Recently, things going on in the outside world have made it really hard to hold all the space needed for the reactions on my inside world. In all of the hats I wear (and fuck I don’t look good in hats… any hat… ever… never have…) at work, at home, as a person on Earth, as a person in community, there seems to be shifting at work. Shifts in our relationships to our bodies, to each other, to our needs, to our rights, to what it means to feel safe and held and to have what we need to thrive in and out of spaces that our “ours.” What it means to identify harm, hold oneself accountable for the harm caused, and work together in concert, in tandem, in relationship, to find new ways forward.
In the reproductive health, rights, and justice spaces I operate in, this is loud. Since the Dobbs decision, shit has been a mess. A sad mess. Brown watercolor. People are being denied health care, people are met with intentionally created, expensive barriers to the end that people can’t afford health care, and as we’re frantically trying to do operation clean-up, we’re simultaneously having a reckoning of values.
There are seasons of change. Over the course of our lives, we all have times when we feel more (and less) clear of what matters to us and how we can work in community to get there. Yesterday, the season changed in one day. And in reverse. Here in Kansas City, I woke up and put on a mumu dress and kept my feet bare. The 70 degree temperatures, even in the early morning, let me feel grass on the arches of my feet and remember what it was like to just let the sun hold me. Over the course of hours, a portal opened and winter blew back in. Literally. Temperatures dropped by the tens in the course of a dog walk with one of my beloveds. We were all left with cold paws and a craving to tuck in. By the time the sun went down, wind turned to hail turned to snow. All from 8 AM to 8 PM. Summer to winter.
The movement, too, is going through its own shift from summer to winter. In the depths of trying to get people abortions and get trans folks health care, we’re fighting against new attempts to criminalize and surveil pregnant people and insertion of the state into family building a la Alabama’s recent IVF case. As a queer who is relying on IVF for my own family building, the layering of it all is exhausting. Through all these fights, we’re also experiencing grief en masse. Trans kids are dying at the hands of violent hate. Pregnant folks are dying as they’re forced to carrying unhealthy and unsafe pregnancies in a country that isn’t expediently working to prioritize their wellbeing. Palestinians and Sudanese and Congolese families are starving and dying at the hands of colonization.
And then the worlds combine.
Our community in reproductive health, rights, and justice is reckoning with questions around what does it mean to talk about justice, to care about the wellbeing of communities, and what does that mean when communities across the globe are not safe? How can our core tenets be justice and not speak out on issues, clear as the sun in the morning summer, of injustice? Where is the blurry line between individual action and organizational action? What does it look like when individuals start to hold organizations accountable by calling in, having private conversations, calling out, removing themselves from associating with organizations, asking for community action and accountability?
There are so many questions. And living in so many questions, no matter what they are or where they’re coming from, erodes opportunity for trust building. And suddenly realizing that the environment isn’t conducive to trust can feel a whole lot like a trap door opening out from under you and falling into a deep, dark unknown.
My trap door feels like needing a lot of sleep and letting my body cry. My trap door feels like yearning for spaces that have appreciation and tenderness for the fact that I am a human being with emotions, and I am grieving through this season of change. My trap door feels like trying to look at the skin in between my pinky toe and the toe next door half naked on the floor, self examination and self exposure. Vulnerable.
As I consider what my role is in transformative justice in my life, in my intimate and professional relationships, in my writing and storytelling, in my friendships, my trap door feels like looking at the facts at hand, understanding how the facts impact me and everyone I love, and figuring out how to position my body towards collective repair and change. It feels like some wallowing. It feels like some readying. It feels like wishing it could be easier. It feels like practicing new healthy coping and slipping into some old unhealthy coping.
Change work is hard. But just as the sun was pushed by the wind into ice and snow, in the same amount of time, the soil can be readied for buds to push up and through, for the potential beginnings of blossoms. We can decide we’re ready to do better and be better. For each of our lives, and for all of our lives.
It is exhausting to be aware. Of all the pain and suffering. And it is a gift to know that we can make it through, however we want, in new ways. Because as my friends talked about last night, that’s what queerness activated and alive looks like: moving through the dark unknown, knowing that self-creation is the best form and source of the glow; of the light.
Reading has been a slog recently, but I’m moved by Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Melissa Febos’s Body Work.
My best friend and I are trying to send each other pictures of handwritten lists of the small moments of good in the day. Of what makes us feel alive. Friendships how you keep me going.