A Resting Place

Alone on a pathway

Mom, I sometimes think about what it would be like if you were dead. It scares me more than most things that I imagine. I feel like I need you. I have allowed myself to need you. I begin to trust that there is space inside of you, space for me to be cared for. We move towards profound closeness, reliance, trust. Over time I learn that you are there for me, and that I am there for myself. Perhaps I play with the emptiness of you being gone because I am learning to let go.

Our long distance relationship

Not long ago, on a video call, I really wanted to be there for you. You were feeling insecure. You looked at me softly with those eyes that ask for love, a gentle plea to be understood. It took a few moments of just loving each other before you began to talk to me about what matters. It was like, in those moments of looking at each other, sending soft coos, we were feeling out the space; beginning to understand what there was space for and what didn’t need to be verbalized. When you began to talk it was clear. I could hear your feelings without rejecting them and I could share my experience in return.

My mom is woke.

Her eyes are open to systemic horrors that dictate so much of human existence. She sees social dynamics for what they really are. She delves deep into emotion and thought, building a foundation. She does not hide from the truth but rather takes it upon herself to pull apart the real from the mess. It’s true she is something of a hero and I feel lucky to have her as a mom. Not because of her convictions but because she never stops growing, she never stops changing.

My mom is a cancer and studying to become a therapist

You begin to talk to me about needing to be seen, begging the world not to give up. The eternal conflict runs deeper than the immediate struggle between you and your partner, but it is contextualized in your relationship and you feel trapped in their tunnel vision, recognized not as you but as something that their triggered self is deeply afraid of. This misconception hurts you as you feel reduced to a vessel for the reenactment of their fears.

Internalized pain from the past coagulates

Emotions are murky, the dirty water from which the lotus grows. Ultimately I don’t want to be my emotions, but the lotus cannot grow on its own. When I experience a loved one as cold hearted, withdrawn and completely unavailable, I am triggered by their rejection. The hurt from the past mingled with the hurt from the present flattens my perception. I no longer see the nuances, nor am I able to comprehend our purity.

It doesn’t happen often, but not long ago I was there. The conversation that I was having with somebody that I love very much was going awry. Their eyebrows furrowed in a way that signaled a receptivity shut down. They were triggered. I tried to talk my way out but we were spiraling into the dark depths of miscommunication. I should have gotten up and left so that I could at least hear myself, but I didn’t. It escalated... I snapped...

Then one night they fought so loudly that all night long they could be heard in the village below their cave, and even as far as three mountains away. In the morning, however, people saw rainbows above their cave, and when they went up to the cave there was nothing left of them at all—they had attained the rainbow body.

Sometimes, rather than responding to triggers with rage, I withdraw. I raise the draw-bridge around my heart and fade behind closed shutters. With sadness and gratitude, I eventually venture out of my lonely stone castle. Either way, the aftermath of such an encounter is an in depth conversation with self loathing. Self loathing reminds me that I still live in a relative world, I am messy.

How can we even begin to see our loved ones if we can’t see ourselves? A medium in my life often says, how many therapies is too many therapies?

We are learning to sit still with the unknown, COVID-19

It’s true, change is unpredictable, transition is happening constantly. In response to shifting conditions we start to develop a sense of self, something that we begin to solidify over time. As children we learn to protect ourselves, differentiating between me, the pain and the mom that I was sure was somehow a part of me. What seemed unconditional begins to feel confusing, interdependence and impermanence begins to fuck with my bliss.

Samantha Frost in her new materialist essay titled Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy talks about fear as a “response to the obscurity of the unknown.” She says that “fear compels us to see the wisdom of leaving the uncertainties and violence of the natural condition by setting up a sovereign to rule over us.” When we are young we are the victims of all kinds of abuse, hurt from the beginning by our parents, by culture, by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Hurt is internalized. As we grow up, it detaches from the initial cause and resurfaces in confusing emotional responses that are often hard to identify. We don’t understand ourselves and we don’t have the skill set to sit still with the unknown. We distract ourselves eternally, simmering in an almost bearable depression. We learn coping mechanisms to shrink our world into something seemingly controllable, narrowing our horizon. “In situations in which we cannot find ‘the true causes of things,’ we are compelled to ‘suppose causes,’ fabricating them.” Identity itself is a coping mechanism. One that differentiates the self from the other and over time provides us with “reasons” and “answers”. The cleverer we are, the more bullet proof our construct and the easier it is to convince ourselves and others that we have an open mind, that we are not stuck. We hold on so tight to an illusion of possible mastery over ourselves and the world around us. We confine ourselves in our own narrow fictions, we restrain ourselves from our expansive capacities but we also use mind expansion ideologies as hiding places and ways of avoiding reality. We mustn’t forget that “expansive thinking”. has been used time and time again against women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. Justifying exploitation under the guise of “we are so open minded”.

Fear is a prerequisite in the development of identity, “a passion among whose effects is the illusion of individual autonomous agency.” Frost places fear in time as it is equated with an object from the past. A memory of fear becomes attached to an object so that object or one similar effects anticipation, proposing some kind of understanding of what the future holds. Each thought or memory, with its affective dimension, paves a simplified field of action proposing a fake “sense of possible mastery over the field of her actions and (therefore) over the future.”

Fear objects can confine us to a limited fields of action but they are sometimes necessary for survival. How accurately can we use fear objects as survival tools? This of course depends on how severe the threats were in the past, how high stress levels are, and whether or not the stress is chronic. Chronic stress is often a legitimate response to unflawed perception, perhaps an indication of a chronically stressful context. Our anxiety is not inaccurate, however it makes us more prone to illness, it weakens us, so we carve out little islands for ourselves.

Much of the time, people that are healthier are more capable of setting aside anxiety even when the anxiety producing circumstance have not been resolved. This is not about truth, but rather, survival. Preserving life; feeling alive rather than dominated by anxiety. Survival is about transcending the reality that we live in.

Transcend or die, another utterance of said medium.

I recently read a thing in the Coven Berlin newsletter that said, “Eclipses are not good times for manifestations, btw. They are like sliding doors suddenly closing only to reveal a changed world in place of the familiar”. I sent the quote to a friend of mine who had been equating his depression with the full moon lunar eclipse and he wrote back, “That’s why I am so scared of them” and he went on to mention the “great summer eclipse of 2018” and how it “Blew the whole world open”.

I offer this as a simple example of a fear object from the past that is projected into an anticipation of the future, and produces a sense of comfort in “knowing why” one feels the way they feel. Fear, says Thomas Hobbes, is “Aversion, with opinion of hurt from the object. Since aversion involves an absent object and ‘opinion of hurt’ involves an expectation about the future, we can try to be very precise and say that fear is the feeling of the repulsive movement at play in the imaginative expectation of a future experience of pain from an absent offensive object.” We carry so much hurt from our childhood. I understand the need to make sense of the unknowability of shifting conditions, to place the emotions somewhere, materially.

A memory and a fear object

Mom, this one stuck with me. Tucking me in, I’m drifting off to sleep, we are holding hands and I feel cozy. You tell me that you are going to go now, and I hold on tighter. I’m not ready for you to leave, or maybe I just need you to know that your departure can also be up to me. That I do not become a burden for needing you to stay. You sit with me for a little longer, “ok sweetpea, I’ll stay a bit longer, but I’m tired and still need to do the dishes so let me know when you are ready for me to go downstairs.” I keep my hand in yours, eyelids get heavy, cheek sinks into the pillow and my grip relaxes. She slips away and baby me slips into sleep. I feel cared for.

This rendition is a story that you told me later, the way that you wished it had happened.

In real life you left, in real life I felt like a burden, that perception of myself lingers. Because of how you had been hurt as a child and re-wounded by the world, there was not enough space for me to need you. Because of your hurt, you had to be selfish to survive.

Developing subjectivity, defined in this context as autonomy, agency and freedom, is also a beautiful thing. Elizabeth Grosz, in her essay Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom, attempts to open up these terms that are so often used to define identity, by contextualizing them ontologically. She depicts freedom in two ways, a positive understanding of freedom as “freedom to” and the usual, negatively conceived freedom, “freedom from”. The intention here is not to depoliticize freedom, I recognize freedom as the elimination of constraint or coercion, but also something more; potentiality.

Even in the most extreme cases of slavery and in situations of political or natural catastrophe of the kinds globally experienced in recent years, there is always a small space for innovation and not simply reaction. What remains remarkable about genocidal struggle, the horrors of long term incarceration, concentration camps, prisoner of war camps, and the prospects of long-term social coexistence in situations of natural and social catastrophe is the inventiveness of the activities of the constrained—the flourishing of minor and hidden arts and literature, technologies and instruments, networks of communication, and the transmission of information. What is most striking about the extreme situations of constraint, those which require a “freedom from,” is that they do not eliminate a “freedom to” but only complicate it.

And stimulate it.

“Freedom to” proposes creative potential. I understand it as relating to an openness and constant newness of subjectivity. A subject always in the process of coming into existence, a subject-to-be. In Irigarayian terms, this would be the female subject within a feminism of difference.

To go back to the fear object as that which grants the subject a sense that there are possibilities for action and furthermore that the action is decided upon by the subject, I would like to discuss what happens when there is no fear object? What is taking place when the subject cannot find an identifiable cause and therefore cannot develop a narrowed field upon which to project a sense of knowing the future? Hobbes calls this “Panique Terror [lol], fear, without apprehension of why, or what.” When no simplification of causality can take place, the subjects imagination is stunted and they are no longer able to take voluntary action. “An objectless fear rips the illusion of agency from the subject and thereby deprives her of the ability to initiate actions.” This disillusionment leaves the subject lost to herself, without a future.

Tracing causality has its place, a very important place, for example, in distinguishing systems of oppression. People are often denied acknowledgement of the horrific things that have happened to them. In this sense, they are denied their own reality. Believing this, they become divided within themselves. Perhaps we are less afraid of the unknown and more afraid of knowing something when the whole world wants us to think otherwise.

However, I am able to read hope into Frost’s theoretical framework as well. For it is the moments when we are not swimming in the illusion of agency, the moments in which we do not know what the future holds, that free acts have the opportunity to happen and simultaneously transform us in the happening. Freedom in this sense is a process, a movement that cannot be defined by qualities or properties of the human subject. Perhaps it is through “free acts” that we can ultimately experience ourselves and each other.

Imagine an imminent identity

I need space to witness you. It’s demented but tbh I cry when I think about how preoccupied people are with their own hurt, unable to see each other’s beauty.

If I recall correctly, it was an elementary school assignment. I was maybe seven years old. I brought home a huge piece of paper and had to fill in the 2D tree with pictures of my family, two generations. It was easy on my mother’s side, and seemingly easy on my father’s side as well. I put a lot of work into making it look beautiful. I was proud of my family tree. When my step dad saw it, he berated me. Crushing my sense of accomplishment because he could not believe that my biological father held the father branch as opposed to him; the man who was raising me. He yelled and acted as if I had deeply hurt his feelings. I felt terrible, conflicted because I had done the assignment correctly but had let him down.

A full moon lunar eclipse in cancer is a time to cut toxic family relations

There was no privacy in my childhood home, not when Charlie was around. I remember a time when I dreaded showering if he was home and my mom was out. I remember that dark green shower curtain and the way he would knock on the door before I had finished with the hot water, steam, and my autonomy. He would come into the bathroom in just his towel and I was immediately incapacitated. Like a cat when she is grabbed by the scruff of her neck, compliant, not by choice.

Compliance causes a shocking realization that must be registered by all women. That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.

“You don’t have to turn off the water,” He would say.

“I will come in right away to save water.”

His words made no sense but it was not about the meaning. It was about his naked flesh, pale and freckled, the mass of his body standing before me. He handed me my towel as I stepped out of the shower, the water still running, our bodies too close. I had to dry myself and get dressed with him on the other side of that curtain. If I were to leave I would make it obvious that something was wrong. Was I denying myself trust? Pretending that everything was fine for the sake of peace in the household? I didn’t look because I was afraid of him knowing that I knew that he was looking. I could not stand up for myself, I was embarrassed and scared. I knew, but still, it couldn’t be.

My sexuality developed in relation to this man that I called daddy, as did my entire sense of self develop in relation to this person that I depended on for love, affection, knowledge, growth. He used me as his play thing.

I need space to get to know me. I need to embrace the possibilities of a “freedom to”; potential for change. What kind of creativity can develop out of something as bleak as the history of women's oppression?

Children are born, raised and socialized in capitalism, a system of power that came into being with the overt sexualization and oppression of women in Europe. During the feudal uprising, according to Silvia Federici, the growing influence of money and the market “began to split the peasantry by transforming income differences into class differences.” All the forces of feudal power—the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie—united for the first time, out of fear of the proletarian rebellion. A prominent strategy of the state was to introduce misogyny and drastic sex discrepancies to disassemble the collective revolution.

By turning men and women against each other, those in power were able to dismantle the proletarian force. State run brothels became a huge industry, introducing the sexualization of all women. Women were being raped on the street without the authorities lifting a finger. Upper- and lower-class men alike could assert power over women and let their aggression out. “Even the Church came to see prostitution as a legitimate activity. The state-managed brothel was believed to provide an antidote to the orgiastic sexual practices of the heretic sects, and to be a remedy for sodomy, as well as a means to protect family life.” Family life that is based on hierarchy, resentment, dissatisfaction. Husband and wife were kept from being truly close, this made them easier to control and subsequently better consumers.

In the process of the sexual ‘new deal’, the state became the ultimate manager of class relations, and the supervisor of the reproduction of labor-power – a function it has continued to perform to this day. Girls are born into a system of oppression that fuels the development of the dominant structure.

It takes a lot of work to openly diagnose and radically heal seared in pathologies

Thank you mom for your offering, working hard to weave a safety net for me.

I can be held and express my uncertainties and feel good with myself. I can propose intimacy with or without sex. Sometimes I still rush into closeness. Becoming too entangled I have to retreat, but I won’t run away anymore.

I was recently destabilized by a romantic fantasy. I became somewhat obsessed with a person as we were getting to know each other, certain that they could fulfill something. My perception, or perhaps projection of this person was fraught with confusion. At some point they were like the sky, always there when I looked up. I felt safe. I experienced them as reliable and grounded. I felt as though they saw me as a bit of a mystery. And most importantly, every sexual progression was my choice. It is clear to me now that these are my needs rather than the unconditional attributes of a person irl.

At the same time, I was triggered into childhood habits of compliancy and needing to prove myself. I was afraid of being met with judgment. I was afraid of losing their attention. I made myself available even when I knew I should take space for the sake of my integrity. I tried hard not to use my sexuality to get their attention. I was in conflict with old patterns. I was afraid of being rejected.

There was a hyper dialogue happening in my head as we were becoming close and they had little to no idea. Space and trust has allowed the confusion to clear. After excavating my specific needs from a murky fantasy, I know a bit more about myself, what kind of framework I need to feel safe, vibrant. I know a bit more about them also. I am able to love them, without desperation.

“What is suffering like? Suffering’s nature is emptiness; emptiness’s true nature is luminous clarity; and luminous clarity’s true nature is bliss.”

I wish to be able to experience myself and others absolutely. I wish for spacious encounters in which we are not preoccupied with our own healing. I wish to communicate with you as I communicate with a tree or with the ocean. It's wide open here, between two meadows, see you there!