A month ago, my current world (as I knew it) ended abruptly with little time to respond, as most crises do. In the aftermath, I’m more stable in mind than I was then, yet I’m still mildly anxious about my next steps. Juxtaposing it against the various ‘endings’ happening in American society, in my life and those of my friends is getting close to overwhelm. Labor strikes, natural disasters, cultural wars, negative policy changes and more, our brains are all burning under the stress of what may come and how it will upend our lives.
This period has been the most revealing and painful for me in many ways…for those who follow astronomy, there’s been a nodal shift and recent new moon in Cancer that’s shifted many things and resurfaced childhood wounds. This post from an astrologer on Twitter I read one night had me up crying until 4am:
“Can I be real? I think people with prominent Pisces and Sag placements/Jupiter in the 1st house individuals at some point in their young age said the smartest thing ever, and someone hushed them and conditioned them to believe they’re the stupidest person to ever exist, they then carry this on in adulthood. Pretending to be this idiotic careless and become avoidant when it’s time to have profound conversations, yet deep down there’s that child in there who wants to engage in the convo and talk about all the things they too have learned. The issue with authority in their young age in regards to education is their Achilles heel! I have seen this in so many sag and Pisces placements it’s almost like they have to be shallow because they’re afraid of being laughed at again…It haunts them in a way, this is why I truly believe that sidereal sag (tropical caps) are so hard on themselves because they had someone tell them they are stupid and they have been haunted by that ever since, building a wall over themselves and acting brash…” (adoseofmars on Twitter)
A lifetime of being shut down and ignored….even by some of the people I trusted the most, my own parents. As a result, I stopped trusting myself 100%. Doubt and anxiety crept in, and with their well-meaning but overwhelming pressure to succeed, I could never relax into who I actually am. I started to believe I was lazy, that I wasn’t good enough or didn’t know enough. I limited myself because I didn’t believe I had any support for what I wanted to do. Funny, how I still tried anyway. Internally, I battled less with the critiques of others than my own, very loud ones. But it wasn’t just me internalizing, this world isn’t kind to Black girls who are sure of themselves. I became a people pleaser searching for validation and community with people who couldn’t create or reciprocate. Years of only exposing what was safe to, what made people comfortable. The real me would still slip out from time to time, with me eventually isolating out of self preservation. Yet that isolation, grew into self awareness. Battle-worn but not broken, after all the tears I finally validated myself for knowing and wanting to share my knowledge, and that I wasn’t in the wrong if it made other people uncomfortable. I gave child-me the support and apologies I didn’t get. I forgave the people who silenced and reduced me.
It took almost 20 years to undo most of it, to reframe it, to “do it anyway” and to confront consequences, not live in fear of them. I got comfortable with flexibility. The best finding was that even with a hallway of closed doors of opportunity, there’s always another way in. Always.
I freed myself.
Hope. It’s how I got through all my past apocalypses and it’s how I’ll get through this one too. Taking a step back to lick my wounds, get rest and recalibrate has done wonders. Though the world outside is twisting with uncertainty, I can still be aware without letting doom consume me.
A book I recently picked up that I didn’t need, but really wanted: Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard. As someone with an English degree, I can’t not read line by line, so I’m still on the first page, but what a page it is. Beginning with “Peril”, an essay she published in 2009, she talks about how the greatest threat to authoritarianism and the powers that be are “perceptive, dissident writers.” Eerily prescient to our current times of increasing book bans, curriculum bans and threats to libraries. She goes on to say that there are two human responses to chaos: naming and violence. A third response? Stillness. Stillness as art.
She concludes with this:
“Certain kinds of trauma visited on people’s are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.”
I don’t know if what I have to say will only stay here with me or be seen and heard by anyone else, but it’s here. My worlds have ended time and again, yet still I remain, still fighting, still hoping, now resting, back to creating. For now, writing is practice and more of a way to unload and get back into the swing of things. I hope that eventually I can contribute something meaningful.