Tag: self-care

Reading in the Time of Pandemics

If we have anything in common (and maybe we do, since you’re here), it’s difficult to pull yourself away from the surreal every day world into a book at this moment. This morning, news about some of the major independent booksellers that I love laying off hundreds of workers makes me feel small and powerless. There are still things in our control: Our attention, for starters. And, if we have enough to give, our support of authors and others whose book tours and gigs and opportunities have been gutted, canceled and rearranged due to our new world disorder and chaos.

We can also:

  • Read All The Things: I pulled Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter & Tanisha Ford’s Dressed in Dreams off a dusty bookshelf to get started after I finish a few of these books, mainly by people of color, about pandemics & surviving them for HuffPost. I am greatly enjoying Sharks In The Time of Saviors. I just finished the very readable & inspirational More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth. What are you reading?
  • Pre-order: When I was still moving freely about in the world, last weekend, one of the first things I did was pre-order Elizabeth Acevedo’s two new projects: Write Yourself A Lantern & Clap When You Land. Because I could and I wanted to and she is one of the writers I adore. (It’s such an unusual thing for me to do from my phone that Apple called me to alert me to fradulent activity!! So much shade.) It also feels nice to believe in the future ahead of us and beyond the pandemic. We will flatten the curve and life will not be the same, but we can hope that all of us will still be here with good books.
  • Stop Reading & Go Outside: This is also book related. It is safe for you to take your book to a park or walk it around the block with you, for now, I guess. But also good for your brain and your retention of story for you to step away from the screens as much as possible and ground yourself.

You have other tips? Let me know in the comments. And be well. Thanks for stopping by.

 

 

 

Roses for the Living

122517-news-erica-gardner-on-life-support

Roses for the living.

I was thinking of this saying when I first heard that Erica Garner had a heart attack and we were all hopeful for recovery. I was surrounded by my family, and my sweet nephew led us in prayer for her, and my thoughts were consumed with her and her family, what they had been through and the burden black women are asked to constantly carry.

When I was first starting my newspaper career, I wrote for a time almost exclusively about black death and black pain, whether it was killing in Oakland or incarcerated mothers with families trying to sort through how to live without their needed matriarchs. I didn’t fully appreciate then, because no one had ever told me to, the notion of taking care of myself. I did not think that I was sensitive in any particular way to the harrowing and depressing work of being a witness, of being an advocate and especially of straddling the worlds between corporate journalism, where I had to translate the working class and middle class black experience, and the worlds of black folk.

I’m sure it was someone during this time who first used this phrase, to remind me and to remind others that we should give roses and praises to the ones that we love, the ones that are doing the work, while they are still here.

I was also thinking of another ProPublica piece, this one about black-serving hospitals where black mothers have been dying because of substandard care, a reality that could easily be corrected by improving care for them and making it equal to that which white women receive.

My answer to grief and fear and rage, to emotions I can’t name and want to understand or run away from at the same time, is always the same: I pray. I meditate. I read. Then, I try to write.

I looked to Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body and The Gloria Anzaldua Reader and Evelyn C. White’s The Black Women’s Health Book and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and even bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. I wanted to lean on the words of someone wiser than myself, someone who has lived this harrowing closeness to death and daily destruction, who understands the weariness of spirit that emerges when you just feel like you don’t know how else to ask the world to stop being willfully reckless with black women’s lives and hearts.

I found some passages that were connected. Some statistics, though we are more than numbers and metrics. Maybe I didn’t find the right words because I am supposed to write them, because they were stuck in my throat.

The only housewarming gift I gave to myself in 2017 was a Molly Crabapple print which is a painting of Audre Lorde with a quote, “Your silence will not protect you.” I put it up in a prominent place in my apartment so that I always have to consider it, so that I never forget. What I most respect and love and admire about women who step forward to fight the battles of their lives as Erica Garner did is that they understand this in a visceral, frontline way. It is not theoretical.

It is easy to feel that if we say nothing, that we are protected. That the suffering of the world, the tyrannies that obstruct justice will forget us. But reading from the full lecture that the quote is derived from, delivered a little more than exactly 40 years ago from a paper published as “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” helped me to remember why it is important to remember to continue to resist the temptation to clam up:

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.”

I had forgotten that this quote talked about how breaking silence gave Audre community, how it gives me, gives us, gave Erica, community even if community is not always enough to save us. Audre wrote this, too:

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is also the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you to dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”

That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is also the source of our greatest strength. 

This resonates, and feels true, but also we know from the death of Kalief Browder’s mother, Venida, and now Erica, that the vulnerabilities that come with being visible while fighting the good fight often don’t make us feel strong at all. People praise us with their mouths, but outside of public view is where the real war is – with keeping a life together, with staying healthy, remembering to rest, remembering to grieve, remembering that if there are no roses given to you that you can seek your own — but that too comes at a cost.

As Erica’s mother, Esaw Snipes said, “The only thing I can say is that she was a warrior. She fought the good fight. This is just the first fight in 27 years she lost.”

I tried to not write this at all. I had some down time. I was doing other work and I made myself stop being productive to take care of myself, so that I wasn’t spending an entire day during the last hours of the longest year in modern memory thinking of how many broken hearted black women have died while a complicit nation apologized and watched and then proceeded to kill another one.

I took a friend’s beautiful book of poetry with me to the great continent of Brooklyn for a birthday party, had a couple of drinks, met some great folks, had a good meal and came home, haunted, exhausted, near tears in the wee hours of the last day of 2017. I will not be defeated, not while I’m living, not by racism, not by sexism, not by silences or complicity. Or, at least, I can say I will keep trying not to be.

I do not know how to give myself the luxury of looking away when the world is too much, though, and it is often too much. Zora said there are years that ask questions and years that answer. I hope that 2018 has answers for us.

Self-care in a time of racial terror

A friend and I were discussing the heroics of Bree Newsome this weekend when I ran out of things to say. Driving in the rain, attending to the life chores that are demanded of us, I was at a loss for how to describe the light that filled me when I saw the video of her climbing that flag pole, descending with Scripture on her lips, calmly informing the irritated men on the ground that she was prepared to be arrested.

The image of her holding on to that flag like a New Age Lady Liberty gave me chills. But it was something else. It felt like permission to breathe after a series of stories in the news that have left me breathless. It was not unlike President Obama’s eulogy for Rep. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, which was not only one of the most beautiful speeches I’ve ever heard, but also a pointed affirmation of the power of black love to restore back to us our humanity.

In a world where black women are too often invisible, Bree Newsome was and is a symbol of renewal. She gave me life with her act of rebellion, a symbol of how the resilience of black womanhood sometimes eclipses detrimental symbols of hatred. The echo, was “She did it herself.” #WeHelpOurselves, indeed.

Has it been a year, or several months, or an eternity that these headlines have been assaulting us? In the aftermath of Charleston, Dylann Roof, Rachel Dolezal, McKinney, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Marissa Alexander, Rekia Boyd, and the other names of the dead, dying, racially infused, racially polarized or racially symbolic, I have found myself more weary from the news than ever.

There was a time when I felt adrenaline coursing through my veins logging on to social media, to see what news the day or night had brought. Now, I feel a sense of dread and mourning on first glance and it only takes a few minutes for me to feel like I should crawl right back into bed and forget the day.

I have, for all of my adult life, been tethered to the news as a journalist and a writer. Newsrooms were my first sense of community, after the context of classrooms and schools. Even before I became a journalist officially fifteen years ago, I inhaled newspapers and sometimes local TV news in the Bronx. When I was just a consumer, I had the leisure of controlling my consumption. I could put down the paper or magazine; I could turn the TV off. I could create some distance.

I still have that choice but the game has changed. Writing is not just who I am and what I do but it is how I survive in the world. To be a writer, now, is to also be considered a journalist, especially if you are a black writer. These are not problems in and of themselves, but they present special challenges.

When I was researching my new book, I read a line from a journalist of color who said that she was expected to be both a witness to the struggles in her community and an interpreter for her white editors. Though I no longer work in a newsroom, I experience this same conundrum, along racial and political lines. Reaction is considered reporting.

My friend told me what she had read about the Confederate flag, about Dylann Roof, too, and she started to share. I appreciated getting the filtered version from her, I said, but I told her that I had stopped reading the glut of information that came in. Because it was painful. It was too much. I needed time to process and to feel and to see my own emotions, to grieve. To regain some sense of power. To breathe.

Research affirms that black women react differently to witnessing traumatic events than other groups and that includes experiencing the news. There is something about our double jeopardy, our doubly oppressed status that triggers a response in us that is similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We lose our appetites. Our sleep is disrupted. We feel anger, fear, despair.

I thought about this again when I watched What Happened, Miss Simone? which chronicles the life and demise of Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul who was not only undone by manic depression but also her political expressions of rage against racism and racial terrorism. In the film, you can see how systemic racism squelched not only her voice but her spirit.

What black women know, what we feel, at all times, is that there are multiple prices to pay for acknowledging our truth and speaking it. We have seen it over the decades. Strange fruit, swinging from the trees. Literally, figuratively.

As a black woman writer, I pay two tolls when news of racial terrorism breaks: the first is the impact it has on my body and spirit; the second is the weight of expectation that I perform my reaction, that at the very least, I publicly process the act of witness, making that more of a priority than reconciling a deluge of images, commentary and reporting over my internal, personal processing.

To be black in America is to know that few people care about your health or safety or well-being.

It is to live daily with the reality of a horrific, skyrocketing suicide rate among little black children who do not have the luxury of believing we care about a future that affirms their lives.

It is to be told outright or by silence that even when you have nothing to say, even when you are too tired to react or respond, you stand in the gap. But for grace, you might be dead now, so speak, in spite of weariness or fear or dread.

There is truth in that. It is also true that self-care is a political act. An assertion of worth. An assertion of the belief that you deserve silence and time. You deserve your love and attention as much as anything or anyone else.

Sometimes, when I am silent, it is not because of apathy, but an abundance of feeling. An acknowledgment that I need to step back before lashing out. To rediscover joy. To heal. To witness. To hold symbols of hate in my hands and work to dismantle them while praying the consequences that unfold will not destroy my life.