relearning relationships

Category: Uncategorized

  • let desire show you what needs to be healed.

    the new moon is in libra, a time to set intentions about the kinds of relationships we really want and commit to the healing, repair, and everyday practices necessary to co-create these relationships. as a libra stellium who loves to love, this is my time.

    i had an experience recently that felt like falling in love. i wondered to myself: why does this feel so familiar? so intense? some moments felt like i’d gone back in time, to past moments in my life, picking up right where i left off. consciously, i knew a relationship with this person, under these circumstances, wasn’t aligned with what i wanted. somatically, i felt pulled toward them anyway.

    i told myself: it’s just a fantasy. sexual attraction. something to be contained. and my body replied: but goddamn i want it so bad.

    in dean spade’s “love in a fucked up world,” he writes about how to deescalate crushes that aren’t in alignment with our conscious principles. spade writes, “What we need is a way to return to a sober assessment of the situation, to remind ourselves of the buzz-kill realities that make this emotional/behavioral pattern something we are trying to break. Killing buzzes may sound like a bummer, but in this case, it’s about getting back to reality so we can find actual joy and pleasure rather than drama, shame, and conflict.” i followed the advice, reminding myself of why i wasn’t pursuing this crush. but something about this guidance felt off.

    instead of investigating why we feel the way we feel, spade seems to encourage readers to override our feelings, using our minds to control our bodies to try to make undesirable feelings go away. as a somatic coach and mental health worker, i know the feelings we don’t want to feel don’t just go away when buried.

    in my practice, i use internal family systems (IFS), more commonly known as ‘parts’ work, which pulls from many existing practices. the idea behind IFS is that we’re made up of many parts; past versions of ourselves get frozen in time replaying patterns that aren’t necessarily aligned with who we are, or want to be, now. some parts are protectors, and some are exiles. the feelings we don’t want to feel are exiles. often, exiles are our sadness, our pain, our deepest fears, our unwanted desires. we push them below the surface where they can’t easily reach us, because we fear they will debilitate us if freed. we deny and disconnect from these feelings, or exile them.

    our protectors are then divided into two types that work to keep the exiles at bay: managers and firefighters. the managers take control, keep us functioning, and keep us distracted from exiled parts with habits like overworking and caregiving. managers act proactively to prevent us from feeling our pain, usually with habits we appreciate. firefighters then react when we can no longer contain our exiled feelings.

    dean spade seems to be asking us to manage our feelings of desire. the problem with that is, when our feelings become too much to manage, our exiled parts get activated by being pushed away and our firefighters jump out to…put out the fire. firefighters rebel against being managed; they may take drastic actions that have real consequences, like excessive substance use, binge eating, or risky sex. our firefighters come up when we’ve been trying to suppress exiled feelings for so long, and we just can’t do it anymore, so we find other – often much more reckless – ways to disconnect and stop ourselves from feeling those feelings.

    instead of managing or disconnecting from our feelings of desire, i want to offer a secret third thing: we have to tend to what’s coming up. we can accept, embrace, and explore our desires without acting on them (though this is arguably way less fun). so i asked myself: “what if my desire isn’t wrong? what if it’s showing me something i need to know about myself?” and if so, what does my body want me to know?

    i let myself have the crush. i envisioned a way to bring my feelings into alignment with my principles, and i told the person how i felt and what i wanted. even if it wasn’t something that could happen, i had to allow myself to want it. this was my gift to myself.

    over time, it became clear what was so familiar about the dynamic i’d [re]created with this person. working with my somatic coach, i came to recognize i was replaying an old script, acting out an old wound. with her support to bring attention to the wisdom held in my body, i explored the question: why is this feeling so intense? meditation brought me back to a memory from when i was 15, when i learned my mother had regained custody of me a year earlier, but had only taken my siblings back. she left me in the foster system until one night she showed up to have me institutionalized. when the police officers asked her why she left me, she said, “because i never wanted her.”

    i was destroyed. and in that moment, in that meditation, i felt destroyed all over again; i cried like i hadn’t cried for decades, releasing pain that had been buried. and this exiled feeling only became accessible to me when i learned to embrace my desire.

    this is where i return to align with dean spade, who writes, “Sometimes we are attracted to people because of the ways that they remind us unconsciously of our childhood caregivers (parents, older siblings, grandparents, foster parents). Unconsciously, we hope to recreate a similar situation with a different outcome.”

    my desire showed me that an exiled wound, a part of me that just wanted to be loved by someone who couldn’t love me, was calling for my attention. and i wasn’t going to heal by replaying this script, reenacting this trauma in a way i have many times before. the way to heal is to grieve and nurture relationships where i can truly feel and be seen, and known, and wanted. not just because of an attraction, albeit one that felt deeply familiar to me, but because i let them in, through connection earned over time with consistent acts of “care, commitment, respect, knowledge, responsibility, and trust,” as bell hooks defines love in all about love.

    so, for my 36th birthday, i decided to honor that desire to be seen and known by people who have shown me love. i decided not to have a party, because, as much as i’ve loved the parties i’ve gotten to have, sometimes it can be difficult for me to truly connect in a large group of people. right now, i’m not interested in just adding people to my life; i’m interested in deepening my relationships. i invited friends to set up time to engage in trust building exercises with me, and it’s been such a beautiful adventure to see what people come up with and share with me.

    on these trust dates, my friends and i have been crafting, collaging, creating, writing, walking, and painting. we’ve been asking and answering each other’s questions about each other – our pasts, presents, and futures – and about our relationship. i’ve been able to see parts of my life through new frames, through the interpretations of the people i know and love now. and in these friendships, on these dates, i have felt so seen, known, and loved, in exactly the ways i’ve been craving.

    i feel so grateful to be creating love and nurturing intimacy in relationships where i feel connection, reciprocity, and alignment. i feel so grateful to be learning from desire and choosing to heal.

  • “Children are the ways that the world begins again and again.”

    i have said before that i often struggle with building intimate and especially romantic relationships with adults, but i have really wonderful loving relationships with children. i have wondered in the past why that is, but it hit me this week that i know exactly why.

    i don’t ask for a lot from partners in terms of time, or money, or binding contracts; all those things have been offered to me in abundance. if i wanted something tangible, i believe i could have it.

    i ask for a lot in terms of authenticity and care. i ask people to part with social scripts about what relationships should look like and how people should behave. i ask people to be themselves and to accept all of me, slutty and silly and traumatized and mentally ill. i ask people to learn the ways trauma has shaped me and carve out new ways of interacting that will heal my wounds. i ask people to learn how trauma shapes them too, and to teach me how to love them in the places where they feel most unlovable. i ask people to take risks that i know must feel so destabilizing, because there are real costs, and i know this intimately, because i have had to pay those costs. i have lost friends, i have been abandoned by family, i’ve been institutionalized. but for me, the greatest cost of all would be to lose my sense of self.

    to lose myself again, i should say. because i have dedicated the past 5 years to the intimate archival project of recovering parts of myself that had been lost in bargains i had made to survive in this world.

    and children have no expectations about what the world should be or how they should exist within it; children only have a limitless imagination about what’s possible, that sometimes adults stifle when they impose gender norms, and when they tell kids to be quiet and stay still, and when they try to steer kids in the directions they believe to be most practical or fruitful or valuable, and when they push kids to perform when their bodies are telling them they need to stop. and on all of these questions, i’m with the kids asking:“why?”

    i’ve talked a lot with friends about my desire to have another baby, and people often wonder about how much it makes sense to bring new life into this world we’re losing to climate catastrophe and fascism and greed. and it doesn’t make sense at all, and that’s exactly the point. it never really makes sense to bring life into this world; it’s so expensive, and you don’t get enough help. these were the reasons i spent so much of my life feeling like i wanted to die; living just didn’t really seem like it made a lot of sense. here in the belly of the beast, we don’t live in a context that supports life.

    by seeking to bring life into the world, and by choosing to stay alive myself each day, i am banking on the next world. i am trusting that there will be a future and the future will be so queer, and trans, and disabled, and Black, and Indigenous. that there will be love and care in abundance! i am trusting that the world is still in progress, the future is still being created by the actions we take here and now.

    i wonder if this is what june jordan meant when she wrote, “Children are the ways that the world begins again and again.”

    my last suicide attempt was in October 2012, and within a year, i was pregnant. every day of my pregnancy, i bargained. i told myself, “i’ll kill myself, but for now i’ll take prenatal vitamins for the baby, just in case. i’ll kill myself, but i’ll buy this beautiful stroller on sale, just in case. i’ll kill myself, but i just want to meet the baby first.” and then every day i stayed, and i met the baby, and i fell in love with the baby, and i chose life because i had such a deep fulfilling love in my life.

    and learning to love was how i learned to live. and raising Black queer trans and disabled kids, and just letting them be exactly who they are, is how i am continuously learning to love myself. it doesn’t make sense, but it will make perfect sense in the future that i’m creating.

    a friend asked me my ideal way of bringing another baby into this world, and i said, “through magic.” and i really am holding out for that.

    i would be remiss to share this post about children and the future without also offering ways to preserve both for anyone who might be reading. Palestinian children and adults are being starved in Gaza by the US-backed Israeli genocide, and the Sameer Project is on the ground distributing food and supplies. I am also fundraising for the Safer Movements Collective where we provide emergency microgrants to Black queer and trans people in our cohorts to cover basic needs like housing. we need to care for our people, our kids, our land, here and everywhere if we want to make a revolution.

    please give to the Sameer Project!

    and please give to the Safer Movements Collective!

    musings and things i’ve engaged with these past few weeks that have informed my thoughts here:

    songs i have on repeat:

    • “worth it” by raye
    • “white flag” by dido
    • “naked” by ella mai

  • on community, cooptation, & definition as a moving target

    I often see a lot of hand wringing about the word “community” — what it means, who’s included. i care a lot about definitions and specificity, as i’ve written before, but i also don’t see definitions as static or unchanging. our definitions depend on our relationships, on our needs, on our contexts. definitions are created as a process, a negotiation among the people involved. sometimes we need a narrow definition, and sometimes we need a very broad definition.

    it just kinda depends.

    when i see so much pondering over the question of what counts as community, it reminds me of some of the responses to my call for community accountability after my experience of rape and abuse five years ago. whether they worked closely with my rapist in the very same collective, whether they had their work published in a magazine where my rapist was an editor, whether they hung out with this person socially, a sudden distancing happened where many folks became sure that they were not-community and definitely not-responsible.

    not everyone, of course. many people acted in solidarity with me, as i documented in my zine learning to exhale. but the phenomenon of folks distancing from “community” still feels worthy of attention.

    i was clear then as i am now that rape is not an individual problem, that patriarchal violence is a collective and systemic problem. some folks wondered why i didn’t publicly name who raped me and why i wasn’t content with a response that cast out a single person. a lone wolf rapist would have better fit their conceptualization of harm as individualized. but as i wrote back then in my open letter, it’s much easier to remove one rapist from a community than it is to interrogate the conditions that led rape to occur in that community.

    and to that, some folks replied: what community?

    what i think a lot of academics and theorists get right about their definition of community is that there isn’t one single agreed upon definition. what i think many miss is that there is a process that happens where people work collectively to define terms, and that process is an ongoing negotiation.

    in some contexts, we want to be really specific about who we mean by “community.” we want to know specifically who’s picking up the kids, who you’re going to turn to when harm happens. pod maps can be a useful tool for defining community when we need specificity.

    when i approach the definition of “community” as an organizer, i think of it as a constant expansion. how do i get more people to understand themselves as part of a community reflecting on the ways they contribute to rape culture? how do i get more people to understand themselves as prison abolitionists? how do i work to get people who think of themselves as prison abolitionists to expand their definitions of the communities included in their practice of abolition? to make sure their lens includes folks targeted by family policing, folks incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, includes children and especially children who are Black queer trans and disabled?

    while some academics and theorists work to pin down a definition, as an organizer, i’m moving the pin faster than you can publish. i’m actively working to change the definition of “community.” i’m working to bring more people into the fold, support more people in understanding themselves as part of this community, as people who have a stake in this fight. as an organizer, i am working to expand the most commonly used definitions of terms to reach the margins. in angela davis’s words, “i am no longer accepting the things i cannot change. i am changing the things i cannot accept.”

    i’m saying: you may or may not have previously been part of this community reflecting on your role in contributing to rape culture, so i’m inviting you to join me, get on the bus, let’s do this together.

    so sure, i’m sure you can find a loophole where you don’t have to reflect or take a certain position or action because you’re not really part of this community anyway, but my work as an organizer is to close that loophole and create the conditions that compel you to act. to show you that community is expansive, and it includes you. and that community accountability requires us all.

    this isn’t a critique of books; i love books. folks who have been to my home know that i have books falling out of the coffee table, towered over my bed, in stacks along the floor. i don’t have enough furniture to contain the books i collect. & i know the limitations of books, just like i know the limitations of definitions: they mark a moment in time.

    it’s not a critique of books; it’s a critique of theory without practice.

    as more and more folks called themselves abolitionists in and after 2020, but actually supported reforms that further entrenched criminalization, many of us called out the cooptation of abolition. this trend of cooptation made me more cautious about sharing about abolition and transformative justice in under 240 characters. my social media platforms grew after cocreating #8toAbolition in 2020, and i was Very Online sharing to over 20 thousand twitter followers, only to see folks regurgitate my words in their paid articles and books, watered down and devoid of context or practice.

    for awhile it really bothered me.

    what i understand now is that some cooptation is inevitable, and some of it is just the learning curve. yes, you’ll get plenty of white academics exploiting the work & ideas of community organizers to write their little books and make their little documentaries, because their egos are so big, and they love abolition now that we’ve made it popular! yes, you get those, and those people are colonizers. but a lot of what i realized felt like cooptation is just new kids, little abolitionist eggs, who like what they’ve learned so far, and they’re running with it, and they still have a lot to learn, but hell, who doesn’t? who among us isn’t called to check themselves, to notice gaps in our analyses, to recognize our areas for growth? i don’t trust anyone who claims to know it all.

    with newcomers on a learning curve, i don’t worry as much about cooptation. i see learning as a natural part of the process of negotiation involved in (re)defining terms.

    but then we have the distancers — the ones who evade a definition, because keeping things vague and undefined is working for them. so if i say “hey, your community has a rape problem,” and you can’t deny the rape so you redraw the lines of the community in a way that casts out the individual rapist, and say “what community???” then i know you’re just mincing words, and my work as an organizer is to draw the lines again to make sure your skin is in the game.

    and if at the end of our negotiations, you define the term in one way, and i define it another way, then at least i know and use that information to decide if i want to be in community with you after all.