Author: amini4

There are epic books in me waiting to pour out. But first some clearing and healing. And maybe a few chapters at a time.

One day you’ll stop being their favorite, so you must be your own.

What if what you think, believe, and ruminate on just isn’t true, or isn’t the only truth? How tightly must you cling to this story, to these thoughts? What are you trying to prove? And why must you be right?

When each rise is greeted by belly aches, a tight chest, the sharpness of tears in the throat that have somehow escaped past the first blink onto my pillow. This is anxiety.

I’ve lost the ability to dream.

Neglect, abuse and internalized oppression, both mine through inheritance and chronic exposure, has made me vacillate between love and rage, making one appear requisite for the other’s existence. Sometimes the two are the same and I nurture the fury and distrust the love, even my innate source.

Finding a voice somehow that no one wants to hear has taught me how to scream. I crouch to avoid tall glares, making myself small to dagger their ankles.

But I just want to stand up.

I regurgitate what has been force-fed. Silence is torture, but what words could I possibly utter?

Healing is a privilege beyond grasp or at best a catch-22.

I throw people away out of fear that they’ll never see or accept me, only my carnal shadow. And who could love that? This is self-hate.

Doubting what I know because knowledge only gets me in trouble.

Possessing the partial genes and interrupted nurturing of 2 severely hurt, damaged, forgotten people does not create a whole person, but a fragmented one. One with limited dreams that can only be realized at a great cost and joy, that may never be realized because survival doesn’t give way to evolution or the privilege of peace. Where reward or healing morphs into punishment at a moment’s notice. Or maybe there are no dreams, only nightmares in costume. This is generational trauma from a griot.

I get to grieve the childhood I never had. I also get to soothe that inner child now and grow her up. I get to show her off to my people and get loved on. This is completing the grief. It’s possible, this transformation. Actually, I really have no other choice.

Except in the most intimate of safe spaces, relegated to therapy and a few family and friends, I rarely share my specific stories of abuse, neglect and molestation. Only in recent years have I called myself a “survivor” related to that combination of things. It’s as if growing up poor, black and female shouldn’t include more trauma, or that it’s so obvious given my identity and upbringing and moot as a result. But there was catastrophic trauma and oftentimes I keep quiet and rage inside because no one wants to hear another story from someone like me. I don’t share the inappropriate touches and sexual assaults because ignorant and/or hateful people want to make that my reason for being queer. It doesn’t seem worth it to discuss the constant beatings and verbal violence from my grandmother until about age 11 because people won’t hear the immense love she also had for me and protection she offered me out of constant fear that my mother’s partners might rape me. No one ever considered the women, random children and babysitters, unsurprisingly. Grandma had reasons to be afraid. My mother was kidnapped, gang raped, drugged and impregnated with my older sister at 14 after all; something I wouldn’t learn about until my 30s, after that sister, my mother and grandmother had all been dead for over a decade.

Occasionally I’ll reference my witnessing of the domestic violence and sexual exploitation in my home growing up, which caused my mother to be detached emotionally at critical times since she was barely holding onto herself then. This trauma marked all of my childhood and still wears on me. Usually this is raised as a matter of fact and through humor – sometimes through twisted stories, all true, of me coming of age through violence as retaliation, school and local violence or when I thought I had learned to harness my own sexual power with countless boys and many more men before I was a woman and even after I was. It’s difficult to share these stories or to remember them. It sounds like justification for bad behavior. The numbness that’s sometimes required for me to function and serve others is all I have in my most vulnerable times. I shut my shit down when I’m still more fortunate than my black and brown peers or their offspring. So I let other believable women and men and underrepresented and discounted transgender people take the lead. I let liars exploit our stories for profit so I don’t have to be abused further. Because no one wants to hear this from me. Or they do, but want to hear only this from me. Because I’m supposed to be nothing.

When I skip to resilience without these stories, I’m disjointed. When I remain silent, I suffer. When I share though, I’m sometimes bare and uncared for, or people just don’t know what to do with it, or then I’m positioned to care for them since it’s too heavy for them to digest. Every now and again, someone asks, listens, abstains from judgement and offers comfort. And if they’re really loving they don’t use it against me in conflict. Thank you to those. In moments of their support and celebration, I’m told to write books about it since that’s the only way people think a story can be told, because capitalism, and our obsession with certain narratives, as if it’s not perpetually living on my soul, eyes and skin telling all kinds of stories. Still, I don’t know what to do with all this pain, all these stories, all this harm. It’s a litany of traumatic experiences before the age of 18 to have to recount and use for God’s glory, mostly before the age of 11, before I had even caused my own harm to myself and others. And it feels really fucking unfair in moments like this. But I blog anyway. Some good must come from this. And today, I don’t feel much like a survivor so I’ll fake it til I do.

Making peace with the conditions of my life is a required daily practice. It is frequently annoying in its simplicity and accessibility because I realize I am the one in the way of my own happiness and solace. I am the block in the road, the one that splits it into two or more complicated lanes and spins myself dizzy before journeying down a dreaded path. Peace is not elusive when I stay in touch with myself and welcome what has happened, when I allow myself to see and love who I am and what I can imagine, let alone build. Peace, harmony, and connection with myself and others are clearer when I accept what is, no matter how it occurred. Acceptance can feel so far out of grasp when I want to grieve the hurt and inadequacies by maintaining conditions that make these losses persist. When I resist and retract, I kill a bit of myself, or at minimum I put into a deep sleep all joyful and exploratory possibilities that I can create. I uproot what has been sown in me, prophesied, affirmed. I stymy the options I’ve manifested successfully, beautifully many times over and despite this concrete proof, I convince myself that I’m stuck with no way out. I become a slave to my mind and narrative instead of a beacon of my power. And I only look outward for comfort and validation, for escape, lamenting when I don’t get it from others on auto-pilot or command, or when I actually get it I shun the purveyor for not giving more. It’s like pouring out a full cup of actual goodness onto the ground at every refill and blaming someone else for my being parched.

In this state, I simply don’t ask for help and encourage others to pity me and agree that all is lost. Or I isolate entirely and allow abandonment to poison me instead. It’s also possible in this self-made misery, many would call it suffering, to resent people who believe in me when I reject my own peace in this way. When I don’t accept myself, the ones who lied, died, met their expiration in my life in other ways, didn’t choose me, or when I allow myself to feel cast out after a rejection that had nothing to do with me, I create pain, not peace. When I seek anything in my resistance that will further keep me separate from myself, I have intentionally anchored myself in despair and delusion.

So I’m aware in this hard moment and committed to working on the art of being at peace. Because I know what’s on the inside of it and have tasted this balance before. I’m beginning by forgiving myself and saying “I love you, just as you are”. Manifesting peace will be, as it has always been, the labor of my lifetime. I’m accepting this process as a sliver of lessons in impermanence. Everything ends, including my own life and I get to choose joy in this awareness. I’m breathing in a bit more patience to get me through to yet another breath. This is the constant necessity even when nothing else is apparent.

Occasionally in my meditations, someone gets choked. Human.

I’ve been suffocating my creativity. Hiding it from myself so it can’t even touch y’all. Drowning it in fear, anger, and self loathing. In victimhood. I’ve been expecting change without surrendering to its inevitability and constancy. I’ve begged for the peak without the climb. And then I resent change and myself. Oh, and countless people too. I hate the joy and karma of others, or I can’t unblock myself enough to even see their hurt because I make my hurt greater. This is my ego trip. This is my strangled creative. It’s when I block the goddess in me; that essence that is perfect…just as it is. Sometimes it feels as if jealousy, comparison and self doubt are the only attributes I can rely on. That’s terribly sad. What’s sadder is I feed it knowing it’s bad for me and for everyone with whom I come into contact. Especially my loves. What’s scary is that I feel these low vibrations operate on their own, on some kind of auto-pilot because I’ve given up my power – inherent power and power with – and resigned myself to reject myself. I don’t accept who I am, whose I am, and that I am. And that’s where the creator in me dies more each day or is fed misery instead of possibility.

So I’m acknowledging it’s time to raise my self awareness and take the next steps of forgiving myself and others and letting go. It’s hard as fuck y’all. And it’s frightening. Literally one sour moment undoes weeks of progress and it makes it harder (because I’m trained to be miserable) to attempt a practice of self soothing, inner child nurturing, writing often just cuz (and not making text messages my epic poems, sorry y’all), honoring and calling on the ancestors, and being nonjudgmental and gentle with myself and others. I start with reminders like “love yourself always”, “raise your vibration”, or “you get to be here” on my daily alarms. I read ancestral wisdom texts and passages and fill my Instagram with conscious communal beings, artists, usually fierce Black, feminine queer folk who tout vulnerability as beautiful, necessary power, all the while calling for justice and how it begins in us. I remember to celebrate my erotic. I tell people how, why and where it hurts. And it hurts y’all. A lot. My birthday just passed and so much love showed up and connected me to myself. It’s important that I share that part because the way ego is set up it feeds such separateness – division of me from myself and subsequent misalignment between me and others. Soon after this wondrous time though, I slipped back into a cramped, dark space and made myself small. And I showed up even smaller and hurtful to loved ones by putting up a wall and lashing out from behind it. How easy it is to forget the love in and outside of me and that I’m enough.

As much as I abuse myself and wallow in self pity and shame, I thankfully never forget I am a creator. We all are. We are all artists. A fellow creative on IG, whom I don’t know, helped me this morning to remember I control my happiness and that an integral piece of combatting my depression is seeking connection, internally and externally. She used her talents to depict egoic manifestations and I saw myself in them all. I wept at how true they are, how I think and act like that, how ugly and defeated my ego makes me feel and perform. I wept also for how I’ve regressed and lied in hard moments, even when all around me there is light, and how hard it is to stay consistent. How I often reject choosing joy. But instead of shrinking in this bed with my dog, I got on this site and started writing. See? Creative! Honest and powerful in softness and exposure. And yes, still in need, just unafraid to admit it. I am more than depression and anxiety. I am not depression and anxiety. I am not my worst day. I am a creator who is limitless, but only as much as I feed that wonderful part of me. I know I got my shit and it’s embarrassing to encounter and manage, and I need loads of assistance to remain on the healing journey to self acceptance, if it’s even a destination. What am I saying? I know there’s no destination. There’s just this moment. So in this moment I lay down a bit more suffering, vengeance and self deprecation. I choose to celebrate the art that is me. Thanks for reading.