vulnerabilities
a friend and i have been having conversations about how hard we have been finding organizing to be lately. like, make-you-hate-yourself hard. energy-sucking hard. questioning-your-every-ability hard. i am happy to learn that september was the month mercury was in retrograde, that maybe it was the universe or something that we could not control that made us all treat each other like that.
that friend and i have been talking about what working in a community where everyone is coming from an extreme place of vulnerability looks like. like if vulnerability is a spectrum, it’s no joke, so many of us in core leadership roles are way down on one end of it. with parents, family members or best friends that we can’t tell we’re queer to. caught and trapped in systems. homeless. brushed aside. left behind. dealing with abuse/ being in abusive situations. creepin’. stuck. disability, the silence around it, the lack of people who actually get us, can be so isolating. we come to this space where we have access and get to be ourselves — at least for a weekend here, a weekend there—and damn if we aren’t scared as hell to lose it. damn if we don’t whip out all the survival weapons we have hiding under our clothes. damn if we don’t secretly keep our finger on the trigger ready to shoot, not even knowing that’s what we are doing, not even knowing that we are working from a place of insecurity. vulnerability.
or at least it’s like that for me. i am left thinking of all the ways our actions are motivated by insecurity. fear of loneliness. loss of community. maybe i keep waking up and finding myself in these relationships and friendships that aren’t working because i am scared of being so so so alone. that i can’t take any more isolation or longing. maybe the reason you are so angry with me is because you don’t trust me not to leave you, not to spit on everything you have poured into this friendship. when i do something small, it ruffles up all these feelings, hits our histories— that gut feeling in you—and soon we all look like the enemy you have been taught to shoot at.
know that we have to be more gentle. more intentional. more aware. just am not sure yet how to put that into practice.
any ideas?
Thanx for that post. I kept reading it over and over again and KEEP LONGING for comments.
As I was searching (for days…)for my answers to your question I just came up with a re-reading of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: browngirlworld.
Sure you’ve read it before (like i did) but this time was just AMAZING!!!
I find it helpful when she quotes a friend: “It’s the places where we hurt each other when we’re close, girl, that our most important work lies in. It’s where the big changes happen. Where the world blows open or it doesn’t.”
So it seems to me that there is no direct or DIY-way out of the pain, anger, frustration, isolation you described /”we” face (writing more love-letters might help, though). It’s rather that “We have to stay in the icky places, master the art of moving one step past what we know, listen to each other instead of shouting and do that tricky two-step of both trusting we know when we’re being fucked over and knowing the difference between the truly evil and abusive and someone who screws up but is not evil. This is the difference between purity ans practicality.” So that we come to search for family [and maybe community and the ways we actually can act in there/ towards it ?] that is “Not perfect. But good enough. Just good enough.”
bloombeautiful
6 Oct 09 at 8:00 AM
It seems to me that through this writing–full of honesty, gentle intention, and awareness you are putting it into practice. –That you do know how. But thank you for asking us to dream of more ideas
Thank you for this reflection and bloom beautiful for your comment.
(Marian) YaliniDream
8 Oct 09 at 9:40 PM