Catalysis

I left a job I loved last year.
I left a job I loved and excelled at,
One where I regularly
Pleased everyone,
Nurtured every body,
Balmed every wound.

Except myself.
Except my own.

I left a job I loved
Consumed by fire.
Fires of rage.
Fires of love.
Fires of ice.

I left a job I loved
Amidst a whirlwind
Of pain.
And hurt.
And anguish.

In the flickers of my feeling
Self-immolation became
My birthright.
Joyfully
I set torch
To dream
After dream
After dream.

It felt so awesome to feel.
And so awful.

21 people were killed on May 24th last year in Uvalde, Texas, the result of decades of lax gun laws, thriving misinformation campaigns, stoked and festering nativism, and the near-complete evisceration of the commons. There have been at least 76 shootings at schools that resulted in deaths in the period since, according to the Gun Violence Archive. While thirteen states have passed responsive legislation in the months following and in 2023 to date, it remains clear that large swathes of the population remain comfortable sacrificing children to altars of narcissism.

How is one to right a ship of organized abandonment and neglect?

What is one to do in these circumstances?

What hope can we seize?

A year and a half ago I had no answers.

Not as part of a team where I was nominally tasked with affirming, caring for, and resourcing Black queer and trans lives.

Not within an institution actively complicit in housing precarity and premature death-making for its non-affluent and resource-deprived Black neighbors.

Not in a city like Chicago whose business- and developer-friendly mayor doubled down on public health responses that all but guaranteed avoidable disabilities and fatalities, the brunt of which were felt most acutely by Black and brown residents.

I left a job I loved last year because the hope I'd had that life might "get better" for Black and brown children, a hope that anchored my healing practice, had been ruptured. 1100 miles away such a belief would at best be regarded as luxury and at worst gauche platitude. Unable to my convince myself of the durable futurity of Black and brown lives and unwilling to be complicit in their deception and manipulation... I left a job.

I left a job I loved last year because I was unwilling to have my labor--my actions--support or normalize the violent dispossession of people of color.

I left a job I loved last year with unsteady legs.
Disoriented, with no fallback plan and little sense of direction.

What I'd experienced and have nearly recovered from has been described as burnout. I'm not sure that the label is totally helpful (or meaningful), but it feels important to name that the death of the spirit that followed came about partially as a consequence of inconsistently applied boundaries and the unavoidable witness of wave after wave of morally injurious choices and behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in anticipation of regressive fascist attacks on reproductive health broadly. My former team was not immune from these assaults.

It was my community of co-strugglers, my family, and my friends who ultimately helped nurse me back into a healthier relationship with my mind and my body– with my Self--over the last eighteen months. They challenged me in to move through and beyond my discomforts and hurts, supporting me equally in crisis and in vulnerability.

I am forever grateful for the many hands–the soft, the supple, and the strong–which carried me in love while I gingerly thumbed the shards of my past. I dedicate this post–this awakening–to them.

As I grow older and wiser it is becoming clearer than ever to me that it is our labor which ultimately writes the stories of our lives. Words offered up to internet audiences and placed on official-looking documents may trace in graphite, but our actions–individual and collective–inscribe in ink.

As the inflammation of my soul reduces, as I return to equilibrium within my being, this space--these words–will tell the story of my heart. Still beating. Still feeling. Still hopeful.

Growing clearer, I now understand disappointment and disillusionment as requisite sparks for transformation. Held compassionately there can be growth. Held with shame: destruction.

This blog would not exist absent my aches, my hurts, and my sores. And some are still open. My pain devoured me and left me wholly disoriented and desensitized. And then it expelled me and left me forced to cobble together some semblance of a life worth living. I still believe that that life can be lived in such a way that advances and is in alignment with the future I believe we all deserve.

I have learned that emotional and spiritual pain performs its own kind of baptism. It shocks. It smarts and inflames. It may rage. And then it dies. Smoulders. Cools.

Embers of peace, clarity, and renewed self-regard–of potential–remain. And each of these can be called upon to do the work of movement, of kinetics.

My own deeply caressed pains and carefully tended-to dreams are helping me navigate living and retaining spiritual integrity amidst external ruin and the threat of internal dissolution so it's my sincere hope that careful consideration of these words and the following prompts can serve you on your own journey of acceptance, healing and generative movement.

Questions for reflection:

• What embers are currently nourishing your growth and progress?
• What embers lie buried, hidden, or neglected in your history?
• How can you give each more oxygen and ensure its flow?

With love overflowing, light that illuminates, and shade that relieves.

The Eucologist