If you follow me on Instagram, you may notice that my platform has become more explicitly anti-racist recently. I’ve been hesitant to speak about it on my blog for fear that I don’t yet have adequate language, but there’s been far too much silence around this subject so I’ve decided to blunder forward, doing the best I can for now. Please call me out for any missteps that I make.
This July, I joined Layla Saad’s “Me and White Supremacy” challenge a few days in, having caught wind of it from a few people I followed, seeing the profound effect it was having having on those who are doing it, and hearing Layla’s calls to action for white peoples to assume the necessary work of dismantling white supremacy. I am ashamed that come up until this point, my activism has been very passive. I was absorbed in anti-racist education as an undergrad, but I guess life happened. I got swept up in change, moves, relationships, music and really failed to take the work to its next logical step. I’m ashamed that I never really sought that next step, even in the wake of the Trump election. I was mollified by the movement community’s aphorisms about universality, about intention, but have come to see how very tone deaf we are, how ineffectual, how focusing and insisting on love and light mutes so many voices. But this is a very exciting time. So many brilliant educators are accessible, visible, and encouraging white people to assume our responsibility in dismantling white supremacy. Racism will take genations to undo. It’s not enough not to be racist - white people ARE racist as a result of being raised in, living in a racist world. But we must DAILY participate in antitacist activities. There are so many places to find these activities and I will summarize serval of my favorites here.
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You don't have to be a highly evolved paragon of enlightenment in order to ease suffering and bestow blessings - Caroline Myss (Image: Marco Battaglini) I went through a break up recently - one of those processes that is absolutely universal and yet also feels extremely isolating. During that time, friends’ and authors’ snippets of wisdom were incredibly helpful to me, so I wanted to share some of that as most anyone who reads this has or will go through this.
The most important thing to know is that it’s not about them. What all this pain, loss, and sadness is really about is you. That’s both a liberating and terrifying realization. Now you have to face all your stuff that drove you to bond with someone when, for whatever reason, you were ill-prepared to do so and drives you to seek attachment in general (to be clear, not all attachment is bad, but addiction to attachment is – more about that below). Self care is about as overused, overabused, goopified, yuppified a term as you can get. And yet...most of us weren’t taught a. what this really is and b. how to practice. I think Dr. Howard Halpern has my favorite definition; You must learn to listen to the demands of that inner infant and become for her the best possible parent you can be. Nurture, guide, be good to that child, love her deeply, do nice things for her, tell her you will build her self-esteem and confidence and tell her you will always be there for her and never berate her. Also teach her that all of her needs may not be gratified immediately and that she can cope with the pain, that being alone is ok, not to attach to get needs met. The more you can stop yourself from these desperate attempts to avoid facing your own separateness, the more you can experience a mature, self-respecting, almost stately sense of who you are. Got it? Pretty tall order. But, if just reading that paragraph gave you some warm fuzzies, I think there’s hope for you. I’ll leave you from one more gem from the venerable Dr. Halpern; “The intensity of your withdrawal symptoms does not indicate the strength of your love but the strength of your addiction.” This answered a lot of questions for me. My recent break up, though something I provoked, was more challenging than that of my longest relationship. And I realized that was due to a dependency that kicked in as other aspects of my life (work, home) were incredibly insecure. Becoming overly dependent on another person’s love is surely a weakness, but it is also a quintesssentially human one, so go gentle on your sweet self, shore up your life so that you don’t do it again, and self care like a boss. I've been pretty remiss about blogging for the past couple of months, no doubt to the anguish of my legions of fans:). I had more time to process my thoughts while living in the Caribbean, and the past two months - travelling in December and now acclimating to a new city - have been a time of tremendous change, so my silence is due to both general overwhelm and some uncertainty about what the present moment means, as much is still unsettled - which also always a global truism but especially at the moment.
And that's ok. In an unsettled state we are more aware. We are vigilant - the hunters and the hunted. We are more attuned, accountable. So here's to making the most of an unsettled time. Here's to planting seeds even when we don't know if they'll sprout or not, or if they do, if we'll be around to see them. copyright © cicely nelson 2016 |