One thing about me… I’m never at a loss for words.
I thought committing to a bimonthly, moon-based cadence of self expression would be easy peasy for me. I have so many mental blooms in a two-week span that my garden should be flush with flora ripe for the plucking. Yet here I am, two days beyond my intended dispatch date and still resisting the process to hold, nurture, and release something. I am a beginner in the realm of public practice, and I attempt to foster joy by framing the share as an act of loving and respecting myself. But when I think about creating something that I know will be shared, a switch flips in my brain to decenter myself: to put the focus on the audience. Imagine them. Their perspectives. Their needs. From which parts of me could they most benefit? I catch the ways I try to commodify myself. I disconnect. I delay, hoping a bolt of inspiration will sear through all doubt before distribution day. But the day comes and I work myself into a frenzy trying to release anything. And suddenly, in an ocean of possibility, all this clam wants is to snap shut, contradicting the initial desire that brought me here.
So in an attempt to bring flow to what stagnates, I am turning this obstacle into the path itself. Stepping into my identity as a creative, I want to learn to love the process. To do that, I’ve got to untangle the lingering scripts that concern obsession with outcome, the pursuit of perfection, and how doubt works to feed the cycle of mediocrity.
As an avid reader and teacher of other people’s writing, the power of the word has always enchanted me: the magic of black and white markings on a page coming to life inside the mind, inducing physical responses in the bodies of others. A gasp, a chill, the rush of love, a flash of pain, a twinge of regret. The possibilities are endless. Except, when one identifies as critic rather than creator, the imagination can only hold being on the receiving end of someone else’s magic. In her most recent post, ismatu gwendolyn references this power of making people feel something, and the responsibility that comes with it. This is a power I never considered within my reach until recently, and I must say that it scares me. The idea of wanting it scares me. The idea of having it scares me. The idea of fumbling it scares me. I want proof that I’m worthy of wielding such power. I want to know I’ll be good before I invest the time to build the skills. I want to know the hard work will be “worth it.” I want to see my fruits before growing roots.
It embarrasses me to write this, yes, but this is bigger than me. I am not the architect of this framework.
On Sunday, I attempted to record this week’s dispatch from a picnic table by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I pulled some oracle cards and used the texts I had with me for bibliomancy, but what I stumbled upon needed time for reflection.
Number 20- Lighthouse: don’t doubt your worth
Number 43- Spaceship: don’t be afraid to sing
I pulled out my copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I turned to page 43. He’s describing how white America has become so afraid of sensuality that we no longer understand it.
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving, to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”
Attuning oneself to the senses
Expanding the depth to which one is allowed to feel
Being present through the days
Experiencing joy and an inner peace that sustains
I walked the length of the bridge and back, singing a Wicked-inspired playlist at the top of my lungs.
Shit. How do I keep forgetting that the vast majority of inner turmoil is just the machinations of white supremacy instilled to keep Empire alive? Instilled to keep us burning ourselves out at the grindstone, confusing pleasure and rest for functional freeze, numbing and distancing ourselves from our experiences so we have just enough strength to show up again tomorrow. Just enough time to regurgitate the talking points from the morning news we overheard on the way to work. Not enough to ask questions, though. Not enough to get to know ourselves outside of our obligations. Not enough to see that it’s more than the bread they’re poisoning now, as they expand their corruption to new avenues by which we continue the cycle of work, collapse, consume, work, collapse, consume. Looking left and right to make sure we’re still at least keeping up with the Jones’s. The never-ending war of late-stage capitalism is waged against the self-trust of the privileged: that’s how they cultivate our buy-in. If we allowed ourselves to truly feel, we couldn’t keep showing up to the daily indignities that grant us our sense of security. We’d confront the pain we bury rather than paying it forward to those we consider beneath us. We’d finally learn that, in sovereignty, there’s no such hierarchy at all.
But I can hear my Papaw’s voice now:
“They wouldn’t call it work if it was supposed to be fun.”
The implied connotation of misery associated with effort meant that I framed “work” as tasks performed to satisfy an external entity or obligation. Which also reveals an interesting association with the concept of “having to” do something. This usage leads to questions like “Am I being forced to do this?” or “Will I receive punishment if I do not do this?” In this context, work is not simply performing tasks for an external entity; it is elevating the entity to a position of authority--having dominion over my individual success or failure, pleasure or punishment. We are trained from childhood to sacrifice our sovereignty to external forces. (Though is it truly a sacrifice if we never knew it was ours to begin with?)
Throughout my life, I tried to get my lick back by rebelling against these oppressive systems, but the means doubled down on my self-sabotage: missing much-needed sleep to reclaim agency after a long day’s work, skipping hard conversations with loved ones just to forego an argument, ordering takeout to save myself the tedium of shopping and cooking. I made choices that prioritized convenience to claw back “free time” I would then spend frozen in front of the TV. Bit by bit, I chipped away at the little ways I could have cared for myself under the guise that I was, indeed, caring for myself. In a world this carceral, this extracting, the only “safety” I could find in my version “self love” was in offering myself absolution for neglecting the search for my needs beyond numbing.
Fuck. That hurts to say out loud.
My burnout is part of my complicity in the success of Empire.
Only recently have I experienced the drive, the passion, the inner compulsion, to create. To do “work” for myself and to serve others from the overflow. And it is rewiring my brain, this possibility of exerting in honor of oneself rather than in exploitation of oneself. This is the power of artwork, of creativity, fueled by passion and pleasure. By learning to love (and be present in) the process rather than rushing to the outcome. By saying the words that want to be said without giving my power to how they’ll be received.
I’m reading and studying again. I’m writing. I’m moving my body and talking to my ancestors. I’m cooking and cleaning as devotions to my health and pleasure. I’m allowing myself to feel. And in the process, I’m rescuing my creative life from the confines of capitalist norms of success and superiority, of profit and praise. I’m beginning to recognize my gifts and talents, and to puzzle out the ways that my unique experiences will combine to serve my purpose within collective liberation.
So with grace and space, I accept the mess of unlearning within the pleasure of my public practice.
I’ll leave you with an affirmation that has carried me through Sagittarius season:
“I am the Magician; I learn my lessons; I recombine the remnants of guilt, shame, powerlessness, self-righteousness, and perfectionism—transmuting them into calm, clarity, connection, courage, compassion, and creativity.”
Til Next Time,
Meg
Support my friend Aya, her sister Amani, and the rest of their family to survive in Gaza here.
Share this post