Welcome to the Fire

Happy (Lunar) New Year! The sun is returning and my depressed ass finally feels like I can function and not just pretend I can. It’s the year of the fire horse, a year characterized by fierce passion and rapid change The last fire horse year was 1966, so what am I burning down?

I’m burning down every energy that lives rent free in my head that keeps me from being my most authentic, most creative, most fearless self. I’m burning down every instance of the white gaze in my creativity. I’m burning down everything I needed to be and do to get here but is too heavy to carry forward. I’m burning down every pause, and moment of thinking about the audience that worked itself into my audacious journey videos. I’m burning down the Porscha that has been expected and assumed to claim the one who actually is. To claim the screaming, raw one. The one who exists in the way I’m deleting every instance of political correctness or reframing that I inadvertantly put in his writing.

I’m burning that moment when the internalized naysayer, the internalized gaze says who are you to do THAT? Who are you to dream that big, and to actually do it?! Who are you to think you can?! Even a person like me who believes and knows ain’t none of ya’ll got a heaven or hell to put me in still has that moment. If we didn’t internalize the messages we are given the system would have collapsed long time ago. That’s what I tell myself when I feel the fear and do it anyway. That’s what I’m telling myself now as I order prints of my collage work to put in my shop. As I’m working in a HUGE 16 × 12 sketchbook that I bought years ago but never fully embraced.

My fear is not my own voice because somebody had to teach me to be afraid. My fear is the elementary school teacher who told me I couldn’t do the art part of a group project, “let’s let _________ do that part and you do the writing, you are good at writing” My fear is in the voices and expectations that seeped through a good childhood, an outstanding mama and having folks who had my back. Even with that the world tries to break Black girls, tries to flatten us, make us smaller and more digestible. This year I’m burning every kindness in favor of letting them choke.

I’m burning every time I said something was alright when it wasn’t. All the times I say it’s okay that I’m in pain. It’s not okay, it is reality. It is reality right now as I type this and I’m too stubborn to go back to laying on my heating pad. My chronic pain is not okay, not beautiful, not easy, their ain’t a gold lining (I’m allergic to silver) in and of itself. This can true and it can also be true that pain is a teacher, a clarifier, a portal in which a lot of Black disabled femmes myself included find out that we are god and we can alchemize out of a body that is an imperfect and unreliable narrator. Zora Neale Hurston said “If you are silent about your pain they will kill you and say you enjoyed it” I’m not lying about my pain anymore, I’m burning the urge to happy ending my suffering, physical and mental. I’m burning the want to wrap every essay and poem into something that won’t depress and distress the reader. I can’t be frustrated at all the folks who stay sleep if I’m not willing to blare like an alarm clock, to screech like the canary in the coal mine.

My fear is not that I’m a terrible artist, my fear for a long time maybe up until last week or an hour ago was that my life may end up looking nothing like I ever thought it would because I’m doing things I never thought I could. My fear is that I am really leaning all the way in because I desire it and not because I should desire it.

The only way I can Savior Self is to burn down every lie. When I was in taking Roots Wounds and Words with Nicole Shawan Junior she told me at the end of the ten weeks to dig deeper, she said my essay was fine but I wasn’t telling my whole story. I was mad. I was SO mad at that woman for years. How could she tell me I wasn’t telling it all. She had told us about James Baldwin and telling all the truth one can bare then telling a little more. I thought I was doing that. That was all the truth I could bare then which is why I have to burn all my previous interactions.

I didn’t understand it and I didn’t understand it for a long time. I thought I was trying to tell the story of being diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis, even after that workshop that essay didn’t come together. I tried again at Hurston Wright the year I did nonfiction/memoir. The essay never came together because that was the story I was comfortable telling. I wanted to talk about being diagnosed and being relieved and having answers. I didn’t want to write about how many times it could have killed me, how many diagnoses came after it, how many are still coming. I didn’t want to write about the diagnoses of women in my family, that my ancestors and fore parents passed down illness just like they passed down love and resilience and maybe just maybe one of my generational curses to break is in how I process pain, disappointment, mistrust. In how I learn that standing on my guard might be part of why my connective tissue feels like it’s on the verge of snapping.

How the story is really about how Disabled Black femmes have been weaving liberation and dreaming better futures that we could dream for ourselves because nothing changes the spelling of possible like pain that will not go away and when it does leave you know it won’t stay gone. If that is the story I will tell it, I feel ready to tell it. Not that I need to be anything other than my flawed, full self to tell any of it in writing, in paint, in videos or songs. Because I’m realizing that the path I walked of reverence bordering on the worshipful for the folks who I thought had something I didn’t, something I needed Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Nikki Giovanni, my grandma. They were all burning and let themselves stay on fire not to keep anybody warm but the way that any lush, complex forest that is teeming with distinct but intermingled life requires a burn to maintain.