The Aftermath of an Accident pt II

on healing, being in community and evolving

My husband, Anaya, looks tired. Not the kind of tired that circles the bottom of my lids like half moons, hanging and sallow, but tired under his skin. The hidden kind. The kind that has etched remembrance on his bones and sutured up their work with too much St. John’s wort. His exhaustion can be found in his mitochondria- on a cellular level, compounded with worry and I want to tuck my small satchel of worry dolls under his pillow and sometimes I do. Give it to them, I say. I cast above him and towards him. I tuck stones and sigils into pockets and the sleeves of folders he most likely will never see. I whisper prayers unto him during the moments his body is able to access stillness and reprieve. I wonder if it will subside- this soul tired. I know it’s a fool’s dream to think I am able, he is able, we are able, to number the days now. How many times will we have to begin again? I don’t have the answer and so I make us tea and I strengthen myself and I wait.

His brother Rei has been in the hospital and recently nursing home for 116 days. 116 days of worry and you can see it on faces and hear it in tone. 116 days since Rei went for his nightly walk. 116 days of only brief glimmers of Rei before the accident. In the photos Anaya takes when he visits, Rei‘s knees have transformed into those of a knobby teenager but more so. You can see his knees and know they don’t belong to a pre-teen but a 40 year old man. You can see too much. Anaya puts booties infused with shea and aloe on Rei’s feet to combat that lack of attention to detail, something he hates, but after more than a decade spent in disability advocacy and policy work he understands. You can’t ask for too much so you don’t. You do however wear your ACLU badge whenever you visit because Anaya is a lot of things and fucking around isn’t one of them. He trims Rei‘s beard and puts sheet masks on his face. He texts me, he remembers! he came back! but just for a too-quick 20 minutes and it was sweet but not enough and I think it never will be. Don’t leave me again. Stay here. I wonder how many more moments he will have with him. Neither of us talk about the obvious, not yet. What if there aren’t any more?

Part of the How To in caring for a life, a person, a brother that cannot care for themselves that spans more than 1000 miles is to care for oneself. I ask that you stay here with me for the following because they’re interconnected and if you’re still enough I think you’ll be able to connect the dots yourself. Stay here awhile?

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I intentionally requested my social media followers to ask me for suggestions on what to do after the election results. Sure, to give them the names of boots-that-have-been-on-the-ground organized folks but to shift the conversation. To first and foremost, gently, ask what they’re doing in their day-to-day. The life that is within arms reach. The life that exists on their block. In their kid’s school. In their bed, in their books, in their homes. Because Black women and women of color have been screaming this forever. People do not need more Us and Them. Folks don’t need you to take your kids to encampments twice a year to “see how others live.” Sure, most boots-already-on-the-ground will gladly accept and welcome whatever help they can get. But what happens when you go home?

More of the same. This is why we are stuck on this hyper-loop of finger pointing and shame. If you want to care about what’s happening around you, you first need to care about you and yours. And that’s what folks, white folks, don’t want to hear. This might seem counterintuitive, counterproductive but hear me out.

Note: nothing that I am writing here is novel or new. In fact, I’m intentionally sparing us both the lengthy text of how-to’s because they already exist.

Things I recommend reading right now-

Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey

Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Any of the books in the Emergent Strategy series

It is not enough to read a few intersectional feminist books. It is not enough to help with the holiday meal once a year at the local shelter. It is not enough even to direct funds to grassroots efforts one time. It’ll help for a minute but it will keep us on this same hamster wheel because folks don’t like to look at the ugly- they want to be a hero and they want to go home.

Us and Them

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I wasn’t always like this.

I wasn’t well informed, I wasn’t focused on harm reduction and have absolutely been part of the problem- I always will be because no matter the books and the therapy and the talks and the workshops and and and I am and will always be white and racism is threaded into my bones and courses through my veins. I am inherently racist as a white person. You are inherently racist as a white person. I don’t talk to my father or other members of my family because of this. Because I sent an aunt articles on why reverse racism isn’t real and we don’t have time to continue to argue with folks that choose to be willfully ignorant. Don’t want to. I was mostly apolitical as a kid and a teenager and a young adult- at least the way we frame and think about politics today. It wasn’t part of my world and while I grew up with extremely diverse surroundings a lot of my family is racist, transphobic, and homophobic. The worst kind, I think. The armored-by-humor kind. The well meaning kind. The kind that thinks reverse racism exists and the kind that doesn’t think that trans women should compete in sports. I could’ve quit selling drugs. I could’ve quit the MLM job (cult) I was part of. I could’ve quit the sex work before I had the language for Sex Worker. I could’ve done all that and enlightened myself but that didn’t happen for many years.

It is your responsibility to become more ethical, less racist, more informed, less individualistic than you were raised. period.

I wish I didn’t say or do the things I have said or done in the past. But I’m here now because I’m better informed. Because I was able to get out of survival mode after 30+ years. Because my world stopped being so internal and insular- rooted in just staying housed or just staying protected or just trying to get high.

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Part of decolonizing our brains is to not only be a consumer and voyeur of Black art but to put the words into practice. To steep them into our daily lives. If Tricia Hersey says rest, I’m going to rest. I am going to first and foremost tend to me and my healing so that I am able to be a better and more informed steward of community. This is what the world needs more of especially from white women and femmes- especially white matriarchal figures because lord knows we’re not getting this from the patriarchy. So many people are flailing in their day to day- do not have a grounding practice, a rest practice, a community practice. For those that show up big in organizing spaces that are not tending to themselves, their families, their surroundings- this is not showing up. This continues to perpetuate the Us and Them that keeps us here. If we can’t have hard conversations with ourselves, our friends, our family, our partners, how do we expect to show up for, and with, community? People often don’t like this take, my take, on mutual aid which is simply- if someone asks for help whether it be an unhoused neighbor or a person on Facebook that needs $20 for transportation, give it to them. That is mutual aid. You’re not expecting anything in return, you don’t need to have your photo taken of you doing the work.

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I’ve been spending time thinking about all of the versions of me. The ones that are clearly captured and displayed on social media- a time capsule of more than a decade of all of the me’s that have existed, and the ones that only exist in the corner of my brain and others’. Some days when I haven’t done a great job of taking care of me slivers of shame creep in. An old me creeps in and unpacks a handful of polaroids, this is who you are. I don’t see myself as any version of arrival but a slow stir- clockwise to infuse love. I see each version of myself the same way I see my mother in my dreams. Each one standing at the window and two hands holding each face, a kiss on each cheek. Hey, you look well. Hey, you seem like things have started to look up. Hey, I remember you. I then realize I don’t entertain shame for any versions of myself but rather softness- at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself anytime I feel that familiar sensation near my root- who do you think you are. I am a becoming. A transmutation of generational tears. Here, take a jacket. Hey, I saved that letter you wrote. Here, you forgot these memories and I think you might want to see them.

I never stopped loving you. I continue to evolve like daisy chains turned to lamé, like wide leg came back to wide legs and I stretch my arms out to each of them and thank them for what they’ve taught me. That one was for survival. That one for softness. For unraveling. For grounding. I love each of them like I love my babies because I finally realize that is what they are. I no longer believe that I will come to any sort of destination- I don’t believe there will ever be a time that I’m done. Instead of being overwhelmed by this I find comfort in knowing that I’ve come such a long way. I have such a long way to go.

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Go to therapy. If you can’t go to therapy, figure out a reading and in-motion practice. Fix you if you want to help fix the world. Raise a different generation. Rest, really, just rest. Take the time to unlearn and unpack with your kids. Don’t be a safe person for racist folks to run their mouth. Tend to the land. Take your Facebook rants and turn them into conversations with your families. Begin to understand that everything we touch and see in this country was founded on and to the oppression of enslaved and Indigenous folks. Everything? Everything. From the systems that build our “democracy”- look up how and why the electoral college came to be. Look up and unpack how the BMI index was created, a tool still widely used today. Take the time to learn about gentrification in your area. Research what food deserts are and where they exist. Take the time to learn about the school-to-prison pipeline. Unpack why you think the carceral system is ‘good’- who benefits from it and who continues to be largely impacted. This is what it takes- you have to learn and you have to decolonize and you have to do different. You have to heal because even as a white person you are negatively impacted every single day yourself.

One of my greatest a-ha’s I’ve ever had was looking back on my perfectionism and how it was born from and for the patriarchy and therefore the pervasiveness of colonization. I did all the things for every one, all the time. I had zero boundaries, I did until I was exhausted and then sick, I did because there were parts of me that wanted to do but mostly I realized I did because I was wanting something in return. I wanted somebody to do the same thing for me. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be loved unconditionally. And instead of doing these things for myself or better yet, stopped doing things for people that were unable to love me the way I wanted, I kept at my same cyclical exhaustion. Today I can barely look at photos of when I first left my ex-husband when Moonie was 4 and Little was 4 months old. They bring me to tears every time because I can still feel that version of me- searching and clawing and doing because I thought I had to. Rarely was there actual intention behind any of my doing besides if I do this well or enough or right, if I do it all, I will be loved. I still do. I will never not be a do-er but what I have learned is that the best version of whatever I am trying to give or do has to have intention behind it and in order to have clear intentions I have to be well. I have to be rested. I have to be able to enthusiastically choose yes to the doing and know when to say no or not right now. I had to do long before children should have to and that turned into an endless void, a hole, where my dignity and self-preservation should have resided. My instinctual protection became a black hole that drove the car of my thoughts and actions for the majority of my life. If I do and do it perfect I will be loved. It turns out the less I did and the less perfect I tried to be, the further I untethered from colonizer mindsets of what role I play. The more still I became and the more listening I did I was able to get to a place where my rest and wellness were foundational to the type of person and wife and mother and friend and community member I am able to be. Perfectionism is a by product of racism. You don’t need me to tell you.

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I hope you’ll begin again with us, as we are often faced with. I hope that you will begin your own searching and seeking. I hope you will begin with you and yourself and let it trickle down to those you touch daily and allow it to spill onto others. I hope you’ll set aside your shame for a more rewarding payout- the kind that comes with the understanding that if you are unwell you are unable to care for others the way I know you want to. I hope you will find a rest and ritual practice and I don’t mean through sigils and saining but even through active listening, exploration of your lineage and ancestral grief, through questioning the things you were taught as a child and again as an adult, through listening to new perspectives- the kind that forces you to sit with a reckoning that only you know how to reckon with. I hope you’ll understand that there is a different way and it’s already been written, you just have to be willing to receive. Like Lama Rod Owens said, “The werk of liberation includes the work of resting, grieving, and releasing… just as much as the work of direct action and organizing our communities.” Let someone take care of you like Anaya and I tend to each other and then reciprocate back to the ones that need it. Not because you’re waiting for something in return but simply because you meant it. I hope you heal.

Biggest Love,

AR

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Currently Reading: Family Meal by Bryan Washington

Currently Cooking: all things warm and generous- green chile and still this squash pasta

Currently Listening To: blues. Blues guitar gets me every time

What’s Next: I’m teaching a biscuit-making class on December 8th via Zoom at 12 pm MST. Specifically, I am teaching the recipe from my micro-bakery Butter Moon Bake Co. There are 2 spots left and I love being in community this way- over food and teaching what I know and love.