I’m a human again?

I made many promises to myself at the beginning of the year. I threw that list out mid-March, maybe? Because sometimes you really do just need to focus on the present moment, breathe; move into the next moment, breathe. Being back at school was strange. In the time I was away from it, I was so stressed out by how I should be back in it that I never actually managed to get away or find the peace I needed to process college in a healthier? way. I came back, took on a super light course load and was doing alright. Until I had to work on my final thesis and the same lack of support that characterized my four years enrolled reared its head for a final battle. There are ways that academic institutions, administrators, can crush you that honestly should be jailable offences. So much of my current mentality that I have to do everything by myself comes from how much disappointment has characterized my relationships with structures of support since I left home. I’ve been so let down, so discarded, so hurt by people I was supposed to be able to trust. And so yes, I went to this fancy school and did these cool things but at what expense? In exchange for how much trauma? I graduated; and even though the next couple months are still murky, I am so grateful, so absolutely happy, to be finished with this. I feel like a human again. And yes, I still am an unclassed human; a confused human; the kind of human the world doesn’t protect in so many of the expressions of who I am- but I am no longer these things and also a yale undergraduate human. And for that, I am thankful. I can at least look forward, able to breathe again.

A prayer answered

The thing I was thinking about the most this week was the assertion that God is good. In my post about anxiety, I mentioned that I was praying for peace this year– peace and freedom. I wanted to know what peace meant, how I could live it, what it would take for me to attain a state of peace. I think I am learning from within and without, liberatory philosophies that allow me to breathe, praise and live. I said a prayer in a moment of deep distress, and I got an answer. I asked God what His love meant because I didn’t feel it. You say You love me but what does that mean.  Why do I feel pain, why do the physical manifestations of anxiety beat my body the way they do, why can’t I sleep through the night, why can’t my heart beat normally, why can’t I breathe. I shared the answer in these photos I put up on my insta story that I will insert here.

I realized that the foundation of my question of my question was my personal understanding that I deserved a life free of these things. I deserved the good things that happened to me, and I deserved a life full of only those things. I’m a decent human being, I mind my business, why don’t I get to be happy all the time and have things move smoothly.  The answer I got, which might seem counter-intuitive to the point I’m heading at was that I deserved nothing. I didn’t deserve a good life because I was a decent person. I wouldn’t deserve a good life if I never made any mistakes and was always good to other people. Everything I have, everything good thing I have the capacity to be is not because I deserve it, it’s because a good God gives them to me out of His love. I could never earn the right to or deserve to wake up healthy, to have a loving and supportive family, to have the abilities that I do- I have them because God chooses to give them to me out of love.

 

The condition of humanity is stress lol, we have new problems to deal with everyday. We have things fall through, other people’s mistakes cause us harm, we can’t always trust each other. Through all of that, I can trust that a good God who gives me good things is active in the negative situations, and is carrying me through them. He will often not make them disappear but He will always be present to grow me and provide for me through them. So when I prayed and asked what God’s love meant, that was my answer. Even though I deserve nothing, He gives me life, and faith, and love.

 

These Bodies of Ours, pt 2

Thursday night was the most ecstatic I’ve felt in about a year. I was bumping every H.E.R album, then NAO’s Saturn album, then Uncle Burna, just as you do. It had been so long since I just danced in front of the mirror- it’s one of my favorite things to do, and sometimes the music just hits somewhere too real you know.

I was dancing in the mirror, my favorite urban outfitters culottes low slung on my hips, baggy crop top grazing my midriff, marley twists in a side ponytail secured by my favorite headwrap. I felt light and happy. The midriff is my favorite body part- I hadn’t had mine out in a minute though. Over 2016 and 2017 I gained weight, going up about two dress sizes from the size I’d been most of my life. My body is naturally pretty small, but late night Chinese food orders and zero exercise set up tent in my gut and would not leave.  The years before, in 2014 and 2015, I had struggled with wanting to be thinner because I felt like I took up too much space (big black girl syndrome) and because I thought it was the way to be beautiful if you were femme (thin lipstick girl syndrome). Somehow through 2016 and 2017 I gained over 50 pounds and did not even notice it was happening until one time I bought HM jeans and they would not go up past my ankles.

2016 had a lot of sad parts for me- I lived with someone I didn’t know in an apartment that was too dark and had too much empty space. I had a falling out with a friend that I wanted to work out but they didn’t. I lost the romantic love and best friend I’d had for most of my having-romantic-feelings lifespan. It had some really blessed moments too like how I even found that apartment- a true testimony to God’s provision in my life. 2017 was mostly comfortable. I took a class which challenged me and strengthened my sense of purpose. I found a really beautiful community of people. I also had my hardest semester emotionally, and came to recognize that I was pretty unhappy. I was eating badly and not taking care of myself. I was really uncomfortable in my body.

Now, I am almost back to the size I was in 2015, and I know that watching myself dance in the mirror, I feel better that I see my midriff leaner than it has been these last few years. I don’t know how to feel about that. I know I’m the most comfortable in my body when I’m thinner and somehow I have come to equate happy, true me with thin, butt-length marley twists me. I don’t like that because I want to be able to feel good about myself at whatever size, but I think it’s harder because I do associate the time I was thicker with low points in my life. It doesn’t feel like a healthy parallel and I’m writing this so that I can think through it.

Weight and body politics is the kind of thing that growing up I heard people say depended on where you were geographically because different cultures had different aesthetic senses. Now, however, I feel like global fashion culture at least is pretty clear about that thin will always be in. Because I would love to work in the mainstream fashion industry as some kind of a model, that’s really difficult for me to process. I’m torn between knowing that it presents unrealistic body standards and is often unhealthy for young women–myself included; and somehow still wanting it.

I think I’m learning now to look at my body as what it actually is- a temple. I’m learning to take care of myself out of self love and because this earthly body is a gift. I’m learning that beyond thinness, my body is deserving of love however it looks and that healthy looks different on every body. I want to honour it without idolizing it, realizing always that what’s more important is how I use it to serve God’s purpose. I will likely update this blog on how my relationship with my body matures/transforms so I look forward to having other developments to share with you over time.

 

These Bodies of Ours

I am working on a post about my relationship with my body. I am trying to find the words to talk about something I refer to by two names: a) big black girl syndrome and b) thin lipstick girl syndrome. ‘Big black girl syndrome’  is a term I learned from Shope Delano who is one of my favorite humans in the blogging space. Both terms refer to the same phenomenon of wanting to be smaller, thinner, make my body physically take up less space- but for different reasons. Big black girl syndrome comes from the feeling that I experienced being a black woman in very white (lol)  spaces where it felt like I was hypervisible. I felt like I was too noticeable, took up too much space. In the time I felt that way, I weighed so little that winter winds would literally blow me off the ground- like I struggled to not be carried away by a gust. Thin lipstick girl syndrome comes from a feeling that I got as I became more comfortable embracing my femme-ness. (The road to embracing that will likely come up as a post on its own) I think somehow for me, especially in the space of queer, hetero-passing femininity, I started to equate femininity with a certain aesthetic that was very much informed by size 0, high cheekbones, 24 waist, white women. I felt like that was the ultimate beauty/high femme, and honestly I’m still struggling with that. Both resulted in my desire to be thinner and thinner for different psychological reasons, neither of which were healthy. I will figure out how to write about that for next week, I hope. So stay tuned.

I hope you are well, and I hope this year is good to you. I hope you are kind to yourself. Catch you all next week.

 

The spiders come

Sometimes on 31st night services, the pastor  asks the congregation to pick a word for the coming  year. It is typically something like prosperity, or wealth, or joy; and each person centers their prayers into the new year on their chosen word. I think last year, while my head and my lips formed the words abundance and growth, my heart pled peace.

I had never thought of myself as a stresser. One of my best friends’ major pet peeve about me was how chill I was about everything. I always described myself that way very proudly. I was hard to frazzle, and could remain unbothered through any circumstances. About a year ago when I lay in the couch of my empty apartment- immobile and unshowered  for the third day in a row, my heart beat calmed only by the DW Home chamomile lavender candles I kept burning, I wondered how I got there. My trigger was a four page paper I had due for a class I had actually done the reading for. In my head I knew I could do it, and I had done much harder work under more difficult circumstances. But, the thought of it caused my chest to constrict and vomit to choke my throat,  and so I lay there the whole week of November break just reminding myself to breathe.

Freeze frame two  years before that, I lay in my  boyfriend’s twinXL bed, tears soaking his sheets. When he came in to find me crying, he would hold me and ask me what was wrong. My answer was always, ‘I don’t know.’ There’s no real way to describe the depth of sadness I felt, and the spiders in my stomach every time I thought of going outside. And so I would lie there and cry and hope each shed tear  would lighten the weight on my chest.

We would have great nights together when I could laugh for hours, or roast him when we went to dinner with friends at Shake Shack; and I could smile through small talk while checking out books at my job at the school library. Sometimes the smile was a little lopsided because I had just had a conversation with my supervisor about how I couldn’t make my hours because I was too afraid to go outside. Sometimes I checked out  the books silently because my throat was dry from a moment of spontaneous crying. Some nights after we’d gone to some party or chill thing at a friend’s house, I would lie next to him trying not to move too much and wake him up when the sobs shook my body. It felt like there was a void inside that would expand outwards until it consumed me.

The spiders come during the day. They are like family that show up without calling first, and stay far too long. They know you intimately, they know where you go to hide. They know the things that bring you joy and the things that dig you out until the hole in your chest feels tangible. Until you wonder if other people can see it too. The spiders come at night, in the middle of your third glass of rose and the fifth time you tell that story of how your mom is the person you love the most in this world. But not even she can keep them out.

They have taught me that peace is not always silence, and sometimes it means the same thing as growth. I breathe better these days- sometimes without having to tell myself to. I am learning what it means for this body to be my home. How to embrace every emotion it feels without letting it  define me, how to exist when the essence of my humanity is that I am a constant state of flux. Where does the core lie. The spiders cause me pain to the point of numbness, but I also know ecstacy. If my prayer was answered, and my heart got its desire I think it lies in that- I am not the things I feel and my center lies with a power much greater than I, eternally more steadfast than I. This year, my heart and my mind will together pray for peace, and I will follow where it leads me.

 

Writing Again?

Well hello *echo echo echo*

It has been a ridiculously long time since I posted anything on here. I’m a little shocked to find that people still read it though, you guys are such troopers. I kind of ran out of things to talk about, and didn’t really process things the same way anymore so the honest posts I came here for weren’t as real for me. I also found another area of blogging that I am super into ie style blogging- I love being able to pretend I’m Aimee Song or whatever from time to time.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about coming back on here and writing for my own fun again. School definitely adds a dimension to writing that I don’t always have a healthy relationship with, and I really want to be able to just write again, you know. So I’m going to try to ease myself back into this.

I’m thinking I’ll post more book and article reviews in addition to my thinking out loud posts, I feel like this blog was already going that way so it feels like a natural progression? Lmao anyhow. This was just me poking my head round the door to check just how much dust had settled.

Maybe I’ll be back with a chair soon.

Amoafoa

5

Rain nourishes as grey sky chase sun

Flower bloom and dance in wind

Flood will dig out earth

Colours look brighter in a storm

4

There were never enough Mondays

Body sold to keep mind afloat

Now drowns on Sundays

Awaits baptism

Awaits rebirth

Awaits crucifixion

The blood of sacrifice ransom for sin

Stained and broken

Take me back, please

3

Daddy’s scent lingers

In memory

In imagination

Mother’s blood pours

With longing

Forgotten

 

PC : Ofoe Amegavi

 

2

Good leather is leather cured

Whipped into shape

Bent into form

Smoothed into straight silk

Sounds like waterfall

Roars but gently

Black woman why do you resist

 

(PC Neema Githere)