44 recap: anxiety, bottles, dyett
It's almost the end of another birthday, and the truth is birthdays are kind of hard for me. It seems like such a stupid first world dilemma, what with Trans Day of remembrance, FB streams full of islamaphobia, the inspiring words of Dyett hunger strikers and Black Lives Matters activists at the teachers for social justice event yesterday reminding me of the very complicated structures of violence against black and brown individuals. Looking at the facebook feed and getting all the "I'm sorry i can't celebrate with you, let's get coffee some times" texts feeds all of my social insecurities, which feels so wrong when there are people coming down to adventure with me, help me clean my kitchen while i cook brunch, share part of the day with me. I have been thinking quite a lot about the 5 of bottles (cups in traditional tarot) card. In in there are 4 broken and or empty bottles, but there is one bottle being rescued by a bird. I feel like the random loss of the world around me and my own personal life are four bottles worth at least. I'm a bullied kid; i'm bursting with mostly unhelpful fragility as a result of my not terribly well evolved capacity for empathy, i work in worlds where i see a lot of hopeless situations. Also, there is at least one bottle intact and full, and i really just want to keep my eyes on that rescued bottle. I want to have the strength to wade through all this shit with all the other people who have empty and broken bottles raining down on them. Jitu Brown and others talked so much about solidarity this weekend, in ways that felt real, not coddling or catering, not back patting, not useless allyship, but something charged and hopeful, something i want to aspire to. None of us know exactly what it looks like. But if i'm going to rise to even an shadowy prototype of what that could be, I have to hang on to that bottle and forget about all that other shit. I have to lay easy with the stories about the folks in my life who, with their own social anxiety or untintended judgement or hurt or whatever, trigger my feelings of not being enough in some inherent unfixable way. I have to fix the ideas i have about myself not having the capacity to contribute meaningfully, i have to extend that to active movement away from self sabotage. I have to end this birthday here, alone, with me loving myself, dreaming of and working towards the good shit i have already started with some pretty awesome co-conspirators.