Meeks' Musings

My body is becoming a safe space. It is home. I am always here even when my ego and mind are not. I am blessed when I remember myself and the many ways I get to be me. I am blessed period. Aspiring to wholeness, healing, honesty, and protection. Home is me.

Strong ones are misunderstood

Misinterpreted

Misremembered

Strong ones don’t get to show weakness

Softness

Aren’t allowed range

Assumed to just be able to take it

And take more

Strong ones shock niggas when they crack

And shatter

Their wholeness in pieces abandoned

Left to kintsugi their fucking selves

Or remain broken and bypassed

They don’t get credit for strengthening others

Universal donors

Rarely asked what they need

Assumed to just replenish

Easily disregarded

Taken for granted

Despised for speaking first or remaining silent

For being clear

Strong ones are coveted

Mimicked

Resented

Projected onto

First attacked

Last considered

Believed to be unicorns

Desired and feared

Set up by others’ enactments

Punished

Abandoned

She said she’s grown tired of my stories

Yet she’s helped shape so many of them

A part of my tapestry

I can see she’s worn of us

Certainly of me

And I can’t help but be weary, of my damn self and all that I destroy

When I don’t keep it simple

When I try to overcorrect for my childhood

Reparent myself through maladaptive protections and projections

As if that start to this unfinished life ain’t part of my very splendor and power

When I run from or smash into my story

That she’s grown so tired of

So let’s create new ones

And heal

When I was a pre-teen, my mom’s man at the time sat me down after my passive suicide attempt with some pills. I had gotten sick, but didn’t need a medical intervention. Still, I got in trouble for it. Of course. It was a terrifying time. He was like a father to me, having been my advocate many times over, standing up for me, buying me shit. He also proudly abused my mom and had enlisted me in their cycle at times. He had a mix of helpful and outlandish advice, but I was ready for his comfort and the wisdom because I was hurting bad. After all, moms had summoned him to help because she rarely did. By then I had been hospitalized for gastrointestinal problems, would run away and was engaging in risky behavior to be down. I was hurting.

This nigga told me, “Shameeka, there’s no point in doing this. Killing yourself. People will mourn you for a day, maybe even a week and then they’ll go back to their lives.” He said other shit, but I dissociated after that. By that point in my life I had learned I didn’t matter. So this was just reinforcement. Now, it wasn’t true that I didn’t matter, but that’s what people showed me who loved me, whether I acted “badly” or not. That’s what I knew people felt about my mother, my father, so why not me? I mattered to this man so long as he could control me. But I wasn’t a little girl to him anymore. I was becoming a woman and he hated us.

Today, I still struggle with people telling me I’m too much or not enough. Because they think that shit’s still cool to say. But I know that nigga was lying and everyone else who couldn’t hold this big little girl. Everyone today who can’t look themselves in a mirror, but wanna tell me about me. So whether through my rage or compassion, the gifts I share with the world, the gifts I receive from it, I know my fucking worth and live my life as much as I can in that truth. And like him, fuck the niggas who can’t or won’t let me be.

As above, so below.

Strangers aren’t just people you’ve never met or don’t know.

They’re the ones we know and love who choose their ego over relationship with themselves and with you.

Who don’t know you, but try and lay claim.

Who don’t integrate their parts and resent your wholeness.

See it as threat.

These are strangers parading as family, friend, colleague, ally; safe; forever.

Except,

Our intuition can override our seeking-sameness-and-safety brain. Even the blocked and rewired trauma ones.

So trust it.

There are people, even ones you’ve never met, that see you and say “welcome, you’re you and that is beautiful, interesting, not a threat”.

That are complimentary, easy to your nervous system and self esteem.

With whom you can dream and just be, however flawed, however in process.

They walk in accountability and truth and so they walk alongside you in yours and don’t gaslight your existence.

Ones who don’t delight in your isolation and self-deception.

Beware the ones who can’t meet themselves without punishing you as they do it.

That’s just endless water reflection gazing.

Not a reflection of your highest self.

Control and manipulation masking as kinship and brutal truths when you shine.

Meanwhile they’re holding the oil can as you cringe and rust; judging you for being slow, loud and stuck.

They want you muted and agreeable. Defenseless, unknowing, or without advocacy.

These people ain’t your people.

Yesterday, in this raw ass Cancer season with a recent fuck-em-up Capricorn moon, I got to celebrate my 55-year old sister and our almost 76-year old cousin for their birthdays. Gratitude can’t even begin to describe it. As time has moved, or as I have moved through it, I wouldn’t consider myself a family of origin person. Too much has happened to me and those I love that I both understand and don’t, accept or don’t, but have created boundaries around nonetheless, that I may have forgiven or haven’t, and there’s just too much pain and brokenness. Or nothingness. Or people just left fragments in their transition and I refuse to piece them together alone or at the expense of my joy, stability and sanity. I tried that for years and I got other shit to do now, frankly. So I don’t try much to stay connected or at least I don’t overextend myself to do so. Instead I choose some people, mostly unrelated through blood and DNA, and they’re my family, and our drama together is enough. But still, I spent this time with my kin and quickly remembered our immediate ancestors, many of whom were my age (41), or my sister and cousin’s ages when I entered the world in human form. Ages I never considered being and now hope to make it to and past if lucky. It was a welcome mind fuck to be with these now elders who share so much collective history and lifetimes and it’s working on me. It’s softening me and reminds me that we didn’t have to be here, now, in our mostly right minds and functioning bodies. With genuine smiles on our faces. It’s a reminder that even as fucked up as so many people can be in a world that we often devalue, a lot of shit doesn’t have to end our stories. The shit can simply be the jokes and anecdotes we tell each other over some chicken. Asé.

Family be tricky for me. It hasn’t gotten easier to call one my own because the concept of family is illusory. My mother was considered a black sheep and the dismissal, berating and shaming of her that was generally accompanied by other violence helped me peep game early. She was despised for being a childhood victim of rape and mother of many too soon, being strikingly beautiful, aware of it and saucy, and no one ever let her forget her failures, especially her blood. So to me, oftentimes, family ain’t shit. It’s an aspiration, sure, but never a fixed home or without major anguish or sacrifice. I find myself uninspired by it. Both longing for it like an orphan and terrified of being received. Losing parents has both gifted me more of my people and weirdly reduced my access to my lineage. I haven’t felt like I belonged in decades, if ever. Always a visitor, a guest, a charity invite among my own kin. Add my queerness, radical politics and direct conflict style, and it shrinks even more.

For chosen family, I at least understand the arrangement. Yeah it’s more fluid and engaging, I get to be a bit selective, yet it’s still temporary. All of it. People be outing their true selves and acting up. Still I strive towards it, scrapping for what I can hold onto. Aiming to craft my little area of safety and acceptance. Love. But them niggas got they own kin and cliques, and holidays and milestones spell that out. So I drift again until someone notices I’m gone, if they do. Walking between the Venn diagrams of my crews, never really feeling a part of anything. As a kid, I maintained relationships through constancy and dogged dedication, something I learned from being parentified early. But that was one-sided and exhausting. And we know what happens when the glue stops sticking.

So I’m journeying to me to examine this abandonment and hopelessness. I’ve got much to be grateful for, no doubt, because help has usually come and love ain’t far. I just hate the fickle bitch and this persistent ache. Jagged holes carved out early. Loneliness is quite the abuser as she force feeds me self pity and low self-concept. Yeah, I’m not all alone, but tell my heart that. And find my family, my tribe.

I’m learning to reattach to myself; as temporary as I am in all forms.

“Covid wall”, they say. I know I’m over these fucking masks.

They call it anger. It’s fear. They see rage. It’s sadness. They call it violent. They want no parts of it and this only amplifies what I already tell myself; that I’m unloveable, insignificant, forgotten. It’s low self worth. Its trauma. It’s rejection. It’s faithlessness. It’s so much grief.

It’s certainly anger and rage too. But like all things, it’s not one-dimensional. And I’m entitled to it, so I’m drawing it closer. I no longer fear it. I want to understand it, understand me, even if no one else does or can. After all, they have their own shit to work out.