I have encountered a rift in my story. A lift in the tides in which my sealskin (that enables me to traverse to the underworld of creatures, waters, soul-filled and creative life) has been thrust in my direction with the instructions: WEAR ME.
So I have. I have been wearing my creative skin while traversing between the world of mundane humanity and the creative soul-life. Whether it is finding creative ways to get the little children I work with at the Boys and Girls Club to use their brains to create and explore and dream rather than sit and contemplate how much quiet time sucks, reading them Junie B. Jones, doing Zumba with them, drawing DC a picture of him being choked by Uncle Tommy, or dancing away in my pointe shoes- I have been living in a soul-filled life. Where I can jam on my guitar and sing in a musical. And my soul can have permission to gallop freely among the wildflowers.
But traversing between that soul-world and the world of humanity: responsibility, of making sense of that which does not make sense, of being on time, of fighting for being a woman in my sense of what it means to be a woman rather than on societal terms, and trying to distinguish between my own definition of what it is to be a woman versus society’s, and contemplating whether or not the two need to be untangled, IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING.
Sessions with Charlene have taught me that I need a break. There is a part of the day where I want to check out. And so I don’t eat lunch. I am able to numb out the stimulus overload and be in a transient state of robotic motion- not really feeling it all, not really taking it in. Because taking it in is too much sometimes. Then the shame for being a coward hits hard and heavy. And I was CONVINCED I was crazy and not-right-in-the-head for feeling this way. But alas, I found my feminist manifesto that rings true to my soul.
But before I share that with you, I must explain that after I read in Women Who Run With the Wolves about the woman who gets her sealskin stolen from her by a lonely man, she marries him with the promise that he will return what is hers after seven years of marriage. So they marry, have a child, and as the 8th year approached, she asked for her sealskin back. However, the lonely man, so cowardly and selfishly, told the woman that she was bad for wanting to have what is hers because it would leave him alone and the child motherless. So he left. Leaving them husbandless and fatherless. She knew she needed to make the return- so she took her son with her to meet her underworld creature friends. Then sent him back up to the world of humanity to make his own journey of individuation. Leaving him motherless and fatherless. Parentless. Familiarity struck a deep chord within me, and the yearning moved me to contact Mom, simply asking, “Why did you stay with Dad?” and a whole slew of concocted, defensive, surface-level half-truths were given to me. 16 text messages drawn out over 3 days of random reasons whether it be the lawyer John Green, the Guardian ad-Lidem or the financial turmoil he (and subsequently we) were in, as long as the responsibility was on others and not herself, the excuse was given to me.
As perplexed and frustrated as I was that she has never ever ever DUG DEEPER, I didn’t respond. I spoke with Charlene about my frustration that the lineage of women in my family are full of victims of circumstance who do nothing but choose to stick in that circumstance because of X, Y, Z,... for convenience sake, image in society, fear of judgement from others, wanting comfortability. Simply because it’s easier to stay stuck than PUSH UP IN RESISTANCE FIGHTING FOR WHAT YOUR FUCKING CHILDREN DESERVE. However, I fear that this anger is misplaced. Because Charlene explained that when people have been surviving a certain way for so long- that is simply what they are used to. They don’t know anything else. They don’t know they can dig deeper let alone how to actually do so. So they don’t. No matter who it hurts or how. They continue on blindly with the diploma from the institutionalized perpetuation of profoundly sick societal norms, on the conveyor belt of acceptable whos-its and what-nots- each as replaceable as the other. Because they have no vibrancy, no sparkle, no depth. Nothing they stand for other than existing as skeletally as possible. And that is not the group I belong in.
Here is a bit of the background of the group belong to: (Feminist solidarity):
Thanks to Sara Ahmed, these experiences of SENSATION have left me with a consoling comfort in feeling wronged by the world.
She talks about unwanted advances from men, about being touched by a man while she was out jogging, how her body served as memory:
“A man whirled passed on a bike and put his hand up the back of my shorts. He did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. I stopped, shaking. I felt so sick; invaded, confused, upset, angry. I was the only witness to this event; my body its memory.
My body its memory: to share a memory is to put a body into words. What do we do when these kinds of things happen? Who do we become? I kept on going. I began jogging again, but it was different: I was different. I was much more nervous. Every time someone came up behind me, I was ready, tense, waiting. I felt differently in my body, which was a different way of encountering the world..
Experiences like this: they seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body, so that you feel like you are carrying more and more weight. The past becomes heavy. We all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen. You find a way of giving an account of what happens, of living with what happens” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 23).
On Friday, June 28, I sat James Jewett down on the semi-plush, way-too-big-for-our-shoebox-apartment bed and told him there is a feminist manifesto that spoke to my soul. I finally found it. And I told him it was important to me that he not only listened, but understood it to the best of his ability. He told me he would.
I read the above passage to him. Because not only does it call on the very parts of my existence that have been shoved down into a vortex of avoidance for a majority of my life in order for me to get on with living, but they are the very aspects of me that make me me. Living with the consequences of being afraid of sensing the world in my own body lead me to wanting to disappear all together; whatever that meant, by starving, by numbing out, by drinking, by avoiding feeling at all. Ahmed says it best when she says:
“At the time, each time, something happens. You are thrown. These experiences. What effects do they have? What do they do? You begin to feel a pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body in touch with a world can be a body that fears the touch of a world. The world is experiences as sensory intrusion. It is too much. Not to be assaulted: you might try to close yourself off, to withdraw from proximity, from proximity to a potential. Or perhaps you try to deal with this violence by numbing your own sensations, by learning not to be affected or less affected. You might stay silent. You might not tell anyone, say anything, and burn with the sensation of a secret. It becomes another burden: that which is not revealed. Maybe you adopt for yourself a certain kind of fatalism; these things will happen; what happens will happen; whatever will be, will be.
The violence does things. You begin to expect it. You learn to inhabit your body differently through this expectation. When you sense the world out there as a danger, it is your relation to your own body that changes: you become more cautious, timid; you might withdraw in anticipation that what happened before will happen again. IT might be your own experiences that lead you here, to caution as withdrawal, but it might also be what you have learned from others. You are taught to be careful: to be full of care as to become anxious about the potential to be broken. You begin to learn that being careful, not having things like that happen to you, is a way of avoiding becoming damaged. It is for your own good. And you sense the consequence: if something happens, you have failed to prevent it. You feel bad in anticipation of your own failure. You are learning, too, to accept that potential for violence as imminent, and to manage yourself as a way of managing the consequences” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 24).
James, at this point, was crying. Tears rolling down his face. Telling me, “I’m sorry Teenies.”
I told him, “my body ‘members.”
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