The solstice sun sets over the Hudson River, light tickles the trees who are glowing with delight, the dance of their illuminated branches fractures the sky, meanwhile flowers captive of a small community garden rebel in their show of blossoms. I am devastated by their beauty, and the gentle pinks, yellows, and oranges created by a divine refraction of sun, humid air, and smog, refraction of divinity that itself is almost a proof of the miracle of life….
and when I close my eyes, and I feel the river as my own blood as the sun
merges with my heart, enormous, pulsating, radiant
….somehow, I spent all solstice in a love-drunken state, basking in spectacular and overpowering feelings of connection, in awe of the depth and beauty of our world and utterly in love with everyone and everything in it.
It felt so oddly indulgent to enjoy simple wonders on the eve of the US bombing of Iran and in the midst of the unusual tropical heat and humidity in Northern cities that recalls feelings of “apocalyptic failure"
in the words of First Nations writer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
Love and disaster
are more than strange bedfellows,
they
are
completely enmeshed.
Coincidentally (or synchronistically ;) ), I watched an experimental opera performance that weekend grappling with those same themes. The production fused a W.E.B Dubois short-story, “the Comet” and a well-known Monteverdi Opera, “Poppea.” The first plotline centered around a Black man and a white woman recast as an Adam and Eve, sole survivors of a comet blast that wrecks New York City and in the second story, a palace sets the scene for the unfolding affair of passion between the Roman emperor Nero and his consort, and for Nero’s bloody and tyrannical capriciousness. The stage spun like the world, showcasing simultaneous occurrences of destruction and opulence, survival and whimsy, the depth of companionship and lovemaking at the end of the world and the vacuousness of profligate sex, unbridled ego, and imperial splendor. A baby is born between these two disparate realities intertwining them together.
A baby is fitting symbolic vessel in which all of these powerful forces coalesce: love, sex, power, violence, pain, chaos…and of course,
creation.
I’ve been thinking lately about what kind of love and what kind of relationships I want in my life, and about creation. Mostly because there has been an enormous amount of love and chaos in that microcosm of the social world that is my life….I’ve had a large number of conflicts and falling outs with friends in the past couple of years—far more than I’ve had in the preceding years…and a lot of misunderstandings and dys-connection in dating—far more than I have had in the preceding years. At the same time, I’ve also experienced a massive growth of community and a spawning of vast relational networks – from neighborhood communities to writing groups to roommates to yogis to colleagues to mutual aid collaborators to my extended family (on both sides).
Yet, this expansion of encompassing communities has been disruptive rather than productive to my pre-existing friendships and attempted romantic relationships. It has made me question now: What do we mean to each other? What is the point of friendships? What do I want from a “partner”, a lover? What makes community?
And of course, the perennial question what is love?
--
Let’s start from the beginning.
Family was once community. It’s important to start at the beginning, which for me is in my dad’s village in Adi Baro, Eritrea. When I was visiting our village in January of this year, my uncle told me that all villages are essentially extended kinship networks. The family is still the core community in Eritrea and the primacy of familial relationships can be found in the plethora of terms in Tigrinya and in an intense tracking of ancestry. The uncle I was with is called my dad’s brother (hawabo) different from my mom’s brother (ako), and the terms continue and so does the family, because the family is large, the family is everything. But, I am more American than Eritrean, and I belong to the nation of small family and the nation of far or estranged from family.
Friends and chosen relationships in my life have filled some of the roles that kin might have had, as well as in the lives of many of my peers. And even though, I’ve tried to drown myself in friends to make up for that gap of belonging, I have found it very, very unfulfilling…
essentially what I feel is that the very structure of friendship is that of
convenience and proximity, sculpted around institutions like schools, settings like neighborhoods, or activities and hobbies, and once those disintegrate, in order to sustain a friendship, we must like our friends and spending time with them needs to make us feel good. When they don’t, we often consider a friendship as no longer working, and we grant social grace to simply fading away from friends, falling out of touch, and growing apart. My friend ;) Lilly questions this assumption in her blog-post, asking why conflict between friends is seen as drama rather than an invitation to give attention, water, and weed to nourish their growth just as we would in a relationship between a couple?
….and, I think, Weike Wang who writes for the New Yorker
has a great answer: “the wonder, and the curse of friendship,
is choice.” Her article, along with others I’ve recently read
discuss the problems with friendship as we age and suggest
(overly) practical solutions. (See: Live Closer to Your Friends,
What if Friendship, Not Marriage, was at the Center of Life?)
Distance is one of the core threats to friendships that they all identify, spatial, social, psycho-spiritual. We often follow careers and partners, and so we live far from our early-made friends, and then as we get older we build and experience lives with boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, husbands, wives, polycules ;) and then our networks shift, and we have new colleagues, new neighbors, new hobby groups, parents with children of the same age, pet parents, but perhaps less intimacy so we miss our friends.
Many of these writers’ solutions are simple: be closer to our friends! Both physically move closer and also think more intentionally about making decisions together and prioritizing quality time together, and in a sense that helps us stay connected…
But I think fundamentally, the problem with sustaining friendships is that
they are often not larger than the self, and that friendships do not have to
be interdependent in any meaningful way, and so we’re just stuck
together,
just two bodies with no story and
no survival to bind us….
My friend’s husband, who is also my friend in a sense ;), likes to say something like:
“There are good ships and wood ships, and hardships,
but my favorite ships are friendships”
I love the sentiment. I also can’t help but think of certain friendships of mine and wonder, well where in the heavens is this ship taking us?
In many cases, nowhere…because we are not creating our lives together…and when I feel those friendships stagnating in catch-up land [ketchup land ;) with a “happy” meal that is maybe a dinner or a coffee] when those are in fact relationships that are I seek to bring and weave again into my life that I want to their accompany change and growth with them, I try to create movement and meaning:
Projects, collaborations, trips, and dream, and scheme, and invent new rituals, so that we are tied to something larger than ourselves, so that we again that we are not two isolated particles moving along separate circuits but tracing the pattern of something larger and together.
For instance, some months ago, an old and long-term friend and I
created a one-hour block per week where we complete a reflection
exercise and discuss it…
and which of my beloved friends and relatives have I not invited on a trip with me or to do a little project together or an event?
I’ve realized that means I love you ❤️
I want you make life with you,
create.
--
My life-growth-project friend and I also talk a lot about dating.
Because we are both hopeful to find someone with whom to build a family and to raise children. We have totally opposite approaches—I pray to the universe and then do absolutely nothing until out of curiosity and boredom, I fall in love with one of the 5 single people in my extended networks… lighting a small candle for each in my heart and allowing it to burn down…occasionally, I intersperse an online date.
She goes on hundreds, thousands ;) of dates from dating apps, dates all over the world, so many so that she needs a spreadsheet to keep track of them all.
(Our strategies are both utterly nonsensical in their own way. I want something so much I am in a perpetual state of paralysis and she wants it so much she is going around the world in an anxiety ritual.)
So, then as months go by, I playfully entreat her to live on an Island with me (she already lives on one and I guess so do I), and to have separate children and raise them together, and wait until later in life to find a romantic partner. But she’s not sold on the idea, and I’m not sure I would love the arrangement anyway because I would have to be dad…
---
I have lived far too many places, and I have accumulated many different friends and connections, and too many of them I think are far too superficial…they are based on liking each other and enjoying each other’s company. That sounds great in theory, until I realized…
Liking people isn’t enough...it’s as meaningful as the aptly named
“like button” on Facebook.
“Like” is not a bond; being liked is a trap
that commits us to a certain version of self and worse,
lures us into appeasement, and when we only like each
other there’s hardly any space to grow, and when our
connection is determined by whether we only like each
other, we have nothing greater than ourselves to contain
us.
I never take for granted that we don’t have to like our families and that’s really a gift, because a true relationship that is connected to true community is not based on like.
--
A true relationship is not based on like, it’s based on love, and love is larger than two people, two selves.
--
My sister wisely noted that family as a bond is deeper and more powerful than friendship can ever be because it is bigger than you or me. Family is also one of the few social units in Western society that shares material rather than simply emotional resources—money, shelter, food.
Family, biological, found, created, is larger than the self: I don’t need to know you to know that you are already part of my ancestry, you are already me. Church is also more powerful than friendship because it is larger than self—sharing in the same spirit and the same belief in Spirit, and spirit is a connective tissue. Transness is more powerful than friendship because it is larger than self—pushing beyond rigid social narratives to create new selves and new possibilities for current, past, and future selves. Activism is more powerful than friendship because it larger than self—birthing a new world together and renting open the social fabric to make space for utopia. When we are part of these communities, we don’t have to know each other or like each other to know that we already love each other.
It would be silly to even ask myself if I like you because I love you because you
belong to my story, our story, because we have a story together.
….and in many cases, these types of larger-than-self groupings also
value material and emotional interdependence, supporting financially
community in difficult times, offering emotional care and conflict
resolution, as well as offering other community members a room,
childcare, work, food.
---
It strikes me that the thought that we sleep with strangers is kind of horrifying to me, I guess it is slightly less horrifying than the thought of sleeping with our family members.
--
How we tell love stories is really important and who we tell them about is often different from who love happens with…I think about all the second-tier love stories that have occurred and are constantly occurring in my life, somehow relegated to a lower-down level in the hierarchy of love and longing, but how many stories of love do I have with my collaborators, coworkers, dormmates, roommates, cousins, summer camp and childhood friends, work-spouses, besties, whom with I have made life with in a meaningful way, with whom I have done the dishes with and cooked with, cleaned up spills with, read and took notes with, analyzed data with, stretched with and make art with, protested with, traveled with, sung with and played and explored new versions of ourselves together in this world that is wrapped around us.
I love the interstitial intimacies of being together with people outside of named )and extremely narrowly named) relationships.
Sometimes, I wonder why aren’t those the stories of love we tell to each
other and tell to ourselves? So many of our popular songs, our movies
and shows, spotlight stories of a single kind of love, we get trapped in
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful idea of the “single story,” and
refashion our lives to replicate that, and feel something is missing
when it could be that our glasses are 9 quarters full ;)
and there are a few shows (and other media) that center friendships:
“Friends,” perhaps is an obvious one, but even “Sex and the City” is really about the friendships...though much of the plot lines revolve around dating and seeking love…
in reality, the dating is simply a shared activity, a shared container
for the friendships in spaces of recurrent meaning—the coffee shop,
the apartment, the interconnected webs of their lives…and this becomes the project larger than self, which is weird because once the object of the quest is achieved, the friendship will likely have less place in the world-building project of the resulting couple…
and so when I think that me and life-project bestie—me as prayer¶lysis partner and her as anxiety&analysis partner--are building something together to eventually unravel our own intimate world…
I know why I dream of our island together
and truth to be told, I think I’ve often thought of romantic partners as interlopers, family disrupters, friendships wrecker,
but to be fair, the way our lives unfold into the paths set
for us, it’s almost impossible for them not to be the
villain.
I’ve had so many conversations that revolve around people’s dating lives as these are understood as the end-all-be-all of relating, the summit of relationships – and also one of the few that is most determinant for our survival?
Who will respond to our messages? Who will come to the hospital if we are injured? Who will give us a roof if we lose our jobs? [Who will come pick us up if we have a mental breakdown in the jungle?] Who will we create a family project with and in a sense our own continuity? And who will witness us in our unbound and unmade moments,
and so in a sense our very essence of self?
The One, says American society.
I wonder, how can all of these qualities be imbued in a single person?
It is a fantasy, to think that one relationship can bear so much…
and it leaves us isolated, disappointed,
divorced,
or separate if not separated.
--
I remember being in the Amazons.
How much I loved being there and being with our guide who told me all of these stories of the sexual exploits of the pink dolphin, these large rosy-skinned, humanoid, fleshy water-creatures with apparently very human-like penises. The pink dolphin, according to his stories, is a shapeshifter who dresses up as a handsome man and drags women down into the depths with him,
who impregnates women and gives them half-dolphin fetuses.
Some stories, he admitted were made-up, shaking his head laughing.
…. but some, he assured me in a whisper, were true because they happened to people he knew.
And how much more enjoyable it is sometimes to have conversations about the exploits of a fantastical pink dolphin, and when the romantic and sexual exploits are communal and shared
rather than a private over-played and replayed re-enactment of essentially a Romeo
and Juliet fantasy-trope (see Pride and Prejudice, see West Side Story, see Taylor
Swift), and even worse,
in these modern renditions the fulfillment of this fantasy is supposed to be life-
affirming.
Shakespeare, to his credit, understood that romance, passion as consumption of the other must result in death. We wouldn’t be able to watch a Pride and Prejudice 2, it couldn’t exist. Once the dizzying abandonment-of-self fantasy of romance is fulfilled,
that’s where real life and real love can begin.
--
A lot of my amazing friends have also had trouble with dating lately, friends in fact of all genders who do not yet have life-partners.
I think especially for women and those socialized as women (including
myself), though, there’s the additional question of what am I doing wrong
I see reflected in my friends something in me: a fear of stagnancy
and a commitment to a certain version of self that is limited,
clipped,
compromised.
Once we’ve been outside of the box and made life on our own and with so many people, so well, how can we give up that freedom to be caught
in the strangulation of possession?
Dating has also been made infinitely worse when something called trauma exploded all over the relational sphere, and the most damaging one is this pop-psychology theory of attachment.
Like a kind of anti-love deity, I find attachment constantly invoked – I don’t know how to say it, but I’m not interested in attachment…The last thing I want is to be attached, not securely, or insecurely, or anxiously, or avoidantly – I want to be loose and dancing together in a dense field of relationships, experimenting in world-making and weaving multiple patterns—hopefully across time—in this vast fabric of the social, and to hold each other’s hand as we go through the depths, experiencing the mysterious universe of the Other and the intimate.
Perhaps, if we expanded our field of love, family, vision, outside of the two
parents understanding we have we would know we have so many different
forms and a multiplicity of belonging that eclipses the small forgotten outer.
moon that is the one-to-two-parent-attachment theory.
And while I’m here far, from my own realm, dragging popular psychology –
I’m also tired of the pathologization of people-pleasing, as if people-pleasing is not what is necessary to survive in a society constructed around a need to be liked, to get a job, to have friends, to date, to receive a 5-star Uber rating, to be promoted.
People-pleasers are just survivalists at our core.
--
Do I want Thai, Lebanese, or Ethiopian tonight?
A finance bro or a queer anarchist lefty?
One of my main problems with Tinder is that it feels like a market for
people-purchase.
I would find it a lot easier to date if they combined Tinder with Amazon so that I could order my date alongside my fridge magnets
...then select express delivery with Tinder’s “Free Tonight section.”
--
One idea from pop psychology I did use recently, though, is love-bombing. Because I think I am guilty of love-bombing people, and this has the effect of either drawing people in far too much or overwhelming them and pushing them away—I’m swept up sometimes by people when I meet them and when I see who they are and what they offer to the world, and I’m easily enchanted with their unique way of being …so, I asked my friend for advice about my love-bombing problem..
and she wisely told me that perhaps I’m exploring a Oneness with the other, and
playing in that One-ness a little, wondering when I get so close what it’s like to be
them on the inside and to be with them and in sync with them,
and she was absolutely right,
and so the term was really only the beginning
of helping me find precision for my feelings;
it would be a shame to think a cliché or label conveyed something
about the way we feel and even worse, about
who we are.
We must speak from the inside of our own experiences to be understood,
but it doesn't matter because we don’t have to be understood at all to be
to be loved.
--
…I had this vivid dream in which I was to be married. The marriage ceremony involved jumping off a cliff into water, with both people holding a rope (should we make this a wedding ritual?). I jumped with my partner (a stranger, a shadowy dream figure), and once I came up from the water and swam to the shore, I realized I was holding the rope alone…
we couldn’t hold it together…
What I wish for my dream partner to know, what I should have whispered before we jumped is that I’m nervous too, but that love is not scary,
love is immense and vast like the ocean, and we are navigating
certain uncertain waters together,
but we have so much more than each other and we have to trust that
love is larger than that too.
--
About ten years ago, I saw an ad for an apartment that a man was advertising that said you could live there for free if you would agree to date him…I was disgusted.
I think now, wow what an offer!
A boyfriend and free rent.
--
One of the core problems in the West and Western relationships is the broken family. The nuclear family is a broken family, it is an atomized family, a family that can fit on a slide and be put on a microscope, a way too small social unit that is expected to bear way too much.
One of the points articulated in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, a beautiful book that has so much wisdom about Grief, is that our core wound is a shared in one in the West:
We came into this world and there were two sets of eyes looking at us instead
of forty…so I think it wouldn’t matter so much if we had one, or even two, or
even three bad parents—all parents fail in some regard—but if there are ten
parents, twenty parents, around who love us and with whom we can form
different relationships and be part of our lives, our survival, our sense of
belonging but not attaching,
we would all be okay.
My dad's family, for instance, is very large, he has give or take 7 brothers and sisters that have an age difference spanning 22 years. When describes his relationships with them, there are so many mini-intergenerational connections and inter-tangled relating that happens within that one family, and then when we consider the extended family (exponentiate the 7 and see how much family that spawns), and the unending connectivity of relationships he has within all of that enormous, fecund, fruitful
family tree, and how they have all constantly evolving proximities, conflicts, loves, hates, envies, and camaraderies with their parents, each other, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, grandparents, great uncles and aunts,
it is almost like a swarming, teeming hive
rather than a fragile nest.
There is something special and small in the concentrated immensity about the love for my one sibling, my sister. How many tears have I cried on my own when I allow the feeling of absolutely unlimited love I have for my sister…
People, I think mostly men, spend hours meditating to lose
themselves in the grandeur and sublimity of it all.
I found a secret shortcut to enlightenment:
the love I have for my sister brings me to infinity .
The wonder and rapture that such a feeling of love can exist, that I can experience them is so much larger than self, than us two, and
it is one of the truest and lasting love stories that has ever been written.
… perhaps I am even crying these tears of divine awe now as I write.
But, don’t get me wrong, we get on each other’s nerves and we used to fight a lot. It's also so much pressure to be all the sibling we need to be for each other, and so I can only imagine it’s even worse for how much focused attention it is for a sole child to be the only hopes and dreams of one or two parents, and conversely how much expectation there is for one child to have for two parents.
We want forests of relationships,
dense,
wild, interconnected ecosystems of connection,
and what we created are manicured gardens;
even these can still be otherworldly in their
beauty and abundance.
--
Dating apps are so difficult for me to use because there are too many people. I once scrolled through almost “2,000 likes” one evening, telling myself, well, someone good has got to be in there…
But, I am also opposed to the more “selective” dating apps,
opposed is too soft of a word,
it’s almost like they repel me.
I would only use a selective dating app for crazy people. We can call it “Un-Hinged,” lost minds seeking soul connections.
---
There’s also something darkly funny that white Americans (and Europeans) have shrinking families and are unwilling or unable to reproduce.
So now the white population is in decline, as if that isn’t a metaphor, a mirror
of our lack of sustainability, a natural discontinuity to an out of balance system
we create lives that are anti-thetical to creating life.
I don’t mean this when judging the choice of any one individual,
but for what it means for all of us, including myself, as a greater
trend, as a social phenomenon. And that we still measure
“development” as “fewer children,” call birth “labor”…
everything is always hiding in plain sight.
[A quick aside: Capitalism is like a virus, constantly reproducing itself in the metaphorical and physical bodies of hosts. It’s hard for me to believe we’re on the verge of climate collapse and we’re still telling countries to industrialize, that we’re burning the Amazons to power ChatGPT and we’re still working on AI,
that we say Sustainable Development as if it has any meaning, as if those two words are not opposites. And so Westerners cannot are dying off and we are sacrificing our own continuity to our money God.]
I think once it all ends, the best way I would describe American society to others is as sex cult that is also a money cult, and that we created thousands of mirrors, but we were unable to see ourselves because we exploded the metaphor of self.
We gave body too much meaning and no meaning at all,
and so we have sex with strangers,
but we can’t achieve creation.
At least the economy is holding steady;)
--
So sorry,
I’m not free tomorrow….
I am free
right
now
--
I don’t really like going out to eat, so naturally I think about moving away from New York City all the time. I don’t like going out to eat only a little less than I dislike going out to get a drink which is less than I hate getting a coffee, as a bonding activity.
If we already have a strong bond, then we can enjoy the experience of a restaurant or a café together and enjoy each other’s enjoyment, but I find that it is a really hard way to get to know someone or to sustain a friendship.
I feel I could have infinite dinners and infinite coffees and
we would be in the same place as we were
infinity ago.
Even worse, people often suggest this activity as a date. Worse than that, I suggest this as an activity for a date. In these locations and on several dates, people have revealed to me their past traumas. This is often within the first couple weeks of meeting them.
I empathize because I seek too to be loved for the vulnerable parts of me (would you love me if I was a worm?),
and yet our bond is too thin to hold the weight of everything.
they are and I am, and wish they knew, that once I loved them,
I could hear them
so much more.
We can’t know someone by their pain –
That pain is not them, it's not us, it’s our feelings, it’s what happened to us,
what’s us is how we bring that pain inside, how we grow from it or around it, and how we wrap into our story of self which is a story of agency and not victimhood.
But, I (survivalist/people-pleaser) let myself be dragged mid-show onto the stage of an experimental opera in their revolving world that I never auditioned for. So, I find myself fumbling through a semi-familiar script, play-acting some parental figure and reenacting their trauma, my trauma, our trauma. They play Avoidant and so they cast me as their complement, Anxious, or decide to play Anxious and so I interpret the role of Avoidance…when I have done so much to exist outside of those dynamics, but that powerful narrative whirlpool sucks me in…and so when the disequilibrium finally dissolves and the disappointment of the breaking melts,
and it’s over, I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream,
a vision, a nightmare?
I often laugh at the seriousness of such
pronouncements after they pass, and I’m not laughing
anyone but myself and all of my intensity of feelings that
I find silly, unbelievable, lovable…It’s strange that we
mistake our emotions are ourselves when they are so
changeable like summer heat waves rippling across my
concrete city punctuated by the unanticipated tropical
downpour;
maybe we would all care more about climate change if we
understood the weather was just as much us as our emotions?
---
It’s very hard to think and exist outside of the box in the West because many of the “alternatives” are often just reformulations of the same ...there are a whole host of new terms to describe orientations towards sexuality that are outside “the norm” and yet also extremely normal …
Polyamorous orientations make space for more than one lover and partner, and even decouples sex from those relationships,
and yet poly fundamentally revolves around that notion of chosen partners as the key building blocks of interdependent community—our romantic and sexual partnerships are the only ones in which we share our resources and survival—and so the innovation of poly is to have more of them,
but then poly becomes a sort of tautology, where these relationships are not varied enough, and become incestuously intertangled, trapping certain
communities in a hall of mirrors, in hedonistic pleasure-loops.
When perhaps we could revitalize the breathable and loose and
intergenerational bonds of family, or re-root a diverse community to
land, or redefine a spirituality together, and radicalize community to
become kin so that we all share love, money, land, housing, and food!
(and there will be problems, there, too.)
---
I was this years old when I called my spiritual-guide and mentor absolutely distraught, telling her that I was the most egotistical person that has ever walked on the face of this planet and that I was sick and vain beyond remedy.
She listened seriously, and then she helped me laugh at it a couple weeks
later.
Never, never, laugh at anyone in the moment, I learned from her.
--
I’ve had my own troubles with dating, and amory and gamy (poly, mono, whatever you term to use)…,
One of my exes and I were in what we called a monogamous relationship.
Living that fiction really brought home to me that it absolutely does not matter what you call a relationship because the forms that such relating takes needs to be negotiated and specified in every case and it’s very hard to define the lines around desire, flirtation, emotional involvement, cheating until that last one I guess, which gets far too much attention compared to those other threatening forces that perhaps were not as threatening as I thought they were… but in the end,
it drove me crazy,
and I’m already pretty crazy,
so, it drove me off the cliff…
What I’ve felt is most of us are using the same words all the time, but we’re really evoking very different concepts. Therapy speak is one of the worst examples, and has almost ruined some of my friendships (even if those friends don't know that).
It’s like we're all talking in jargon that we think helps us be understood more when instead it’s all form and no function...I’m sorry to hear that, red flags, green flags, purple flags, emotional needs, emotional capacity, holding space, holding outerspace, gaslighting, lamplighting, attachment, boundaries, triggers, resonate, meet each other, hold each other, I feel, I, I, I statements.
I took an important lesson from an Indian friend of my sister’s whose friend missed her birthday, and she said, “’Fuck you, you missed my birthday, I’m angry at you,” and playfully pushed her, and then it was over.
I found that communication a lot more meaningful than the passivist
(not pacifist) violence of therapy speak.
Love, creation, chaos, violence, and pain are all wrapped into one,
and a lot of the language we use does not sound like language of
love, but a language of control, a language of mimicry.
“I can’t listen to you when you sound hysterical!”
Except now no one sounds hysterical because we all know how to talk politely and process our emotions outside of our relationships, because my emotions are not your fault,
but they’re also not my fault, they’re actually no one’s fault at all, and if we could
actually sit with them together for about 10 seconds,
we’d probably be amazed at how fast they would resolve.
---
The main problem I have, though with the proposition of alternativity is in fact spatial.
Deconstructionist notions have informed us that the norm is an ideal point and often far from the everyday. Normal therefore is a project of social conformity to a “norm,” and yet I know few people or relationships that conform to the paragon of normality.
So, by staking a claim to alternativeness or deviance, we are somehow taking a
position as away from the norm, thereby reifying the norm as if it is
commonplace, as if it exists, as if we’re not all actively practicing multiple
forms of deviance, imperfection, and strange little deals and arrangements….
We pretend the relationships where two people live in a house
together and have two children, have a 9-5 job, live far from all
their family members, have dinner with friends on the weekend
from 5-9 (if that?), hoard all their money from middle class jobs,
and drive to the shopping mall is some kind of norm instead of a
dystopic narrative of brokenness and dysfunction—one that is destroying the planet.
Mercifully, my life is such that I am spared the company of many who actually live that way…
but I know people who pretend to or aspire to,
including some versions of myself.
---
The nuclear family is an island, the communal network is an archipelago.
I don’t mean to place too much focus on biological family—that’s certainly not the only or truest bond we can have. Kinship by blood is a powerful narrative…
again, so is spirit, so land, so is the ritual transformation of body into new bodies, choice can also be a bond:
don’t chose people, chose values, and the people will come.
Something I realize about community
is that we so naturally belong and we
don’t have to be anything other than
ourselves. So, can we make our friends
family? Can we bring this family into
true community and community into kin
(and also preserve ourselves)?
“Infinite kinship experiments”
was an encouragement I read on a wall of a center of a beautiful little retreat center.
I loved the phrase.
I looked up the phrase and it’s written by Sofia Samatar,
the child of a Somali scholar, the late Said Samatar
who was one of my dad’s long-time friends.
Everyone from the Horn of Africa is somehow family, and so
many people I know are family…
and I guess that’s why I love so many people and non-people
and the whole world feels like my home.
--
bell hooks, a well known scholar of love (and many other subjects) says that love is an action, a practice, a commitment rather than a feeling:
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” she writes in All About Love.
I couldn’t agree more.....
except.....
as much as I distance myself from the asphyxiation of romantic love and
as much as I believe very deeply that love is a practice, love is a choice,
and that love is built from the ground up with many hands and much
attention, and that type of love is more grounded than emotions…
I must, I am called to, and I feel the need to revindicate the power of “love” as a feeling.
Love can be an experience of the divine, mind-melding, a feeling so powerful and beautiful and terrible that it is utterly unbearable, love can rent portals into our thin boundaries of being that tears open pathways into new possibilities for ourselves, for hope and possibility, for humanity, for all beings, love can infuse a light in which everything grows and everything,
absolutely everything
in the universe vibrates in perfect harmony.
On this solstice, I felt utter transcendence through a moment of connection with another. There was something so overpowering and totalizing about this experience of love, as if seeing each other and feeling each other, and listening opened up a gateway into which I could peer at the vast universe that was him, more than him, it was also through him and into the creation of stars and into the sublime intensity of
agape love, godly love, spiritual ecstasy.
The ingredients: a blend of sun-magic, pure witness, and the beautiful biology of my pre-menstrual syndrome hormones.
That’s not an experience of love I want to capture or mistake for that particular person, that feeling doesn’t belong to him or to me, or even to build anything with that love, build what they call a relationship? or build a family?…no, how can you build a foundation on a supernova.
It is blatantly non-romantic love, but I’ve those feelings before too
and mistaken them for romance.
Romantic love has an element of self-abandonment; I
think of the passion of Romeo and Juliet, and how the natural
conclusion of romantic love is the collision of two selves and the
swallowing of the the self in fantasy that can only lead to death
(metaphorical oractual), never life or creation.
And I’ve been caught in that love-death-trap and had to
rebirth myself, and it’s particularly easy to fall into when we
mistake our lover as the one who is our missing half, who fills
in our holes making us whole….
Romantic love is a fantasy in which another is our completion,
foregrounding our insecurities, those aching parts of us that want
to be held and comforted and healed, it is the opposite of true love
that honors and revels in the mystery of the Other, because there’s
an impetus to own, to possess, to consume and that forces that
other into a misshapen projection of ourselves,
and once we collide,
it must all necessarily implode.
One of my long-term exes with a religious upbringing told me, “Love is not about holding each other’s hands and looking into each other’s eyes but holding each other’s hands and looking out together.”
When we have a spiritual project together, spiritual meaning creative, meaning family, meaning community, meaning something greater than you and me.
--
To return to the problems of alternernarity, I feel “queerness” also gets too caught in the sex of it all, and sometimes when I’m in a room in a society in which sex is so taboo, it’s hilarious to me that we so openly define ourselves by who sleep with and whether or not we identify with the genitalia that we pretend we don’t have under our clothes – who we love is a completely separate question, and what that love consists of is totally other, too.
I also feel that LGBTQIA2S+ focuses too much on the lawfulness of it all, trying
to squeeze disorderly love into the emaciated story of idealized American
nuclear familyhood.
So, I hold two conflicting opinions:
1. No, I don’t believe in the nuclear family
3. Yes, I believe that people of all gender have the right to have a nuclear family!
That’s why I relish so much those forms we create outside of the strictures of dating, friendship, and family. I feel sometimes, this amazing person who was once a stranger is transformed into a beloved by the casual and simple enmeshment of our lives within the intimacies of an office, a classroom, a dorm-room, a movement, a fandom, a dance studio, an artistic production, a garden, and the thousands of unique shared vocabularies and worlds that stitch our lives together in an intricate macrame made of long texting conversations, many expressions of love, many phone calls, inside jokes..
what I would call romance
until sometimes those worlds and those connections
disentangle as new habits, new projects, and new partners
emerge, supplant, grow over…
that’s not to minimize dissolution of secondary relationships, of friendships, of communal networks. The ends of friendships can be as devastating as the break-up within a couple. I think often about the relationship I have with friends, mostly afab (assigned-female-at-birth), sometimes amorous, where we were unable to resolve our conflict within our friendship. I even dream about them.
There is a podcast called No Such Thing run by my friend Manny (who I consider my friend because he is Lilly’s friend and who I also consider a friend because he is Eritrean-American and went to college with my cousin’s cousin), in which the interviewed guest, Liz Plank, reveals that women think about their ex-best friend all the time, the way that men think about the Roman empire. That women’s ex-best friends are our Roman empire—and I guess we all wonder, who was the impulsive Nero, the outcast Ottavia, the moderating Seneca, the usurping Poppea?
But something that makes it easier is I realized no longer having a relationship or a relationship in the same form is not the end of love.
Love defies the laws of energy conservation, love is infinite, once love is created it can never be destroyed, and it can always be created and it is always, always there.
--
I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good parent..
what I’ve concluded is that a good parent is someone who doesn’t kill their children…
but that’s not a hard and fast rule, because sometimes
you can still be a good parent,
even if you kill your children.
--
In general, the choice of a partner is often overly focused on superficial qualities relating to people –their jobs, their appearances, their habits, and even their families, their friends, their stated political beliefs, their religion—and it’s because we are caught in the superficial quality of ourselves.I’ve often sought out the type of person who would fit the type of life I want to have and the social narrative I have about myself.
When I write out my shopping list of qualities:
-engaged and community-oriented
- creative
-a person of color
-spiritual
-cares about nature and the environment,
… I have to laugh at my own vanity.
Why do I seek another mirror for myself? There are already thousands, far too many. You could say all relationships are mirrors, as it is often said, so what I’m really seeking is a mirror that reflects the way I want to be seen by the world.
That is astonishingly limiting, crippling even.
It’s a miracle
anyone manages to
create real love that way.
Around 8 years ago, someone asked me what my type was, and the only thing I could think of on the spot was, “A good listener.”
I should trust my instincts more.
--
I really wonder what makes a friendship last. Why do we talk about what we talk about, who are we to each other? Gatherings with old friends can feel like reunions in which memories are recounted, old dynamics are recreated, and we relive and recreate the same type of experiences we had together once upon a time rather than meeting the selves we’ve become – and in so many ways, that’s okay – reunions are beautiful and they keep alive those past versions of selves (it gets harder when those are selves we don’t want to revisit). Reunions are little museums of our lives –but how do we grow with each other when those structures that supported and gave meaning to those relationships no longer exist?
It’s scary and difficult to confront who we’ve all become outside of the neighborhood, high school, college, the office, how do we choose each other again or do we?
I think most adult friendship ends up as capitalism applied to our “private” life, and capitalism makes us cut off from each other and that’s the main problem with friendship and capitalism. The structure of a 9-5 workday becomes a fulcrum around which our lives warp—if we let it and it is very easy to let it—so social gatherings are also on a timeline, from 5-9, and a coffee from 1:30-3pm, and a workout class, and then some work probably also sneaks in on the weekend and we end up trying to squeeze in time with friends, community, family…and so I find myself in a strange position because I find that schedule extremely oppressive like existing in a suffocating summer heatwave but all the time—so I am very resistant to making plans and very busy and also not very busy—I find there is no feeling worse than looking at my days and seeing a stacked schedule every single day of the week… how is there time to be? But, then my time fills naturally and up all the way and overflows constantly, too, and I am overwhelmed, and when I take myself out of the rhythm of planning to meet, I fall out of sync with others, particularly my ketchup friends
(who I actually wish were truly ketchup friends because I would much rather
go out and get fries with ketchup than to brunch. We’d share one set of fries
and eat with our hands, and feed each other fries covered in ketchup, and
lick our fingers and each other’s fingers, and not spend a lot of money
because it’s important to remember:
you don’t need to spend money to love each other).
Because I forgot how to make plans, I spend a lot of my time with migrants whose time takes strange forms borrowed from another cosmology of existence, stretched full of transiting, underemployment, and languid days in shelters and at pop-up community centers, all the while busy New Yorkers are rushing around doing one thousand things all at the same time, abusing each hour, each minute.
I’ve been thinking about time, too, because I recently finished the very brilliant time-loop series, Dark, and the paradoxical revelation was that: all the events of the show are all happening once or they are happening an infinite amount of times,
and it comes to the same…this it helped me understand that each moment is
infinity, and I think about how many infinites I’m watching people suffer
through, and how many infinites I’ve suffered through.
These relationships with migrants are also very intimate and we both fulfill deep survival needs of the other, they need me to help them navigate the complexities of the US systems and I need them to feel like a good person ;)
It’s important to need each other, not just emotionally, though, it’s important to need each other materially, substantially, monetarily, for our survival,
because that is in fact, the truth, and it also brings us into deeper interdependence, deeper
connection,
opens the space for deep love.
This is point is made poignantly in the imaginative book of essays about climate change, entitled “Not too Late,” edited by Rebecca Soling. One of the chapters describes how during the COVID-19 pandemic, hardship pushed low-income communities to rely on their neighbors, form mutual aid groups, cook food together, and take care of each other when they were sick. Those of us who could afford to order food, groceries, and medicine became even further isolated from each other.
I see in my own life how relationships built on inter-reliance and reciprocity
are so
profound
and also difficult,
because they are so vulnerable.
I went to a retreat in the woods last summer, and on one of the very chilly nights, I huddled near a companion for warmth, and we both felt how much sweeter it was to be close to someone when you need them. Holding someone because it feels good is nice, but it is transcendent to feel that I hold someone to maintain our fragile existence,
as a reminder that we’re always on the brink of survival,
and to reveal our embodied mortality to each other.
Love and disaster are entangled, only because
Love is survival.
--
Capitalism and the very framework of exchange crowds out the ability to really love.
“Love, not as a commodity” was an assertion that stuck with me from the poetic work, This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson..
…..commodifying love makes it a resource to be exchanged, bought, sold, and makes it scarce. That's what I understood, but to be certain of her meaning I looked up the definition of commodity.
I found this appalling example in the dictionary:
“a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time: water is a precious commodity."
The sacred nature of love (and water and time) defy commodification
--
I want to love someone as a precursor to dating, which makes it an incredible and perhaps nearly impossible challenge to date strangers.
I don’t mean be in love, but love someone because they belong to one of my
communities, are one of my people, because we have a pre-existing container of a
shared social space.
But, I’ve been trying to push myself out of paralysis and trust unlikely connections. So,I went on a couple dates with a friend of a friend. I felt both beyond enchanted and amazed by them and perplexed at how we would ever get to know each other and date at the same time – dating is this strange secretive sphere disconnected from other parts of our lives – okay we go out to eat, we go out for a drink, a walk? But where does it go? It was only a couple dates in, and I truly felt at a loss for what to do next, do these 3 things more?
Add in other random activities?
How do we communicate, over text?
What do we talk about in between? the things we’re doing
without each other with people we don’t know?
How will we ever really know each other?
I even tried to ask this of my companion, but I think the phrasing was so foreign,
I instead received an answer to a question I didn’t ask that seeded the end trying to figure out where to go from there. I felt disappointment, but underneath
a great relief, because I never felt like I could send a heart emoji
or say the word love during any of our conversations,
the word “fun” was used,
and I couldn’t imagine how anything could be fun without heart
emojis and love….
more importantly,
I had this uncomfortable sensation of trying to
grow a vine without a trellis…
A couple days later, I had a lunch invitation from a collaborator who belongs to a connected mutual aid group. It was a very open invitation, simply stated as a moment of getting to know each other more personally beyond our work together. After we had lunch, we went to go see all of our friends and collaborators at the center in the neighborhood nearby, and it felt so natural. It felt like maybe a date or not a date, but then we go see all our friends and neighbors and a piece of the utopia we’re part of building together, and we have a shared world together, and whether or not we create a microcosm of that world in our private lives is irrelevant.
What is a private life anyway but an opportunity to replay, recast,
reform, or too often recreate the larger social world?
I’m also starting to think this whole concept of privacy and the secrecy of certain relationships are ways to disconnect us from each other.
So, I do think it would be easier to start from a place of I already love you and what we mean to each other is instead determined by how we are able to enmesh our lives, how much our values can be interwoven, and how we can grow and go together. Wondering where I like you makes it too easy to feel separate and small and to misunderstand each other.
To be part of shared worlds takes a lot of pressure off of a partner – yes, it’s
scary to create a more intimate connection, to merge lives in a drastic way,
share a home together…
(that’s why I fell in love with my roommate,
we already had that, but they didn’t see it quite
the same way.)
It makes it easier when we each have many branches to support each other and us together, and when I remember
I have so many people who care about me and whom I care about,
and I’m surrounded by other lifeforms who love me
who are my roots,
and we create this vast web of love,
I’m only asking you to join.
I don’t minimize that enormity of the partner that one makes a family with,
of course,
it is a soul collaboration,
a joint effort in miracle-making.
But the way we narrativize and re-narrativize love is the way that we experience it,
so pushing through those fragile tissues
of contained romance,
of nuclear familyhood,
of love as interpersonal rather than transpersonal, transhuman,
creates the possibility for much beauty and expansion,
and ease.
--
My sister, texted me today, “the ability of the human spirit to transform and forgive is just awe inspiring,”
and so, I forgave everyone in my life right now and transformed.
A couple years ago, she also gave me another motto, “Victim, no more!”
and from that day on, I was never a victim of anything ever in my life,
past, present, future
not
one time.
--
Dating strangers is hard for me because
as much as I criticize “the superficial life,” the tenuous grounds of building family in a nuclearity,
the horrors of capitalism,
the ensnarement of romantic fantasy….
out in the urban jungle and on the apps, conventional people with such goals abound…
and there’s so much temptation there because for a second
(an infinite second) I cajole myself,
maybe I can
enjoy
conformity
with a Charming Conventional
who seems to function more or less alright in the system.
they are the distorted mirror of the self I wish to be…
Maybe I tell myself, it’s a good break from my usual preferences for outsiders, outcasts, orphans, widows, migrants, artists, activists, vagabonds, the unemployed, and my attraction to visible deformity because that shows their nonconformity….
I am only really drawn people who bears the scars of struggle under capitalism
because I bear those marks too--
and so, each time I encounter the Charming Conventional,
I am reminded of my anti-self,
that shadow twin I haven’t fully released—
if only I could just hold my breath and suck into that box,
and be happy with a
Normal guy with a Normal job…
then maybe I could fall once again under the hypnotic sell of
a suburban life
…I too could have a taste of normality, neurotypicality in the words
of Bayo Akomolafe, that “hidden curriculum of whispered molecular
instructions that tell us how to navigate the tensions of modernity
successfully”
...that tells us how to be good bodies for labor in the planation, in the factory, at
the Amazon warehouse and the Amazon office.
But it never works…
because at my core, I cannot.
I always exhale and break that constrained narrative.
And maybe it’s because I imagine trying to explain to this type that one of my deepest loves is an ex, and how we see each other and understand each other so much and desire only the growth of the other--and he is also one of the people that can bring me to tears when I think of how much I love him…
and that I also have expansive love for all those interstitial beloveds I named: my collaborators, co-creators, conspirators, soulmates, and lovers of multitudinous forms, in which I include
-my sister’s dog, Coco, as one of my core lovers: how rarely have I experienced such nonjudgemental and unadulterated love and affection from another being?
-in which I include lavender, jasmine, and rose as among my soulmates: how much kinship have I felt with these powerful feminine flowers?
......one of the most painful parts of this repeated cycle is the exposure to that attempted enforcement of
the norm
in my inner realm.
--
There is only one person responsible for my trouble with love:
William Shakespeare.
He wrote this play called Romeo and Juliet, which is the perverse shadow of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Instead of the creation of humanity, Romeo and Juliet’s passion leads to the destruction of their two lives and their families.
Adam and Eve were meant to fall from the garden and create humanity, we can always go back to paradise when we’re ready…
and if you haven’t understood that what turns us on about Romeo and Juliet
is the collapse, the sucking up of space between two beings and the
ensuing annihilation is what makes it hot,
it is a myth of death disguised as a myth of love
the anti-creation story.
And if you haven’t understood that death is extremely sexual
And that there’s an uncomfortable intimacy to violence
And that pain holds a potential for enormous erotic transformation
then you haven’t understood much about life at all…
--
I think for so many of us signs of mental illness show up in our late teens and early twenties, because up until that point we’ve been constrained by the rigid neurological confinement of school,
and as a survival mechanism, we hold it all in until are almost done, and then
we can bear it no longer…
so people who have mental breakdowns in their late teens and early twenties are survivalists.
(I was precocious ;) and I wanted to have my breakdown at 14, and then at 21, and then at 28, but I was also too much of a people-pleaser
and everyone told me that it wasn’t a convenient time,
so I waited two more years,
to let it all go).
So, I am a super-survivalist.
--
We live in a world that is produced by sex and so whom we produce those worlds with and how is extremely important, and so is passion,
don’t get me wrong.
But there’s something that is life negating about inflating fantasy and allowing it to suck out all the air, diminish and consume our other commitments, loves, relationships, our selves.
A death-myth makes sense for our anti-life world. The way American society is structured the important life activities, childbearing and childrearing, bring us farther into isolation rather than into closer relation with each other, which is can only be possible in our anti-life world because
a village is exactly what a child needs to be raised says the old adage…
and I can’t help but feel the vast majority of Western people are
traumatized from a single shared story of trauma: the loss of community.
We need community to hold us in that grief together.
Not work on it alone or with a therapist and hope it goes away when we
try to relate. It’s like imagining working out and then being surprised
when your arms give out at the gym—I won’t knock the value of
imagination (or the imagination work we do in therapy)—but the tools for
our own healing are right there, so close, they’re all around you and me, I
can see them, all we have to do is reach out together…
and if we find ourselves on that platform
I won’t make you jump with me until you’re ready…
But you’re ready right now…
and if you let go
(again),
it’s okay,
I’ve held it together on my own oh so many times,
(even though it hurts so much each time I think I’ll never recover)
and I’ve held it together with the support so many others, too
(let me not forget)
---
I heard that the average American couple has sex 2-3 times a week, which I know to be impossible, because the average American works at a corporation and it is impossible to have sex if you work at a corporation. I know for a fact that if you ever had sex you could not create a corporation, and you could not work there, I am 100% sure….it is impossible to have sex under capitalism’s omnipresent watch…you can only have sex in between the fractures of those panopticonic structures…you can only have sex in the slum where there’s no AC and so hot sticky bodies, sweat, oil, slide against each other in the summer sun, you can only have sex under the cloistered tarp of a refugee camp visioning a new life, you can only have sex out in the open by the river or by the sea or under the wide gaping mouth of the sky, you can only have sex at the fancy cafe at the end of the world but not in the imperial Roman bathtub, you can only have sex inside that tent where you kept each other warm or after a moment of deep witness and presence with a friend…
An even more impossible fact was recounted to me by a friend: “Love Story” by Taylor Swift is one of the most popular songs on American’s sexytime playlists, and you absolutely cannot have sex to the song “Love Story” ever,
because Romeo and Juliet’s climax as I’ve said many, many times was death.
--
I also don’t like dating
because too many people want to have sex (that is not really sex)
and I want to create life—in all the magical and wonderful forms of
worldmaking, imagining, intertangling community and spirit, and
gazing into the vast mystery together.
But, quite literally, I want to have children, yes biololological children.
It’s not that crazy to have children, I want to say, because I already have a good number of children, those of my cousins, my friends, and a particularly strange and haphazard group of sons I found in the waiting room of a New York high school registration center.
This Gen-X, long-term New Yorker and I volunteered to help one or two West African boys register for high school.
It was a commitment of one morning (a one-morning-stand, you might say),
and then many months later,
we continue to find ourselves wrangling our growing family of 6,7,8? sweet teenagers.
We helped them through one high school and then another, in the search for jobs, attended parent-teacher conferences, court proceedings, holiday celebrations.
I think about this as a kind of love, the odd-couple that I form with her, this Mother Hen, is would be quite a believable pair:
a younger femme of color, and a grittier, white tiger-mom,
and our ever-evolving pile of our spiritual children.
I’ve come to understand her, too as a partner, as a co-parent.
At first, I used to feel worried when she got so fed up with their flakiness and insouciant attitudes. When I received texts, that she’s done, she’s had it! She's not supporting them anymore!
But, then she always comes back, does more, finds a new young man
who needs a mom, expands the family…she is one of the people in my life that I have deep respect, appreciation, and love for.
If I were seated next to my co-parent and my spiritual sons on a long bus ride, perhaps I would have nothing to say to any of them had we been strangers. But we were born into a family quite suddenly, “fatefully” as of one the boys says – and now this woman is one of my most frequent contacts, and it’s easy to have drawn out calls and text conversations.
So, sometimes when I think about the emphasis placed on the “conversation” part
of getting to know people, as is often the only thing to do at a restaurant, bar or
coffee shop…
I feel so unbothered by that.
When we create a life, we will have things to talk about, and interesting things, and plenty, it’s more about finding the kind of life we can create together.
--
And so, when the war is going on
(and it’s always going on because I have family in the Horn of Africa)
and we’re on the verge of genocide
and already committing a vast ecocide that is ultimately a project of self-annihilation,
when I see a beautiful sunset,
I let myself be carried away by beauty and magic.
So here I am, lovedrunk off of the sun and friendship and family, and the simple thought that I am lucky
to have such a loving American mother who always sends me love and I am lucky
to have an East African father who that day sent me, “Love you ❤️ love 💗 love ❤️ lots of love.”
And the wonderful West African boys that I spent part of the solstice weekend with
and who send me so much loving …
…So, make life with me at end of these worlds and love me the way I love you and together
we can remember that creation and destruction are one
and that love is survival
worlds were always ending,
and we were always loving through them too.
“Love, by nature, should be other-oriented: I love someone so I love for that person to be well and happy, and I am willing to invest into their well-being. That is primarily not about myself.”
Looking forward to “Un-Hinged” hitting the App Store.
If I may add this:
“Love, by nature, should be other-oriented: I love someone so I love for that person to be well and happy, and I am willing to invest into their well-being. That is primarily not about myself.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/drjaneforhappiness/p/what-is-love-anyway?r=31zx1q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true