The full cycle of love always include grief
I’m not only talking about death.
Most of us won’t see the people we’ve once loved die.
But there are plenty of unrecorded deaths we go through when we witness how systems break us, our loved ones, and the bond we create with them.
What would have it been like, if it wasn’t for trauma?
Would have this worked better?
Saying “it wasn’t meant to be”, sometimes feels like an insult to how hard we’ve tried. How hard we’ve failed. And most importantly: that it is trauma that made it impossible.
This isn’t to invisibilize our loved ones’ agency as well as our own.
The point I’m trying to make here is that if we want to be in right relationship with each other, we owe it to ourselves and others we choose to be in relationship with to be intimate with the way racial capitalism has hurt them. Becoming intimate with someone involves becoming deeply intimate with the ways in which racial capitalism has hurt them, too. People are not their wounds, but the way they engage in their relationships is.
Trauma happens in relationship and so healing has to happen there, too.
If we want to walk each other home, we need to become acutely aware with the force that has driven them so far from it to begin with.
We need to know what home could be like, despite trauma, and create a new route to our bodies (instead of retracing our way back).
That starts with insight, which lends awareness, but it solidifies with practice, which creates capacity.
The capacity to hold, in our tissues, the ramifications of our own social positions. How they benefit/hurt others and how we can use them to create a world in which we can all belong.
When we hold less privileges than the person/people we love, we are being confronted with the costs of our own subjugation that allow them to gain power & privilege (social status, economic wealth, comfort, ease...)
For we are in position of privilege, we get to witness the cost of our privilege on the person we love.
While those two positions (power over vs power under) are far from being equal, they both create huge amounts of rage & grief when we listen to our bodies close enough. They both create separation, which is what racial capitalism relies on to survive.
Maybe like me, you’ve been in both positions and grieved the eternal wounds it has created in your relationships.
Maybe like me, you’re ready to face those truths to reconcile with them and create real change.
Systems are not meant to take care of each other, so we have to.
Last call for my workshop, My Queer Relations!
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