Veil

I know that it’s April and that my last post was on my mother’s non-birthday/birthday. Woops. Hello again. Staying true to my name says that it’s been a while for a lot of reasons. One being that I’ve been poured so much into the Who Heals the Healer experience that I’ve been struggling with integrating myself into that statement. I say statement because I sure as hell don’t have the answer to that as a question, but I trust and surrender to the vulnerability that is required in invoking those words, in that combination, as a statement only. Because I do not have the answer. But I know it’s been hard for me to feel worthy enough to ask it, to hold it, and to share it with other folks who have been grappling with the same feelings and have felt it slip through their fingertips. 

Exalted exhale. 

As I stepped back from my internal feelings momentarily, I should have warned myself about this part. The “here’s what happens when you stop doing your art and give to other people” feeling of being stuck. Lost. Hidden even. In the name of the external. As a Black woman, I am constantly aware of the ways in which I have to be “on” or “perform” at a higher level, in all of my roles embodied and experienced as the counselor archetype in practice. If I’m not touching the future through helping youth navigate the higher education process, I’m talking to folks about the latest oracle deck to cop and what smudging tools are helpful, but are over harvested.

A part of that feeling of being over harvested comes up in the demand of the spaces I’m curating. To document and record my work through technology, and every time someone that I’ve reached demands that of me, I cringe. I think of how many interviews, photoshoots, or other captures of my essence were supposed to happen, and then for whatever reason, the capture was postponed. Never out of malice, but it’s happened far too many times for me to ignore it. 

This feeling of wanting to show up for as many folks as possible ends when paths of instant consumption of my image, my work,  my words, or my being are blocked. Those blocks have kept me hidden from myself in a way. 

Because in looking at this delay in my tried and true healing modality, I realize I’ve over harvested myself. There are seeds planted and been harvested at a rate that makes me feel like I actively can’t keep up.  At first it felt good to be able to have reach and be able to been seen and support many people. My workshops have been wide streams full of love and new faces. Their have been moments of extreme joy among intimate stories of pain and trauma. I find grace and humility in been chosen to bear witness to these testimonies. 

When I was on “break” from one role, I was able to fully switch to another. I’ve also know that I’ve had that ability, and as I grow older I realize how much of a survival mechanism it is for myself and others. Stil DIY-ing to make it all come together. Then I saw a message from my twenty year old self, through Facebook memories, and that Veronica said “when all is said and done, success without happiness is the worst kind of failure.”

Who the fuck is that girl and can she come back to help me get my shit together? Because I’m crying as I type. I’ve been keeping some updates veiled and not sharing with others but then I ask people to share with me all the time? That message from seven years ago has forced me to take inventory of what my needs are. But what it actually comes down to is - how can I allow myself to be fully seen, if I’m not able to build trust in my relations?  

Being seen requires intimacy and trust, and I’ve seen it done in the spaces I hold fairly often and I find myself sitting back in awe. Deeply grateful for folks that showed up for themselves and their journeys and allowed them to be seen. I know that my role in the community is to be a connector and to help folks that are on similar wavelengths find each other. 

As the connector, I realize that I have transitioned into another level of not only responsibility with others, but with myself. That all of the readings that I’ve received, across traditions and practices, have said the same thing in different combination of words. That I have a lot more to give when it comes to my art, and I have to continue to speak things into existence in a very strategic and innovative way. My way. The way of my ancestors and the ways of those who are on their way. 

But this also means, and these readers have said this, is that it’s going to take me allowing myself to be seen and held by a select cadre of folks in order for me to be able to do this work. That if I’m the CEO of my life, I have to hire and fire as I see fit. That have to share my ideas but also be very protective of how they’re communicated and disseminated. To think big and go big. 

Yet I carry active wounds from my intimate relationships of the past of being too much. This wound pops up when people approach me with fleeting intentions, predictable to the tee, and I grow tired of the stagnation that comes afterwards. So actively choosing to be celibate triggers a bunch of questions, and then it becomes a level of self-defeating thoughts around “do I really have to share this? Is it that deep?” and I’m starting to think that it is. That I have to continue to name that I’m not sharing that part of myself for a while, until it’s with someone who has proven to me and named explicitly that they will still be their when I drop all of my veils. 

I am not something for mass consumption, in all of forms of creation; my workshops, my healing spaces, my voice, these words, my body, my heart space, my mind. I am a lifetime investment. I am not for the faint of heart. I am both the lightning that bursts across the skies and the jolts that strike the Earth. I am someone who is constantly learning and evolving on how to be a fire without being on fire. I am not for the faint of heart and I can’t shrink anymore for temporary comfort. 

The most recent time I saw my father, he asked me whose heart I was breaking now. I started to say myself. But I explained how I was feeling and why I was choosing to focus on myself, and said something like “I’m too much for people as it is.” 

All (everything) he said was “okay, then be too much then.” 

Allow me to show you who I am now, again, and again, and again. 

Exalted inhale.