One thing I’m curious about is the space between stop and go. I don’t know about you, but when I actually stop something, I feel awful.
Some days it takes everything I have to refuse the old coping. Most days I notice how much of what I tell myself I should be doing, or even want to be doing, isn’t mine. It’s not real. It’s not attached to any true feeling of embodied desire, or curiosity, or wonder. It’s just me, recirculating what I’ve been told I should be doing to be valuable, or acceptable, or safe, or interesting to someone else. It’s “me” as the dominant culture represents me to myself.
I don’t believe there’s a “me” I can find that isn’t already shot through with patriarchy and white supremacy. I don’t think I’m going to find an authentic self, a self before culture. I’m noticing I want to give you a template for how to do this, this what-comes-after-stopping. If you have one, I want to know yours. But if I give you a template I’ve destroyed it. I’ve turned unknowing into knowing. I’ve made a graphic you can pin on your mirror. I want that, too. But then I’d be back in the “go” box. I’d have my secure path forward. I’d be congratulating myself on how much more self-actualized I am, now that I’m doing the new thing.
If we’re going to stop so that something visionary and truly revolutionary shows up, something that lets us maybe survive and halt the violence and destruction, I think it might come from sitting together and trying to find some way to communicate this unknowing, collectively, in a way that preserves a tentative sniffing at something, rather than a fixing, a certainty. I want you to share your version of that with me, in whatever way feels best to you. I long for it, because I want to know you, and because you hold my survival in your hands.
