The Spook Who Sat By The Door

I’ve blamed myself for the death of my biological mother for years. I don’t anymore (or so I believe). I carried the self-imposed guilt for years though I had nothing to do with her death. Even she didn’t have anything to do with it. But my seven-year-old mind had to make sense of why she was gone… forever. Seven is the age when you still view the world from a selfish lens. It’s not bad it’s just biology. If things happen that are out of our control we blame ourselves because our young minds can’t wrap itself around the fact that the bigger humans have the capability of making their own decisions and choices. We are the center of our worlds which means that we believe that everything starts and ends with us. This is why childhood trauma can be so difficult to untether ourselves from because the trauma is happening at a time when we have little to no sense of identity. The bigger humans are meant to cater to us and when that doesn’t happen we believe that is it a failing on our part.

I’ve been working for years to rewrite the narrative that has shaped my entire existence up until this point. But no matter how many positive words, affirmations or creative visions boards I created I kept returning to this false story. Naturally from this (and the events surrounding her death) was born people pleasing, perfectionism and placing my power in someone else’s hands. I didn’t know I was doing these things of course. I simply lived my life with a pressurized need to have people like me. Recently some of the most important relationships in my life have been turned on their side with my role in those relationships changing over night. I had no control over how others viewed me and it sent me into a tailspin.  

If I’m not perfect then bad things can happen. Questions of worthiness and value began to plague me as I descended into the shadows of my inner world. It was hard for me to separate the need for acceptance with the need for validation. Little did I know that my perfectionism came with a side of not being able to slow down. As someone who has been practicing meditation for years I was under the impression that I was slowing down. But the truth of the matter was that I was only giving myself enough space to freeze. To stop the clock only to have it resume right where I left off when life started back up again. I lived on an endless loop of being sad then pressing on. I never integrated my experiences, my feelings, my grief. I simply pushed forward. It’s what I had been trained to do.

Ancestral patterns passed down through the generations made it easy for me to do what the women in my family had done time and time again. Not only did I need to look at my own lived experiences and take them into account when it came to perfectionism and slowing down but I also needed to recognize the expectations of external narratives. I’m a black queer person. I present as femme though I identify as non-binary. Looking at me I have certain privileges that afford the ability to move through the world with slightly less push back from society. I don’t come across as queer. I’m light-skinned. I’m non-threatening in my presentation and overall presence. I’m agreeable to a fault. There’s no doubt in my mind that the respectability that I perform is a function of safety that many if not all of the women in my family used. As long as I wasn’t like “those” black people I was safe. “Those” qualities were never verbally expressed but were telepathically understood. 

By the time I reached adulthood and became a parent I was swimming in an ocean of perfectionistic, people pleasing skills. Succumbing to the exhaustion of treading water to stay afloat I was beginning to drown. Nothing I did could allow me to come up for air. So slowing down looked like death. If I stop treading water I will sink down to the watery grave of the ancestors that never made it to dry land. Maybe their deaths were intentional. Maybe they could see the writing on the wall unlike me who was still in the middle of the ocean waiting for a ship to save me from myself. Over the last couple of months I’ve been doing rituals around cord cutting. Cutting myself off from ideas, beliefs and stories that only keep me in the exhaustive struggle. I won’t be able to keep this performance up for long. And who would emerge from the disembodied corpse that I would leave behind? Who was the “me” inside this shell of flesh, bone and blood? 

After one particularly meaningful ritual I began to feel the old me slipping away. Though she fought tooth and nail to remain in tact, to remain connected to this corporeal body I knew that “we” had to surface. No more living at either end of the human spectrum and having others determine who I am. I knew integration of the all was the only way to live. But that’s easier said than done. Especially when the ocean that I am swimming in is that of white supremacy, patriarchy and puritanical ideology. Though my outward expression showed myself to be excelling as a black woman I was failing as a child of the most high. And failure is a construct of the human. In truth I was not failing, I was rising. I was, and still am, remembering who I am not who I constructed myself to be in order to fit a model of acceptance and love of human standards.

This work is hard. Being a human is hard. Not because of the practical skills which are laughably simplistic in their design and execution. But because we are constantly inundated with energies that seek to pull us away from remembering. To remember is to  recollect. To recollect is to return. And there is nothing that this world wants more than for us, for me, to never return to that knowing. Knowing is dangerous because it’s resistance. It flies in the face of erasure which this world seeks to do each and every moment that we breathe. Be perfect, hurry up, forget and melt into asimilation. I’m not completely out of the woods from my perfectionistic, people pleasing historical patterns but I have been able to shed some of the lies that I have told myself about myself.

And I think that in and of itself is progress that I am proud of.