Volume 27
3 gray hairs and another rotation
This past Monday, December 18th, I completed another rotation. This year was extra hard given the idea of celebrating life during a time where I am witnessing lives being taken in Palestine and here in the so called US as COVID continues to spread. Generally birthdays are complicated for me for various reasons. They’re always a mix of excitement and existential dread over past loss and abandonment. It always a push and pull between wanting to be alone and craving affirming company. This year I cried as hard as I did the night of my surprise Sweet 16, tears of disbelief and gratitude.
Collage by my tender hearted partner.
For my birthday this year my lover partner bestie roommate created a zine compiled of contributions from friends, family, and comrades. 71 pages of memories, words of affirmation, art, silliness and more.
Transparently, I cannot believe I made it to this age.
As a person who has battled immense mental health difficulties their whole life, I am shocked to still have a living, beating heart.
When thinking about this particular newsletter, I couldn’t type about myself without thinking of everyone who held it down for me while I was consumed by pain and trauma and frequently triggered. Without the people before me, I wouldn’t have grown and become grounded in a self more aligned with the world I envision. This year is the year I’ve been able to look around me with pride over what I'm cultivating. I’ve always been proud of those around me, but in particular this year I am proud of the me that has transformed enough to bring forth these connections. I am always working to maintain relationship but as a person who has experienced such painful ruptures and abandonment (perceived, unexpected, and some I’ve been responsible for), its been easy for me to fall into deep defeatism over how unworthy I am. What wrong with me that I can’t keep *everyone* I’ve loved in my life? I know now, historically, culturally and personally how what I’ve been through impacts me relationally. I have been both pursuer and withdrawer. Harmed and harm do-er. Seeing the continued maintenance of my mental health care, consistent therapy and medication, I’ve been able to regulate and move from response and not reaction. I can show up more aligned with my values and check the part of me that wants to always indulge in the only child, triple fire sign attitude. I’ve been able to tell people of my diagnosis without the fear of judgement, because I know my actions and care show the lengths I have gone through to move beyond the parts of me that are frozen in abandonment, pain, disappointment.
Below is a piece of an email I sent to a group of folks in 2020. I had just finished graduate school, thrust into a pandemic and feeling activated beyond belief due to multiple triggers. This email was inspired by my desire to manifest Pod Mapping into my everyday life. I wanted to encourage those around me to see my pain and know that action can be taken, as well as my willingness to do the same for them. I wanted to exemplify vulnerability laid out in a tangible and action oriented way so that we move closer to one another in moments of fear. I wanted to practice deep relating.
Realistically - this was a long and brave email for me. I sent it to about 15+ people. I have a handful of those people left in my life. I was wrecked with a loneliness I’ve known my whole life, resurged in 2020 when communal care was so strained or down right inaccessible. That year I dreamt up the kind of people I wanted in my life, influenced by a chart reading I received by a fellow Black Dominican astrologer. I prayed for a life filled with artists, makers, thinkers and people who would encourage me to be the version of myself that is best for the collective liberation of us all. My first attempt at pod mapping led to a necessary heartbreak and realization that I wasn’t surrounded by politicized love as I wanted or needed. My friends were not my comrades and I was organizing with people who were frequently in the defense or it just didn’t click. I wanted friends and comrades, some one in the same - who supported the discipline and vulnerability it takes to a student of Revolution. The people I sent that email to knew me at my worst of moments, plagued by splitting, manic episodes and various degrees of self harm. I realize now, some of them saw the exasperation of my trauma but not the way it tied me to radicalized perspectives of care and being.
This thread by depressedwhileblack is more recent than my 2020 pod mapping email, but explains perfectly why I care as deeply as I do about the world around me. Its not just my personality disorder (which comes from the trauma I have experienced). Its not just my neurodivergence creating a compass of justice set up only for me to follow. I am pulled to care for others after yearning for that in my darkest of moments. I see how all of our care is interconnected. I see how Imperialism ties back to cycles that plague us spiritually, physically, mentally, socially and politically. I know what it has been like to be alone in terror, desperation and hopelessness. I have studied and connected with folks who share such similar stories, histories. Of course we see through the cracks and think beyond what we’re told to settle with when it feels like the only option is being left to die.
“ to those that have held me… it is the love and tenderness of those around me that have kept me afloat. That remind me that life is worth living for every drip and drop of water, a tear, the rain, the shower - I am fire turned fluid. I have the power to choose to be a drizzle or a storm. This year I embrace the power of choice. I also accept that I have control over nothing other than my individual choice. I learned to adapt in a way I never had before - in thinking, in listening and in loving. This does not mean that I always made the right choice, but I also have relinquished the idea that there is always a right choice. I choose to understand, not fight to be right. Through understanding I can then move in a way of who I want to be, not pulled the weight of who I have or have not been. I spent much of my present thinking of who I was but now, with you, and your company - I have learn to hold the present and drink it in.
To those of you that affirmed every feeling and thought that passed like a shiver or rocked me to my core, while also challenging me to reassess the pillars that make the foundation of my being. I look around and see the people that have remained in my life - the tears we have wiped from one another's eyes, the laughter that has made our stomachs rumble at the same time, the songs we let move through our bodies in united joy, the hard conversations we’ve pulled through the spaces between our teeth, and all the words sitting in the cracks. I have felt so many things with you - it reminds me Im alive. Something I spent years fighting, numbing out - because the truth of that was the truth of pain. When the fog of depression dissipates and I come to, I remember the joys of life, your love being one of them. “ - From my 2020 birthday entry. I welcome the continued lesson that every low will rise again. These words are forever true and I welcome their continued relevance to connections present and future.
Today as I blew out my hair, I found my 3rd gray hair.
I smiled as I saw it twinkle in the light because I never thought I’d live to see myself age in such a way.
By the grace of my ancestors, loved ones past and present, self accountability, recovery, therapy, medication, EMDR, political education, collage and writing - I am here. Like holy shit.
Below are some bits from my birthday zine that made me laugh and smile.
With that, I’ll leave you with a song that held me in this last rotation.
Below: 4 times I was captured by my lover in the Dominican Republic this September 2023. I want to archive this version of the self, the one that has carried me into this new year of life.
Until next time,
In Love, Solidarity and Liberation.