permission to be
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it has rained almost every day for the past three days in mexico city and an umbrella has yet to accompany me. i feel turned on by the risk of a torrential pour forcing me to pause and check in with myself.
yesterday, ochy curiel shared wisdom on la colonialidad de religión and la descolonización y los tambores en el Caribe. my body pieced together the fragments of a lecture delivered in spanish and those fragments spooned each other while we embodied the rhythms of merengue. my emotional body demanded it be witnessed through movement and articulation. we found a temporary home.
i am a student again. this time with materia abierta, a summer school on rituals, art, theory, and technology. this program appeared somewhere on my instagram feed back in 2019 during my first / previous visit to mexico city.
that year, my life was full of deep transition and grief. i was running away from a terrible situation in denver and had a month before my eventual move to NYC. i didn’t have much money, had little to no experience solo traveling (especially internationally) and only knew a little bit of spanish.
because I had lost everything, taking a giant leap didn’t seem terrifying. leaving was easy but the trip itself was full of mixed emotions: overwhelming feeling and numbness. in the midst of multiple at the time peak experiences, i was feeling sad and guilty for both running away from my past and abandoning a newish lover. before my leaving, denver was the place i wanted to be my forever home. it felt so hard to hold the sometimes conflicting realities of time, place, and relationships but my leaving was one of the first times i made a big decision to do something solely just for me.
now four years later — im living in the most beautiful room in an apt of a mutual friend from new york. my spanish is no better than before but there is a clearer desire to learn and i’m taking lessons. i had to leave multiple lovers and one of them is coming to visit me.
for the first time, it feels like i can befriend failure, trust, love, and complexity more fully in my body. now within me, there is knowledge of how to care for and love myself. my heart is demanding i create the space for it to expand.
my last two weeks before leaving were incredible. i followed through on the desire to experience as much joy as possible before my time away thanks to a slight push from my therapist. i went on the best dates, hung out with all my favorite people, got an old client to pay for me and my lover's expensive steakhouse meal, went to two bath houses, stayed up all night, did a final summer eros study, and finally saw real life glory holes
new york feels like my home and as much as it feels like home, it wreaks havoc on my nervous system and body everyday and less because of the usual talked about stressors and more because it is the place where I feel the most like an outsider and am always reminded of my being one.
it has been a place where i experience the most unexpected gaps between who I believe myself to be and how others see me; who i was told i am growing up and who others tell me i am presently.
in college, i thought organizing my feelings around “diaspora” could help me contend with my experience of outsiderness but that word felt flat as soon as i got to new york. why? its a bit hard to say but it only takes so many “where are you from,” and people looking at you crazy as if you’re lying when you give them a response, for you to wonder and wonder and wonder. it only takes so many examples of identity conformity to be elevated and rigid categories defended for you to wonder and wonder and wonder. before i mostly felt like i was failing, mostly around white people, but in new york, i am failing constantly amongst everyone. a person with no known roots beyond this so called united states of america. a person with a broken image. “at least you have slavery,” someone once told me. they should’ve just said “at least you have nothing.” but even then, they would still be wrong.
nothing is not all i have. i spent so long riding the emotional waves of failure, that i couldn’t see the web of stories. so long riding the waves that my sense of self became so blurry. in an introduction circle, someone who has some similarities in their background mentioned wanting to learn about other cultures because of feeling disconnected from theirs. although they didn’t say this, it did make me think of how so often, people disconnected from their stories and histories who can’t point to a place outside of the states, talk about culture as this thing that is outside of us. this thing that we do not have, that others have. this thing that we are an outsider to.
because stories and histories are sold to us fragmented and irreparably glitched, does not mean i have to further carry them that way and continue to live, assuming the position of “one without story” and “one without culture.” its a myth with a lot of lies and some truths. and i swallowed this myth for so long, that i forgot to look, forgot to fact check, forgot to remember that i am a person with a body from a place connected to other places and people with bodies. so i am giving myself permission to be a person with a body from a place connected to stories, bodies, and places. and i am giving myself permission to let desire propel me towards the hidden place - the place of intimacy and whispers and murmurs and listening and re-remembering.
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<3 <3 i still need some help! here is my mexico city / materia abierta gofundme