I finished my therapy session this week feeling seen. Seen by my therapist and most importantly seen by myself. In my journey to be an amazing therapist and healing assistant, I’ve been on a voyage to heal a sister. I’m the sister! I don’t identify as a healer, I feel that in order for one to heal, they have to put some work in; people heal themselves with the help and guidance of others.
Read MoreOne of the primary reasons why I joined C2C was for the opportunity for spiritual growth. My answer to “what are you willing to do?” even became a reflection on my obsession with freedom. I’m currently seeking to use the medium of script writing and songwriting to capture my complex relationship to, and understanding of freedom. Previously, indulging in spirituality added so much value to my being but I began to develop a toxic relationship to it, hence the saying “too much of a good thing is a bad thing”.
Read MoreThis is what I want to explore in my answer to this question: shaping fate by making meaning. And I am not alone. An entire tradition of makers and shapers have come before me in the form of Afro-futurist giants like Alice Coltrane, Sun-Ra, and Octavia Butler. They too were weird. To the mainstream, they seemed to veer off toward impossibilities, galactic abstraction, dissonance, but they were actually Afrofuturist superheroes, drawing new connections and creating new narratives. Their method? Diverging from convention and design to explore marginal relationships and unlikely (or all too likely) sequences. Coltrane and Sun-Ra, for example, diverged from expectation by using bebop era improvisation techniques. Their goal was to go as close to the edge of reason and sound as their own humanity would allow, producing for us feeling which could not be described in words. Octavia Butler was a pioneer in her own right, exploring possibility free of know-how and to-do, meaning free of lore and its progressions. She was always looking to the future and its sustainability.
Read MoreI’m trying to tell you that the question “What are you willing to do?” was terrifying to me, because I used to believe that the answer to that question meant whatever it took, even if at the expense of my wholeness. I’m trying to tell you that beyond growing accustomed to operating from a place of deprivation and scarcity, I sincerely believed that I was underserving of anything enjoyable, that if I would do something as self-indulgent (or so I thought) as trying to be a writer or daring to live a life of my own design, I would have to bear every difficult consequence on my own. I’m trying to tell you that I can’t even name what my favorite meal is today, because I have disciplined my self into an unbending strictness where I only buy what is cheapest and will last longest, only what is essential and on the grocery list. I’m trying to tell you that I wasn’t just trying to live some sort of romanticized life of a struggling artist; I’m trying to tell you that what I was doing felt like dying. I’m repeating my self because this is a ritual that I cannot afford to see fail.
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