Day 41 of 100 Days of Blogging: Gravity
Today things feel heavy, heavy to be productive and constructive, a heavy lift to move forward. I tell myself its not because of the National Election because I don’t think the outcome will change my or my community’s circumstances one way or another. But actually maybe that’s precisely the heaviness, the tension.
I do the mindfulness and the meditation, I am grateful and count my gratitudes;, thankful for my independence, for my life, for having paid work, for having food, for having people who love me, for having a computer on which to type and publish this blog.
And also sometimes consciousness is ominous. But most importantly, what I’d like to figure out is how to sustain a creative process in the midst of collective and individual energies of turmoil, how to empower myself through Afropessimism . I’ve made a commitment to creative expression because it is an act of healing and self work to express, to create a wall of resistance against erasure. I want to leave a legacy, to whom I’m not sure at this point, perhaps just to my future self, but I made a commitment to at least try to express in ways that are authentic and true for each moment of expression, a #mood. I want to leave a dialogue, a conversation with myself as an exercise of presence. Today, I realized that being in relationship with oneself is a victorious gift, for so much trauma is experienced in relationships with others, and often with a latency in realization regarding what happened, an emotional residue.
Some days, the step forward in self actualization feels lonely. But loneliness is just a story, like all the others but a captivating story none the less. But rather I feel temporarily lonely than forced into psychosis encouraged by any number of several forms of institutionalization I have been so fortunate to avoid (hospital, mental health facility, prison, etc). Rather I count the blessing of opportunity to focus on self-actualization in honor of all of those who have not been as fortunate to avoid the aforementioned institutions, and rather I not regurgitate a narrative of de-valuing the texture and quality of transformational solitude in the safety on an apartment that I call my own.
Today I was remembering how healing from trauma is a process like grieving…sometimes it comes in waves, sometimes its triggered by something seemingly random, and sometimes the realizations and healing feels empowering, other times it feels like drowning. How do we create space and freedom of movement to stretch and regenerate cells, to create new neural pathways, to push past the gooeyness that arrives before the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis.
Sometimes I’m peering out the window, looking down onto the street in my NE D.C. neighborhood, but I’m actually looking into a time capsule where we’re sitting on the porch smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, or we’re walking hand in hand into the sunset making jokes in a language half psychic, half dialect particular to us two, and other times I’m picturing your face and what it looks like when I’ve lost contact,….the expression of hatred and violence, real or imagined, emotional or physical. It all swirls into threads that make up a textile of experience, a social fabric. I’m not sure how to let it go. is it even possible?
I try and figure out how to create a larger imagined vocabulary of how to treat myself and how to manifest the ways I want to be treated. But the social data is so noisy sometimes! So perhaps the solitude of the moment, of distancing ourselves from the threat of virus,(both physical and social illness) is a kindness bestowed to those who follow distancing guidance. Quarantine beckons me into a creative imagination in respect to the social production of connection, to reimagine what makes us human.
Is gravity heaviness, or grounding, and is there a difference?
