I raged about the patriarchy this morning and thought, after, what a waste of my time and emotion.
So often after something about the outside world — all that stuff I can’t control that hurts me — pisses me off and sends me on a tear, I come back around to find myself exhausted, unmotivated and dulled. But then something else will come up, and I’ll go through this cycle again: rage inside my head or to a friend, then end up tired and depressed.
Trauma is like a subscription — you keep paying and paying. I’m not surprised free, easy and shameless mental healthcare hasn’t come around in the U.S. It serves the dominants to have their subordinates stuck in the trauma subscription. Folks use their time and psycho-emotional energy on anger and hurt, revisiting their frustrations over and over rather than redirecting that time and energy into carving out ways to be happy, kind, loving and self-efficacious regardless of what the outside world serves up.
It takes time and energy to develop and practice strength and love, and it’s strength and love we need in order to counter the culture, to reject norms, to self-realize, to self-activate — ultimately, to serve ourselves rather than The Man.
When we’re rehashing pain and flailing in anger, stuck in the trauma subscription, we’re serving The Man. So I’m going to figure out how to drop it. How to drop this brick — the weight of wounds I’m carrying around, which is stealing my life force and keeping me down. Me, just me, not me as a people or me as an identity, but me as a powerful, personal, living, possible self.
“Be a goldfish,” says Ted Lasso. “You can serve fear or you can serve love, but you can’t serve two masters,” says Don Miguel Ruiz. Lots of people have said it, have nailed it.
I say, Forget.
We have a cultural narrative that is extremely opposed to forgetting. Forgetting is called dangerous, which is what The Man calls things that it’s afraid of. Things that threaten its paper-thin status quo. Like transgender folks, queerness, pornography, sex, impoverished neighborhoods, unhoused people, etc. We are told “Never forget.” Carry everything, remember every mistake, every wrong that’s been done to you or your ancestors, all of history, whosever’s history that is.
I say, there’s a difference between honoring life and remembering everything. That we can honor our ancestors and honor the world by living now. By being what others couldn’t. By being goldfish. By using the energy we burn on being mad in the service of our vision.
In other words — don’t get mad, get on with it. Sort of like the saying how the best revenge is living well.
Which is sort of like Audre Lorde saying “When I use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important if I am afraid” — or bitter.
Because I have stopped being mostly mad about what someone else is doing wrong and am instead focused on what I have the power to do right. Right now.
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