigns for American Apparel and other well known trendy brands, to my modeling days with campaigns for Abercrombie, Mellissa, Adidas, Carhartt, Smashbox Cosmetics, and Guess, and then, with sound, from the scape of Boiler Rooms, Burberry, ICA, NTS, HOR (later found out to be a zionist entity), The Serpentine and countless others. I find myself at a familiar glass ceiling that I’ve hit each time I’ve monetized a skill or hobby.
It is fun playing in a fish bowl for awhile but of course, I am suffocating and agitated by the constraints and I want to return to the sea.
I feel the familiar ache of having no room to stretch my limbs and I need to return to eternal salt-waters, so I can swim as far down below as I deem appropriate.
When I map out my desires, bringing my pen to physical leaflets I recount a line by an enemies best friend that ‘desires are needs.’1
I read anything my mind can grasp and even denser text that it cannot. I know one day the meaning will reveal itself. Maybe nine years later but I believe it all circles back.
I read like a maniac.
When I was eight years old my mother was informed that I was reading at a comprehension level of a college student. When administration tried to have me skip straight to 6th grade, my father said “no,” being one of the only kindness’s that my blood father has ever afforded me. He was firm that a nine year old did not belong in middle school.
I come across an essay by Molly Frances titled ‘Instagram is not a community. It is an audience.” It radicalizes me. Starts a fire under me. Makes me even more fearless about the thought of leaving the industry for good. Molly reflects:
I define a community, in an ideal sense, as a group of people who are bound together through active, overlapping relationships. These relationships generally cultivate security and belonging. Each person has a purpose in the group that allows them to make a valuable contribution, and contributing to the group strengthen ties. Community may also include a consensual sharing of resources. Community is not the same as a network or an audience. I do not consider a community to be a group of people who coalesce around a personality; that is perhaps a fandom or at worst, a cult.
I examine my life and realize what I have been assigning community was merely a sector, an industry.
We coalesced around the most insidious personality yet, (social) capital.
Molly doubles down
An account-holder cannot cultivate a community on this platform by virtue of the power imbalance and relational limitations of the platform’s architecture. Instagram is not built for cultivating community, but an audience. It is a marketplace. Instagram’s architecture is one that, in terms of relational potential, can at best build a customer base for creators or business owners, and at worst foster cult-like dynamics between a leader and followers. Calling a large audience a community is at worst a marketing ploy, at best a naïve misunderstanding.
Molly’s words stick with me. Thinking about the bearings of Instagram, it dawns on me that no world that I can imagine can be built from the structures of a conglomerate. I start thinking about divesting from my 30k+ followers. I start thinking about the wrath brewing at my naïvety re: confusing a network of opportunistic peers for community all because we share the same oppressions.
I become inconsolable following my brothers death, a rape and an ex-situationship, whom I met my rapist through, being consistently on the same line ups after holding me through many moments of assessing the damage from said rape. What solidifies and emboldens my anger is the loud silence of my peers who I watch employ theory through out the years but without an inkling of praxis.
The vicious circle is stifling, a line from Rosi Braidotti, The Post Human. A choir of tongues whispers back to me
then, step outside of it
There is simple power in voicing things; it helps people let go of them.2 I spend 2022, inconsolable. I refuse to stay quiet about my rape or Kirsten or my shitty “community”.
I become a forest fire and begin to burn my life down around me. I know nothing of mulch or the indigenous legacies of arson, all I know is that my anger will not be stifled
My resentments, years in the making, wage war.
Alissa Boyer cites resentment as an indicator that a boundary needs to be set. She helps me understand that resentment is a sign that I have an unmet need. She asks her instagram audience to look at where we could be lacking in boundaries.
In an industry (modeling and music) where boundaries are not honored, my skin is raw with violations, my hands are also bloodied with my own desecrations of others boundaries. I become at peace with knowing I’ll have to contest where my own poor understanding of boundaries have facilitated my own boundaries being intercepted.
Hailey Paige Magee asks her instagram audience to examine the next time they feel resentful:
“Am I resentful because they trespassed my boundaries? Or am I resentful because I trespassed my own boundaries by giving more than I’m actually comfortable giving?”
I am confronted by the ways I have neglected implementing boundaries with lovers, friends, peers and an insidious industry.
I become at peace with losing it all months before a peer of six years, Chelsea Gaspard, calls me out. I wonder if she goes down the same line of questioning as I did when I called out my own abuser and her rape apologist behaviors:
Am I the first to suffer abuse from this person? Remember conflict is not abuse. This is not a question of if this person finds themselves in a lot of conflict, this is an action asking if this person finds themselves abusing those around them. To be in conflict does not inherently translate to being an abuser. Conflict is eternal. For example, land stewards and water warriors find themselves in loads of conflict because their values and world understanding naturally conflicts with a western ecocide oriented government.
Does that mean because these people who find themselves in perpetual conflict, disagreement, heated discussions and debates are inherently abusive because they tend to find themselves in the center of conflict? In this respect, theory and praxis is a form of organized estrangement from hegemonic values.
Does this person have a lot of power and/or visibility?
Can this person harm more people in the future if I keep silent?
Will this person harm themselves if they are not brought to awareness of their abusive behaviors?
Who benefits from me keeping silent? Also, especially when dealing with abusive people who can’t recognize their abusive patterns or abusers who’s self esteem are so cripplingly low they can’t understand their position in harm.3 Abusive people are also harmful to themselves in all the ways self-destructiveness shows up in our lives when we deny, refuse to acknowledge and shift blame when being called out on our harmful behavior. The abuser doesn’t get a chance at rehabilitation, the victim has to fester in silence and more individuals get in harms way.
What the fuck is all this restorative justice we’re trying to integrate into conflict resolution if we don’t start with our own abusers? If I don’t start at the confrontation of my own abusers.
The Rise of Bbybit
Storytelling is not simply for the verification of transgressions but also for the proof of breath. Of the life and redemption that is sure to follow and circle back around. As I am settled quite firmly and gently into a new chapter of my life, a feeling of clarity rests upon my shoulders in my most mundane moments. There are times where I feel like I left behind a war zone in my old life and when I speak on it, write it down, it’s all to say that I was here, that this is a piece of me and this is apart of who I am today.
Sometimes my friends and I giggle like hyenas about the surprise it is to be still alive as the partying we engaged in from the years 2018-2022 were low key enough to kill a grown man. I’ll never forget this one night we did 6 different drugs and the next morning we woke up like… “that can never happen again” and then, it happened, AGAIN. It’s not a laughing matter but the story makes us bust out in laughter every time.
Youth is silly like that. You really do feel invincible.
I am so glad I made it through the delusion of my 20’s. I am so blessed to be alive even with the way we were running through these parties and raves and drugs and trips and and and.
It’s a miracle we didn’t die.
As we approach our later 20’s, near 30’s, it’s really nice to see all of my loved ones decontextualize substance use in our lives. I hope to be malleable enough throughout life to put down a substance before it causes significant harm.
Thankfully, I do not have the gene that is predisposed to addiction. No one in my immediate family deals with addiction and I follow suit, being able to go cold turkey on any substance of choice without a blink of an eye. When I decided to set aside nose drugs, it was mainly because of the climate. Ketamine was mostly my drug of choice, being a versatile substance that I could do most things on, sort of like ganja. I used it ceremonially, to facilitate grieving and keeping in touch with the deceased and recreationally, pulling up to the club or the afters on a bump or two.
Then, I started hearing stories of five peers dead in one night off of the same bag of ketamine. I perform at a Vigil service where a peer of mines best friend is thought to have overdose on a bump. I’m in Mexico city when an affluent DJ has the same fate.
The substance loses its allure. I decide no high is worth my breath.
My relationship with reality-altering drugs is largely ceremonious these days and less recreational. I position them in my lives as a way to reflect the actions of my ancestors. I smoke ganja and pray at a full moon to the indigenous stewards drifting under me in the earth. I chew some shrooms and watch lizards and florida flora, studying how they move in the wind. I put a tab on my tongue when I’m ready to have a fit of belly laughter and soul-crushing cries. It’s all practice to me.
I am almost 24 months off of nose drugs and I decide I’ll offer myself a ceremonious reintroduction involving ketamine, cooked and prepared myself as to confirm no additives are in place, somewhere in CDMX with a lover and a host of caves to explore. I decide to gift that to myself as a treat for the way I’ve reworked the substance in my life. I enjoy drugs enough to respect the power residing in them and humble myself to their spells when needed.
I am not moving towards anything as much as I am returning to the ways before the interruption of chattel slavery, I am returning. Practice is ritual, whether it involves a substance or not. Practice is ritual not simply for a performance somewhere off in the future but as a return to the understandings of myself and my birth right before colonialism. Practice as a return to 13,000 years of culture and Afro-Indigenous science before 500 years of genocide.
I know that every tear shed is one step closer to my ancestors. I know if I am allowing myself to cry about the unmentionables, I am healing from them as well.
I know, I am not (always) brave but I am made brave by my friends which is to say I am made brave by love.4 When I am blind to my own strengths, my loved ones, my witnesses, my families remind me.
I feel compelled 2 tell u that the truth of life that you feel in love and purpose and music and water and soil and soft toys and doggos etc. is yours and mediated through your body. As deep as the pain, so is the love and just an ounce of that is worth cherishing without measure.
Cienna, My sibling
Ed asks “Could I share who you are to me? Would that be okay” on a day suicide ideation is laying down with me in bed.
For me, you have been an extension of love transformed from this earth and only in secure safe spaces rebirth. Or just exposed to me. You have held an energy of love, light and grounding energy for me and even for my students because the things I learn from and with you that I have extended to them. Again, energy is rebirth and extended with care. You are more than usefulness to me. You are a gift, more so.
Tiki reminds me over and over, I am important to the ecology of our world; that I have a heart made of molten lava. One of the most beautiful sentiments a loved one has ever gifted me.
I think about these connections, these waves of emotions, the drugs and the moon and how we are not meant to suffer alone. I also think about the connections I made that were solely built around our shared suffering. I think about the places that I do not connect with others because of our different values around liberation. I think about the places that arise when I forge connection beyond the pains that I and someone else both have experience with, like losing a sibling or reeling in from a rape.
Each day that passes, my desire sharpen and I learn that I want connection that begins with joy and laughter and promise. A promise, a dedication, a will to encourage life beyond suffering, life beyond miscommunication, life beyond dishonesty.
A life in contingence with care.
To allow me in, to mend perceived wrongs is a gift—to shut me out and move forward without involving me in conversation is a shame but it beyond my control. I can only mend what is brought to me.
I can only repair when I am in the loop about something being broken.
I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to bear. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear rejection? Sometimes if I feel all my emotions in public I can’t make myself speak.
But sometimes I speak anyway.
And my first marine mammal lesson was that if I breathe I can still speak even while crying. I can breathe through salt water.
I can live through this mess.
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
I know that the victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim; he or she has become a threat.5
I also do know that I am not going to go back and forth because of the normalcy that is avoidance, passive communication and unspoken social cues we have been conditioned to practice; professionally and personally. Now that I know the conception of these responses to conflict, I withdraw.
I am serious about communication, not running around in circles trying to argue against pedantic individuals bent on dismissing my abuses. Let’s be firm about the knowing that a multitude of interpretations of the same situation, can and will exist and if we’re going to get anywhere, I am not going to speak to anyone using the legacy tactic of drowning out and silencing my lived experience. One party is serious about discrediting my experience in hopes to reduce very, complex and drawn out relationships into a strict understanding that only allows for one of the experience.
When I speak boldly, choosing my words carefully in order to speak accurately to my experience, I know differing responses are a guarantee. I still cast out my experience, because I am equipped to handle the differing perspectives and uphold my own. I can get on the line and be firm about my experience while hearing the other side, empathizing with you or even, contesting you. If me being firm about my perspective launches you into an attack, discrediting, minimizing, dismissing, my experience of the situation then we don’t need any long talk.
If you come at me with attacks, from jump, then let’s ride. I will absolutely strike back using strict language, tact and of course, my favorite tool, humour (:P).
I am not above a good ol’ square up, assuming we are speaking about the verbal kind. If it need get physical, I was raised on that sort of compromise as well. It’s really up to us to decide how we move forward from complex abuse.
We don’t need a compromise, but if we all care to initiate a middle ground, that is of course an option as well.
Or, we can sit and let it fester.
(although, my anger usually dissipates after 2 years or so before I return to my normal disposition that comes from a deep practice of gratitude and spinning pain into proverb. If you don’t have the same response I suggest we do not do it this way or it may lead to some feelings of resentment on your end when I eventually, grow and move on to more embodied pastures), but yes we can also stew about it until we all heal in our own respective ways.
There are so many possibilities!
Some of us get loud, some of us turn inward, some of us learn a new instrument and some of us, wage war. I can get on the line and hear another’s experience and stand firm by my own interpretation while listening to your take and voila! We can begin to give and take to get on the same page. We cant do that if you are bent in deeming my experience as “delusional.”
Since we have been existing in two totally different books ,and that’s how we ended up here in a disagreement, it’s safe to say you might not understand my interpretation because we don’t read the same shit, hold the same values, derive pleasure from the same pools of life or investigate the same rooms within ourselves.
Put simply, we not ripped from the same book.
I am clearly unlike you as you are, most clearly, unlike me.
A knowing worth holding close as we traverse eruptions of devastating conflict.
We can all move towards holding that knowing when confronting conflict but if silencing my lived experience is the sole way you can “prove” the validity of your experience than I am calling your bluff.
Why cant your experience hold up on its own? Does your experience have quite a medley of blind spots held up by your own dishonesties that have circled back to look you in the eye? Maybe you are feeling nervous about the prospect that once light is shed and my contribution to the story, if I am not deemed delusional, insane, narcissistic, abusive or whatever the fuck else, could bring us closer the truth that yes, you were harmful; whether you believe I am allowed to call myself a victim of said harm, or not, is out of the reign of your control.
We are all allowed to own the things that shaped and destroyed us. You do not get to tell me how to respond to the harm, the rape, the dishonesties or the meaning I assign to the harm or what I do now that the hidden harm has been revealed.
As I, do not get to tell any of you how to respond to your own harms, especially the ones I have a hand in causing. I wont tell you not to speak on it; or warn others about it or silence you around it.
Those are my consequences to hold and that is your right.
As it is my right to speak up on the harm I’ve come into contact from you all is mine to hold as well. Perhaps, if we were to be in front of a trained mediator and all the sides were put on the table, we might need to encounter all the ways that we have a hand in creating and enabling the abuses around us.
I am lucid.
I am listening and I have been serious about extending invitations for direct communications re: all and any harmful behavior on my end. With that being said, if that invitation is left to dust then alas! I wont hold my breath. Our lives will continue to hurdle into our expected (and unexpected) trajectories and we will all meet even more gut-nourishing loves, confront even deeper abuses and cry even heavier tears. The good ones and bad (sometimes a binary does a concept justice).
I know myself, very well.
I will always find more compatible love, experience deeper pains and grieve heavier losses. That will always be the case with me. That’s an understanding that I’ve built with my Gods and breed my principles from. I worship the uncertainty and certainty of my life and love has always founded me. Care and safety, too.
That’s how my world is set up. I don’t know about the set up of anyone else’s reality, but that is mine.
We will all have to assign our own meanings to the situations at hand that did not get the chance to be mediated or spoken directly about; because of the overt cowardliness nurtured by industry politics. If we live long lives, then how we respond, now, in this moment will figure if we will continue to be loved ones, work partners, peers, lovers, family and all the other types of relatives we are allowed to be in this life.
All this said, there is of course a window and it is not perpetual. What we do now, affects us later. How we respond now will determine the years to come and the future of our relationships.
But at the core of it, I am not pressed.
Because this is not my center.
Industries, institutions, a social scene, a nightlife sector, is not and could never be the end all be all of my extremely delicate life. My life is quite larger and intrinsically richer than a queer sector of a triangular industry trade route between LA, NY and various european capitals.
I offer a piece of unsolicited advice and urge you all to make sure that your life too is also larger than a triangular trade route.
Words forge. Words are spells. If I said it—understand and hear me very clearly, I meant it. If you wanted better representation, you should have behaved with more integrity. You don’t need to believe me, recognize me or even empathize with me because thankfully, I was born with a sword for a tongue, a knife for eyes and with the hands of a titan and a special knack for synthesizing the ordinary into timeless proverb.
Which is also why you’ll be seeing our story being processed in my art practice.
Not because I am “obsessed” with any of you but because of the voracious nature of my heart and mind. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with making sure I can go on living. This is for my own heart. This is so I can rest easy at night.
My art practice is my flesh as sharpened knives and the webs that use to tangle me now pass through me like wisped air. Yes, the truth has made me freer. Yes, the truth has grown my limbs large like a Big Friendly Giant (The BFG) and now, the set nets are only cobwebs that I cut through unknowingly as I stride *curiously* amidst this life.
In other words, this my pussy and I can do what I want, heh, I’m a big girl now.6
Seventeen
I believe national liberation is possible. A Marxism course I took spring ‘24 illuminated all combined struggles across the global south for me. I feel like a more intimate comrade has been born inside me.
I’m very excited to be used as an instrument for collective liberation. I recognize even more intimately than before how I have abused my own powers in the past by simply not recognizing the power I hold within me. An inherent power imbalance because of social capital, TWEAKS, my diction and spirit that put me in the seat of holding weight over another.
I am learning more about recognizing and acknowledging power dynamics and having checks and balances. The ways I afford myself accountability is by being being clear and concise about where my harm begins and where it ends.
I afford myself accountability by strengthening the act of listening to others. I afford myself accountability by also sifting out projection from others. I afford myself a life full of breath when I face the ways I cause harm with curiosity & gratitude that its being brought to me so I can remedy and course correct my behavior. I afford myself accountability when I communicate to my own abusers and trespassers where they have violated my own dignities.
Thank you for the opportunity (to see my transgressions clearly) and I hope you can also find gratitude in me giving you the opportunity to see your own transgressions clearly when I speak confidently and precisely on the harm caused onto me.
And now, we figure out how to do less harm in our futures, without one another.
Conflict is eternal. Incompatibility is eternal. Discomfort is eternal. Non-abusive confrontation is eternal. Conflict resolution is eternal, abuse does not have to be.
Practice is Eternal
There are years for play and years for dedicated study. There are years we are reminded that we are not entitled to our loved ones breath and years we get to hold them even closer than before.
Let me explain something about self esteem:
A lot of us think self esteem starts from the outside, meaning; it relates mostly if you feel affirmed in your body, by the tone of your skin, the texture of your hair, the measure of your weight, whether you are able-bodied or not, if you are intellectual, if you are deemed ‘desirable’ and all these other markers. And yes, self esteem is partly derived from all of these things, combined.
It is very important for me to feel deep in my body, to feel sensous, to butter my skin and have clean water to wash my hair. It does help my self-esteem to be thin in a fatphobic world. It doesn’t help my confidence to be disabled in an ableist world. It helps my self-esteem to speak english fluently in a post british-imperalist world. It does not help my self-esteem to be dark-skinned in an anti black world. It affirms my self-esteem to be enamored by curiosity concerning my roots. It does not help my self-esteem to confront all the erasure my lineage has been subjected to.
All this to say, yes, we are all at the whims of desirability. These embodied forms we were given and how these forms operate under the domination of whiteness can be rubbed raw when we are not the beauty standard.
This is incontestable. I have watched my position in the desirability matrix fluctuate beyond my control. It’s inconsistency pushed me to look for firmer grounds. The self esteem I have come to know to be eternal is this:
There is the relational value that you practice privately everyday. There is the honesty and integrity that you breathe day in and day out.
You write a to-do list and you build a habit to check off most things for 3-5 years, give or take. Inadvertently, you strengthen an esteem in yourself because the private you understands that you can follow through on your word.
One day you decide to make a promise to yourself to respect your allergens and the foods that upset your gut. You embolden your self esteem because you know now that you are capable of listening and accommodating your body. You make the intention not to avoid conflict and to speak up on your discomfort with your loved ones and naturally, you inject a confidence in yourself regarding your capacity to have difficult conversations.
You now have a practice in exercising the muscle that is your self esteem concerning the way you show up in conflict.
All of these private moments where you honor your needs, have difficult conversations, remedy your mistakes, say no to poor behaviors from others (and from yourself), you don’t eat the mac and cheese at thanksgiving because you know it gives you the runs; these are all moments that affords you a self esteem.
You have granted yourself trust with the person you will breathe your first breath and last breath with, you.
You grant yourself a richer confidence based outside of desirability because you have forged an understanding that you can do hard things. That you are allowed off days because you have enough discipline to still get things done. You can say firm no’s to mean people. You can say fuller yes’s to your loved ones.
This is the self esteem that transcends.
These boundaries you create for yourself create healthier meadows for your self esteem to breathe and warm itself under the spring sun.
So yes, I enjoy the way I dress, the way my laugh rings, how my waist wines when I’m being snake-charmed by the right chune, the way my smile flashes and, of course, how fucking good I look under a blue light but these things are not eternal. I know how good I look. I know how beautiful I am but one day my waist will stiffen with age, my teeth might be worn down with decay; these clothes might not fit my frame how they use to because this body, this beauty, this desirability is not eternal.
These standards of beauty are flimsy and I might not be what it feeds off of tomorrow but I do know, the other realm of my self esteem will live on long after this body returns to dust, long after I flirty and play with the desirability politic unleashed on me, and all of us.
Because I enjoy living in my skin, waking up to my brain chemistry, investigating my feelings, giving myself orgasms and dancing in the privacy of whatever sublet I am in for the month; because I am an embodiment of my deepest pleasures and sorrows, I can hold myself accountable when needed and offer grace when necessary. I can acknowledge my behaviors that I will replace with new tools while I acknowledge the behaviors I will no longer accept from others. I can choose less self-abandoning rituals in confrontation and refuse to be a scapegoat for others abandonment wounds and/or insecurities. I can use my instance of sexual misconduct with a 17 year old when I was 24 years old to strengthen my boundaries around young people and I can recognize that when I lost my virginity at 17 years old to my 24 year old neighbor that those two incidents are not independent of one another and a nod to the the ways we have been taught little to nothing about power dynamics, consensuality and restorative care. I can be sat down by my loved ones when I make a mistake and listen, crucially, while keeping my autonomy centered. I can usher in an accountability meeting with my rapist and explain how his actions severely affected my entire world and also hold a moment of silence for his dying mother. I can bring my alcoholic dependent ex best friend to an intervention after four femme’s come forward about him raping them and host an accountability process that prioritizes his victims and not his comfort, so they can get better sleep at night.
I can, I can, I can and I do, I do, I do
Because these are complex pains. These are historical legacies. These remedied mistakes and seemingly endless patterns are a microcosm of a subjugation pronounced to us the moment we draw breath. We are born into the remnants of chatteled histories. And all of it, every bit of it, can be used as a practice in self esteem.
And practice, if not anything else, is eternal.
Praxis, practice— not in the way that I’m practicing for a final performance but if I go back to the understanding of the Bantu Congo that time is circling, not linear, as eurocentric interpretations suggest, but cyclical and revolving around vital forces.
Looped.
When I speak about praxis, practice, I am speaking about my routines that are moving alongside themselves in the understandings of my lineages relationship with time.
I am embodying over 13,000 years of indestructible, inalienable Afro-Indigenous science.
Farhia Tato
The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malidoma Patrice Somé
Consent.wizardry by Mia Schachter
kaf-ka via tumblr
James Baldwin
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Woah! This was kind of amazing and I’ll be rereading and keeping notes as affirmations to myself. On conflict and harm done to oneself and others and accountability and restorative justice and how to actually exist in relationship where conflict is inevitable. True