“Our bodies are flashlights toward our ancestors” - Fariha Róisín

I’ve been thinking hard about the person I am — I don’t know who that is and who I’d like to become next. This idea I'm playing with right now, this sense of impermanence, is because of a bit of an “ego crush” I had recently. “Crush” instead of “death” because my ego prevails but she is mangled, different. She’s hypercritical and scared of what I’ve done to her. I am scared too. I am scared of this hard-to-see other side we speak of because I know it is not the one often promised. Still, I know I can change things for the better. I’m deciding which tools to use first.

Starting backward, I was listening to a lot of Baldwin last night. He comes to me in times of crisis, likely because he sits with crisis so beautifully. He handles the warped nature of humanity with a surprising amount of grace. It is not controlled, but with the grace of a dancer flowing with the music no matter how chaotic or aggressive it rises and falls. It’s not an easy style of living; it’s one of surrender that he seems to hold with him philosophically. I find myself drawn to revolutionary types obsessed with integrating the failing of our world with daily living. I’m finding this is tricky to sit in union with. I am not an activist type, at least not in the way I imagine them to be. I hate protests: walking in the street, no sense of direction, surrounded by people, the overwhelm of movement. Protests are exhilarating in a similar way to running, feeling what the body can do when pushed up against the limit lovingly until you must slow down to a jog.

I am not an activist. I’m a little thinkfeeltank in my room, crying on my yoga mat because there are still children dying in Gaza and they average around 5-9 years old. I oscillate between crying for myself and the world these days. I felt this strange sense of derealization the last month (starting around the year anniversary) that broke around early November (the day after the election). I’ve been scrambling to decipher the pieces for meaning since.

“This world is fake,” Bisan Owda said once. These words are pebbles embedded beneath skin between tendons and bones. Little cancers.

How can one live in a world that exists in this way? Naturally one must die. To literally die would be easiest, the light sleep of escapism for the rest of time. I think it’s funny Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pretty much any spiritual faculty you encounter frown so highly on self-murder. They are obsessed with staying in a world they detest so much despite the joint understanding that the world is a playing field for gifts in the beyond as if the threat of suicide’s aftermath is enough to keep anyone from tapping out early.

I used to dream about killing myself all the time as a teenager. As a kid, I couldn’t conceptualize the notion. I’d spend my nights researching each method in detail, the logic, the symptoms, something about Google witnessing my macabre enticing me. I wished for a hand to reach out from my screen and push me into a reality worth living for. Ironically, I stopped over contemplating death after 2016. I had a future to plan for. College and leaving my parents and all.

This notion of “we’re all going to die” right now feels a bit like Vanessa Hudgens's 2020 Coachella video to me. As if any of us have ever been exempt from death. So if we will all die some way or another, and self-murder is off the table — plus the urge to kill one's self is always a rallying cry to not only survive but to thrive elsewhere — then what does it mean to live right now?

I kept seeing these “wake-up call” declarations after Trump’s re-election. It was the stats of the popular vote and all the demographics backing him, many surprising and unsurprising. I got so angry I wrote a little rant on my story at 7 AM, the day after my mental circuit breakage.

About a week later, I understood the wake-up call for some may not have been “the system is broken” but just how broken it was. For me, the wake-up call was, “No one is here to save you. You are alone”. This is a lie of course. But my mentally ill brain wasn’t reacting to the election. It was reacting to the election and the one before that, and when Trayvon Martin passed, and that feeling I’d get in my house when my dad would start yelling a little too loudly.

No one prepares you for what happens when the thorn stuck inside of you is pulled. It's a leakage that unearths not just your hurt, not just your trauma, but the trauma of the lineage before and the world around you. I don’t see this election as a moment in time at all. I’m seeing a seemingly endless cycle of human suffering chosen over and over and over again.

I was watching Spirited Away on Wednesday after I left work early because I couldn’t stop crying without warning. I was broken inside in a way I did not yet understand. My only memory from 2016 was coming to school and hearing about the Yee Yee Brothers terrorizing Latinx students at my school while my Republican classmate oscillated between smugness and embarrassment at the glorified clown becoming president. How was I supposed to know I would care this much about the results? I still can’t say how I feel about it all.

In Spirited Away, there’s a scene where a supposed stink spirit comes into the bathhouse, his smell so revolting it scares the staff. Chihiro, renamed Sen, is tasked with cleaning him. She tries utilizing the best in-house herbal washes, making not even a dent of progress in cleaning. As she swims around, she finds a thorn in the spirit’s side. The bathhouse bands together to remove the properly stuck thorn. When she pulls, a string of pollution is released, freeing a river spirit that gives her a gift as a thank you. I didn’t realize at the time that I was watching a message, one I had completely forgotten from the first time I had watched it eight months prior:

The current theme is release and I have yet to explore what that means — releasing the past, present, and future. Maybe a release of what we thought was. Release being the process of purging, letting it all go, every weight every burden. Laying down weaponry and extra supplies. Release the birds that fly into the sun, wings melted, wax collapsing into the sea.

Release a neutral stance of being, regenerative and destructive all at once. I pulled the Ten of Wands last night and it talked about letting go of burdens that were never ours to begin with. So where do I put the generational trauma, the stray desires for fame and power, the need for validation and radical acceptance? It’s all lost inside of me, fragments of the sludge coming up during a breakdown or a fallout. I imagine the thorn being pulled out of the river spirit in Spirited Away, and an endless string of debris and memory lost inside of it. So much pain, so much history.

In my James Baldwin diving last night, I watched the first half of his talk with Nikki Giovanni. It’s notorious, with one of the quotes most famous to me coming from Giovanni.

Watching them, I realized how they both circled around the points the other was making, too determined to be understood. Writers are obsessed with being understood. It’s what drives this form of robust communication — all these words just to convey the nuances of the human condition.

In their discussion of the relationship black men and women have with each other — a conversation that is still killing us to this day — you see a split not just from a gendered perspective, but a generational and philosophical one as well. Baldwin articulates the reality of the black man during his time; the abuse sustained during the day that threatens one’s manhood. That anger is then transmuted and taken out against black women, the only group “subservient” to them. Giovanni counters that a) Black women of the 70s are not willing to be so docile and that b) Black men shouldn’t feel so comfortable acting out with so much vitriol. Giovanni wants a man to be a man and to show up as he is nothing more, without abusing others in the process. This is a reasonable and rational request. Baldwin argues that her request is noble but unrealistic because these are imperfect humans we’re talking about. Men are driven by a desire to provide and be treated with respect, two things black men struggle to do under the restrictions of white supremacy.

To me, they both carry very important ideas. We need to have empathy for the conditions we are experiencing. To act in a theory space only ignores what drives humans to act the way they do. To ignore the sense of powerlessness Americans feel just so you can jump to a solution faster is unrealistic. It’s trying to live a healthy functional life without addressing the trauma living inside of you. It’s trying to exercise when your broken foot still hasn’t fully healed. We jump the gun in an effort to reach perfection without realizing how much we leave behind.

Inversely, to accept human tendencies with no criticism is ludicrous. We are not enslaved to our humanity. We are not subservient to fear and insecurity even under a system that encourages us to be. Imagination is key to revolution big or small. The child’s ability to imagine a beautiful life away from a parent who terrorizes them will keep them alive much longer than succumbing to the fear being embedded in their psyche. Imagination drives us to grow and evolve. Any limitation to how we could be is a disservice to ourselves.

I say all of this because I have been taking a break and working inside out. I am pulling out the wreckage to understand how we got here — how I got here as it is one and the same — and working to imagine where I want to be.

What’s been getting me down is knowing I cannot escape this journey. This samsara of suffering must be dealt with head-on — I see no other way to prevail. So I will no longer imagine escapism, feel the “joy” in the illusion of being “elsewhere”. Because wherever you go there you are and I am not a safe place to be right now. I’m not evil or good just this middle ground to cultivate a different thing entirely. I don’t know what that will look like across the world. I cannot solve it on my own or with my friends just yet. I have to dig inside for the light and follow where it leads.

If there’s anything I can say right now it would be I’m committed to learning for myself and forcing myself to not isolate in this journey. So I’ll share it with you. I’ll share it and talk to people about it and branch out. I’ll see where I land despite it all.

And I know you will join me too.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe