Coming out of my cage at an unfortunate time (In the tune of Mr. Brightside)

Processing everything that’s happened in this little pocket of time has been . . . a lot. But it’s the last Friday of 2024, so I’m giving it my best shot!

There have been waves of anger, despair, disappointment and just plain sadness.

There has also been a lot of recontextualizing of me, my life, my community and my art during this time that I want to unpack.

After my initial wave of emotion, it was really hard to engage with politics or politic-adjacent things for a while. I mean, what is there to say?

I even painted a piece that I called “Banefully Unburdened” about this almost spiteful apathy that I was feeling.

“But I see now what they really wanted was to weaponize hope. So I’ve chosen to weaponize hopelessness.”

I also took the opportunity to reignite an old flame for poetry and prose. Sometimes it’s just easier to think without the expectation of intellectual soundness or justification. I always admired the space poet’s hold for grief.

That felt better, definitely the right choice for me. But I did take time to evaluate my personal choices and what I would do differently if I had the chance.

Small and pink. She has no idea

After careful reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was hurt because I didn’t consider myself deeply enough when forming my community. I hadn’t fully considered my history, my healing journey or my finite amount of patience. This is only my third legal election cycle, and this is my first time feeling how much it matters always, not just during Election Year. The era of blissful ignorance has come to a bittersweet end.

Slowing down and listening to my needs and the pain really healed me just as much as it hurt.

I’m not losing my mind, I’m expanding it.

My biggest regret, was thinking it wouldn’t matter this much to me. Maybe it was arrogance or overconfidence, but I genuinely did not think ahead to a time when I would be in a position to choose between my healing and people who claim they care for me. Maybe I thought I would grow into a completely objective person, capable of compartmentalizing better than I ever have before. I actually thought that more people saw my point of view and I wouldn’t have to worry about it.

Things got really wirlwindy for a while there, and sorting through everything was rewarding, but tiresome. A misconception I had about healing, was that those past versions of yourself were supposed to go away when you did everything right. Kind of like, a ghost phasing into the light after you solve it’s murder mystery. But that’s not actually how it works at all. Now I’m just better able to take responsibility for the care and management of those parts of myself. I want to explore this part of my journey in particular, because it really informs my actions, reactions and decisions in a way I strive to honor. I aspire to apply the lessons from this journey in every aspect of my life. And now with that context, I hope someone could understand how everything changed even though nothing changed.

What about “Class Empathy”?

I honor my younger self deeply and I am forever grateful for everything we went through together. It is such a very recent development that I’m able to say that. Exploring themes of inherent worth through the context of personal history and trauma has been a really profound experience. So it matters very deeply to me actually, that someone would vote against a slightly younger version of me and not even care. It bothers me very deeply that I allowed people access to the current me, that would not have valued me at all if fate had not given us a role in each other’s lives. I didn’t anticipate this reaction, but I am grateful for the prompt towards reflection and the conversations I got to have as a result.

You can always be loud.

The end of the year is fast approaching and I have to take the closure I can get. I am satisfied with the knowledge that I gained a deeper level of understanding this year and I’m grateful.