7.

Systems of oppression function best when we are isolated, the antidote, the medicine, for the systems we are fighting against is community.

-Cynthia J. Zapata

Women for Political Change hosted the Young Women's Initiative YWI Network Launch on Saturday, January 25th, and invited me to perform poems. I am an alumnus of the Young Women's Initiative, but I will write about that journey in a different post. 

My set was short, but in between each poem, I created a narrative arc to tie it back to the event's theme of "intentionality." This word has a certain buzz to it, and when I thought of what I wanted to say to a room of young people whose gender identities bump up against structures daily, I knew that I wanted to reiterate the power of community.  

Dr. Faith G. Harper writes this in her book titled This is Your Brain on Anxiety:  

"Human beings are hardwired to connect. We get better in healthy relationships and crave interdependence not independence. "We are the products of all sorts of fuckedupedness. If your word is disrupted on a regular basis because of who you are, what you look like, and where you live, you lack privilege in those areas. And lacking privilege makes you far more susceptible to mental health issues and less likely to receive appropriate treatment for them."

Loneliness is a type of bodily hunger that is attempting to tell us something. When we hunger, many of us seek out food. However, when we feel lonely, we don't always know what to do or who to turn to, and ignoring this need can only cause more internal damage. 

In the United States, toxic individualism is uplifted and celebrated. It is easier to blame others for their misfortune if you believe they aren't trying hard enough to succeed. 

As I've tended to wounds of mine, I've dived deeper around the research on interdependence and attachment theory. Interdependence is much like a muscle; you learn to use it best when you work to rely on others. To become interdependent, one has to trust that someone will be there.

The trust part of this equation is one I am still learning to understand because to trust; I must also believe I am worthy of having my needs met. 

So as someone who has experienced interpersonal-violence, systemic-violence and also carries generational trauma, finding myself worthy feels awkward and uncomfortable. The word "worthy" is difficult enough to say out loud, but to feel it and to understand its truth feels much like putting on something that doesn't fit right. 

When I think of how difficult it is to wear "worthy" and sit with its weight in my chest, I'm angered. So much has happened to make me, and us, feel like we must fight to feel this, but how is that possible if worthiness is an intrinsic part of who we are?

We have been untaught our worthiness through different stories and narratives. Sometimes the story is a caregiver who neglected us. Sometimes the narrative is the education system failing us. Either way, we are still the authors of our lives. We know our truth, we are worthy now.

I imagine a world in which we are so profoundly unafraid. Unafraid of who we are and able to ask for what is rightfully ours. 

Imagine with me. There is power in numbers.

6.

The day I got approved for my first apartment in St. Paul was the first time I felt a place ring out to me and say home.

I moved in with my then partner and two roommates, and learned to love the sunny light that would pour into my bedroom every morning. For an entire year, my partner and slept on a full sized mattress on the floor. We crowded our tiny lives into this small room. I never kept it clean.

The roommates moved out, and a cat moved in, and we spread out into the house. Filling rooms with books, buying a new couch, finding beautiful mid-century pieces, and sometimes art pieces that worked for the both of us, I would go home happy to this place.

For a long time I thought I was going home to a place, but I have found out it wasn’t the address, it was the person.

I was going home to someone’s heart. The most important place I belonged to for awhile was in the bright brown eyes of my then love.

Since the end of the relationship, my heart has felt like it’s been floating. There is nothing wrong with making your heart a home in someone else. What is hard is learning to go home to yourself.

I think in a conversation about our separation, my partner said that our relationship was like a house that we built together, and that we weren’t going to tear the whole thing down, but instead build new rooms and new places. Some doors will be closed off, some places will be remade, and that is work we will do in time.

But right now I am sweeping out the spaces in me that have long collected dust, the garden I let overgrow and let untended.

I am committing to making me a place I go home to.

5.

In the Dessert:

It has been five months since I was in Jemez, New Mexico. There, alongside a group of incredible poets and writers, I learned again where my heart was heading.

Sometimes it is not the work of writing that is a problem, but it is reminding yourself of the deep love for the work.

Waking up to the page is not something to take lightly

4.

ADHD: A Journey

of Learning to Forgive

This photo was taken in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. The sand was dark brown, and the wind coming over the waves was cool and smelled bad. Along the shore were thousands of shells and stranded wobbly jellyfish. It was my first encounter with a large body of water and I was entranced by the white foam erasing the sand from under my feet.

If you asked me how old I was, I'd proudly smile all tiny baby teeth and very matter of fact tell you I just turned seven and a half. Then, I would fill your ears with story after story of what I had seen and done that day, punctuated only by a sudden gasp for air.

I was spunky, smart, and passionate about what I liked. I had no shame.

When you are seven and a half, people think it's cute to talk too much, forget simple things, and blurt things out loud. Eventually, as you grow, they replace cute and interesting with words like annoying and self involved. If you don't know it's ADHD and no one else knows either, you become the problem.

Shame is a persistent and harmful emotion that clings to all of us, and we weren’t born with this feeling, we are taught it.

So how does one unlearn it?

Over breakfast with my friends we talk about how we are doing. I play with my fork and wait. I mention I’ve started therapy which is met with nodding and encouragement. “I’m learning to forgive myself.” I say, and my friends smile and wish me well on this journey.

But saying I am learning is a way to prolong confronting the hurt. Peeling away the cracked paint, the truth under it all is there was never anything wrong with who I was and still am.

This is no longer a journey, but a matter of me arriving fully to where I belong.

3.

What's something everyone around you knows you're obsessed with and why?

---

Avocado means "survival"

I walked into Sea Wolf Tattoo shop on east 35th and Cedar. I held the scrap paper, with my smudged tattoo idea up and said, “I want this done today, can you do it?” The artist looked at me, my drawing, his schedule, then back to me, and said, “Sure. I have an hour.” The image was of a misshapen sliced avocado; one half held the seed. The other half, hollowed, was hiding behind the piece with the pit in it. 

Had the tattoo artist asked me what the avocado meant to me, instead of complaining about how tattoos are now “mainstream,” I would have said “survival.” 

I am not obsessed with avocado toast, (as most news sources think any 23-year-old would be) and yes, the best Christmas gift I have gotten to date was a six-month subscription the Avocado of the Month Club. But the best part of the avocado is not the taste, its versatility or the color. But rather how it’s original name, aguacate, has survived in Mexico. 

In public so many people want to know me, know who I am, where I am from, and why my hair and eyes are brunneous. I used to entertain them with my captivating exotic look, and say Xicana.* Now my answer is simple: I don’t know. 

In the mirror I turn my full and angled nose, examine my large brown eyes, and the different lines of my face, finding traces of more questions of the game people play. “Arab? Indian? Italian? Greek? Wait, are you Latina? Mexican? I knew it.” 

My parents are from two small pueblos in Zacatecas, Mexico. This state was one of the first lands colonized by the Spanish. No matter how much I pry my parents about our families, I can only uncover our connection to Spain. I carry the ghost of my ancestors on my face; I don’t think I’ll ever know them. 

When I slice an avocado, I hold it in the cup of my hand, turning it over and examining the black ink skin of it. Laughing, I say “testicles.” Yes, aguacate means testicles, it is one of the few Nahuatl words to have survived the hunger of the Spanish mouth. People say it looks like one, and to be fair, I have only seen a few pairs in my life. Perhaps they are right? I hold it in my hand as I slice and scoop the flesh into a blue plate. The green fades from dark to light yellow in the center, and I devour something unknown. 

---

2.

Forming Identity

The Limitations pt. 1

 I often wonder who I would be if I was never racialized. I don't wonder whiteness, I wonder what it would mean to have a race without meaning.

So much of who I am, regardless of how much I reject it, will come back to my racialized identity.

I am because I am and I defines I through my understanding of Xicanidad and Latinidad. All I know is rejection from the norm, and in that, I have formed who I believe I am. It is terrifying to think of who I would be without this. What kind of person would I be? What narrative would I have created if I could exist without the trauma of colonization and imperialism?

Yes, these are all rhetorical questions, I cannot imagine myself out of this context. It is possible that I could move to a country that has less historical baggage with Mexico, but in that moment I shift from being Xicana to American.  

However, I wonder if I love this identity of myself too much and thus will never be free from it. I will, because of my desire to be affirmed, always define myself through it. I will always give it meaning and it will always limit me.