retelling my story.

Looking back on a year…

I wanted to go back but the giant hole in my chest that says you are nothing without the struggle wouldn’t let me. I am committed to economic and social justice, no matter where this crazy path takes me. I am not ready does not mean there is something wrong. I am not ready means time to look back on what has happened, time to remember who I am and what I fight for. I am not ready means figuring out why. I am not ready does not mean that I cant. I am not ready means right now I wont, cause I want to be in this fight forever, and I want to be strong in this fight. I am not ready means I am not broken without it.

I looked back at my calendar to try and remember exactly when I was in the hospital but my calendar is so goddamn full I can’t even tell. And I don’t remember really, except that it was after my birthday sometime. Emily tells me it was February 25^th or 27th- all I know is that sometime that week, shit fell apart. I remember only flashes, like riding around on my bike and hoping I’d get hit by a bus- riding angry and fast, taunting cars cause I was waiting for death. I remember the cutting, imagining gashes and gaping holes in my arms. I remember feeling distant from everyone, like my world wasn’t on the same clock. I remember that night, having dinner with Madeline and my old housemates, feeling overwhelmed by all that had happened between us, by failure, by fear of what I was gonna do when I woke up tomorrow and left their place. In their downstairs bathroom, I took all the little clonazapans I had, it was maybe 15 or 20…I had no idea what it would do to me, I know at that point, when I swallowed them, that I wasn’t thinking and I didn’t want to die. I threw up and tried to sleep. I remember going to a job training the next morning, being asked if I was ok, and smiling and saying yes. Then I just remember not being able to be alone, or ride my bike, or cook food. I remember staying at the Fireswamp like being wrapped up and held. I remember feeling embarrassed when they hid all their knives.

I remember mostly anger in the hospital. I had been told it was my choice- my good friend held and steered my hand as I ‘admitted myself.’ She told me she was gonna call the police if I didn’t. Somehow I thought admitting myself would give me more control over the outcome, but the cops inside the hospital of course quickly assured me otherwise. I was furious and scared. I was mad that my friends gave up on me, that I gave up on myself. I was so angry, trying to understand what really had landed me behind thick panes of glass and metal bars, doors that lock behind you and those fake ass plants I tried to kill on my first night. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I just rode the stationary bike and went to art therapy. Some folks broke thru the giant wall I had up, and humbled me with their strength and commitment to healing. But I just wanted the hell out. I did all the worksheets, tried to read, wrote, and waited. I remember being sure what was happening wasn’t really real.

I had to laugh when I look back and see that March 9^th, the day I got out (today one year ago!), I went right back to work, walking dogs within the hour. Within the month we pulled of a huge benefit brunch, within two months I helped support some poorly planned direct actions, went to a march in Baltimore, finished my thesis, and managed to get fired from my dog walking job. Within three months I was participating in an intensive organizer training, working for CISPES, pulling off another benefit event, and starting a new job at the Art and Media House. My confidence was soaring in some ways, I was running as fast as I could to be far away and different from that person who had overdosed just some months ago. But things fell apart and then I fell apart, over and over again.

I cant really remember much of summer, just waking up early to babysit, endless hours waiting for afternoons at the art house, for the familiar energy and high of working and being alive. Pushing through that time, pushing till Detroit, pushing my way through relationships, lying through my teeth. Wondering why no one had any time, and pushing to cram more hours in a day.

When the opportunity came to travel, I left, with a million promises to myself and other people of what I would get done. Still impatient, not satisfied, but surviving. Kara helped me love life again, though I don’t know if she knows it, cooking meals together and good questions on long bus rides. But in my head everything was still so urgent. I smoked a pack a day in Honduras, impatient to be useful. I saw a chance at a job back in DC and ran for it, only to hit a wall, pick myself up, and start serving coffee and walking dogs again. My cafe job was the only time I remember feeling warm, moving, smiling, eating a good meal during that time. And that day my brother called, I ran again.

I don’t say any of this to say that I was wrong, I just want to put the pieces in order and understand how I survived (with stubbornness) and what I survived (a moment where it all could have been taken away). And now? I wait, I write, I read. Things that have been taken away, things I have chosen not to do, feel like heavy painful loss on my chest. I can still feel rage and I can still cry- I am fucking grateful I can feel again at all. I am remembering who I am and what I want, what I like to do when I get up in the morning…rebuilding my confidence in the person I want to be. Gathering tools and building. Acupuncture, writing, running, guitar- all are affirmations that I survived.

Trying to remember in any work we do the way we go about it is just as damn important, or more important, that the goal. People I love are waiting for me. I am waiting for me, excited for whats to come.

things

things that make me happy right now:

-getting bike grease on my hands from fixing something

-the way cold fresh air makes your nose kind of hurt

-cooking strange concoctions for my family. playing loud music while i do dishes.

-getting my father to go to the gym with me

-all things related to KBOO- hard knock radio, queer youth radio project ideas

-noticing spring things peeking out like cherry blossoms and tulips

-hiding out and reading. being able to hang out with myself.  being present with my friends, feeling like i can notice details/ask questions, without exhaustion or panic or hiding on their porches smoking too many cigarettes.

-putting words on a page to feel like i’m going somewhere

-planning ridiculous trips. laughing and making plans despite gloomy mad clouds.

-that spot on N Prescott and Overlook that hangs out over the river

-playing with other people’s dogs

-research projects for friends that make me feel like 3,000 miles is a short distance. supporting and being incredibly proud of what my friends are doing, how they are fighting, feeling eager to join them but patient. most days.

healing/returning

so im nervous as shit to go back to the district.

i’m scared i dont believe my own story enough to believe that it is ok. to stop, rest, reflect, look around at your tools and see which ones are dented or broken and what parts need more attention to heal before you can keep building.

i’m terrified i dont believe in myself enough to know that this struggle is long and i am fighting now and will always be fighting, that my commitments are unwavering even if my feet are faltering sometimes.

the words for what i want and need have never come easily. now they seem to have gone into hiding as i put up a big old bandaid over broken insides and prepare to go back, to try and tell my story and hope that the people i love understand.

i ask for patience, with myself and from others, and understanding for the many forms of struggle. i want to have those conversations that break open, i want my healing to allow other people to talk to me about how they are healing. i want so much from this trip because i believe there is so much left to fight for.

Anger and surviving.

Something I wrote to a friend recently-

i dont know what i am writing this to you.
maybe cause i’m so angry and i know you’ll hear me. or at least you have the same kind of anger that consumes you and keeps you alive.
i’ve been seeing this psychiatrist while i am here, trying to understand this diagnosis, so i can keep fighting forever.
and she says that trauma and bipolar have such similar patterns, she cant really tell, but that i have to learn to back down and calm down or ill never stabilize.
and im so so angry and ready to take off, and go back to the place where i was at least learning how to fight. instead of learning how to be calm, and tell everyone’s hurts- mine, my brothers, that its just gonna be ok, if we take a couple of deep fucking breaths.
i dont ever not want to be angry, and if we’re all fucking traumatized then the only way we are gonna heal is by trying together to heal eachother and fight the conditions that hurt us like this.
deep breaths are not the answer. but i was scared a little too, and thought of you and so many people who I know who are fighting, who in my struggles have told me they might be bipolar too. if we’re all just fucking traumatized, how dare they tell us to stop fighting? and take away the only tool we can use to heal?
i can take enough deep breaths to keep working, to keep moving, to keep loving. isn’t that enough?
its not like the conditions that make our breath catch in our throats, pepper spray in the jail today or shit jobs or addiction, they keep pressing even against our breath.
and breathing is nice and all, but i sure as hell dont believe that breathing is enough.

i know i’m not fucking crazy and i need to get out of here, please tell me that you have heard these things too, and taken the good advice, like “breathe” but turned away from the bullshit advice like the “just” they tack on before the “breathe” as if thats all we were ever born to do.”

Coals, not flames…

His response was that he turned away from being diagnosed, he said he remembers connecting with someone else with similar struggles who said, “of course poor people are all bipolar or depressed or anxious or whatever, and I remember that being really comforting- of course I am, just like everyone else.”

I am not poor; my family was working class-turned professional. But I am a traumatized, assault-survivor, organizer, prone to manic brilliant episodes and debilitating self-doubt and depression. And I’d like to think I’m like everyone else, too.

I want to scream and cry and have people pay attention, to say that this life fucking hurts. I get scared that it the way I hurt is not normal, that right now I am not approaching the fight in the right way. I fight so I can breathe, can I breathe without fighting?
Advice from my friend again, “Organizing needs to work for you, too. Sometimes it’s a personal battle for energy, inspiration and being able to wake up in the morning. But it also needs to flow, and you need to seek benefits in it for yourself in order to keep yourself going. Give give yourself a lot of credit and a lot of breaks, and don’t burn out like a lamp that runs out of fuel and destroys the wick.”

And from Mark Anderson:
“We are not hear simply as sacrifices on the altar of some revolution made for others, we are precious parts of the world we seek to wrap our arms around, to protect, to nourish, to build. Revolution is a path of growth, empowerment, and organization, seeking the healing within us that we seek for the world.” (All the Power: Revolution without Illusion)

I’m desperately afraid to put down the only tools I’ve ever fought with- passion and rage, to try and take up others- mainly, a more slow-burning and sustained fire, like coals I guess. Directed, balanced anger instead of rage. A really wise friend of mine once said to me that anger is incidental and rage comes from repeated or sustained witnessing of violence. At the time, I was angry. But at some point in trying to survive, I have started to have the kind of rage that keeps you up at night, ties your tongue at important moments, and sparks outbursts of weeping/cursing.

So how do we fight differently?

‘Adjustment’
My skin still crawls in meditation or yoga class when someone says some bullshit like establish peace with yourself and you make peace with the world. Don’t mean to be quote a cliché here but, no justice, no peace- without justice we will not lie down and make peace with things the way they are. So how do we fight in a way that has room for our sparks, the consuming emotions that connect us to our work? Without burning out the wick or unleashing rage unfairly, as I have too often done to quiet and demure yoga teachers and therapists.

Something that stuck with me in my recovery is that depression is anger turned inwards. When our anger and emotions have no where to go in our work, we turn them in on ourselves. Anger is something important we use to survive, to get up and fight every day, to spark ideas and soothe pain with its heat.

My friend on anger- “The only therapist I ever had told me that anger was something that needed to be personally resolved, always. I told him that was bullshit, that anger is motivation that fucked-over people need. He said that every activist he ever worked with told him some version of the same thing.”

“I don’t want to learn to be ok with the world as it is, or adjust to things as they are, but I also don’t want to be clinically depressed”- Kristi Kenney in counterbalance.
“There are some things that we must always be maladjusted to- to racial discrimination, to bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few…” MLK to American Psychological Association in 1967 (also quoted from Kenney’s great zine)

So how do we build, allowing for our maladjustments, recognizing them in one another and finding a language to talk about them? Because we need each other, to heal and to fight.
I’m looking for ideas.

A few I’ve got:
– creating safe boundaries in our communities of struggle that allow us to ‘not be ok’ sometimes, and having the honesty/accountability to talk about it
– recognizing and verbalizing coping mechanisms and ‘warning signs’ in ourselves and others that we are ‘not ok,’ especially the harder ones to spot or put into words like numbing/disassociation, or overworking/distracting ourselves
– continuing to be creative and dream up new tactics with lots of love- we need strategies that keep our hearts as well as hands busy (as a part of this, recognizing diversity of gifts within our communities, ex: mania often brings great creativity, surviving depression can remind us of our strength)

More soon.