diasporic located self/pain and family

You know that feeling of when  it hurts so much you feel like you are always crying, in your heart, with your body everything is dripping tears…thats how i fell today, thats how i been feeling all week. I guess that’s why it’s called sorrow. I guess that’s why it’s called heartbreak.  I guess that is why it’s called growing pains….

Growing pains because i’ve decided to continue to live my life for me, to dream up how  i want to be living, where i want to be living, who i envision myself with, what i envision myself doing and to actively struggle, work for and fight for it…i feel threatened that people will attempt to take away my dreams for my family, for myself…more and more i think of my brothers and sisters and the vast difference in quality of life that we’ve had and how i represent so much of what the western world is to them(i should say western imperialism at the expense of others while asserying thier superiority as if it is “right”, all the while claiming justice, freedom and equality )…and their ‘progress’. My family sacrificing and deterring their dreams just so i can be here and have continued to now for years and will continue to.

Yes, its complicated with my family from the times when all i did was caretake, from the time when that was all i was constructed as the evil/oddly demanding must caretake and therefore be taken care off..its a weird arrangement where folks in my family felt/feel guilt and other emotions that compelled them to either justify the ways that i was not normalized or centred in the family to centre me in other ways..especially in relation to abuse/rape/trauma…sometimes my brain cant handle everything all together and i think ignore that for now….

And yet, it sit at the back of my mind, i any case, all that aside where it is true that i was not a powerful position in my family in the past, that has shifted radically, i have the most earning potential, the one with western arrogance and entitlement that feels i can change my world around me and shape my world around me as i see fit, the one with non practical/strategic dreams when my mother in her late forties is still thinking in terms of what is practical/strategic for the family and not in what would satisfy her personal desires and needs…apparently she wanted to be a writer and has volumes of journals bound up just waiting for someone to read…or do anything with. her story locked down on paper, my mother. The rest of the family, most of the family i have watched attempt to navigate this push and pull, i mean extended family and most of them have eventually settled on taking of care of their own nuclear family. And i cant blame them, that is why i can/could have gone through the times i was eating at the foodbank, living in shelters, walking with my Achilles in the snow to school and work after just so i could take care of my lonesome without falling back on an abusive exploitative situation where i was extremely vulnerable: i mean without entering partnerships/friendships etc where i was extremely vulnerable to abuse due to physical, mental, poverty condition…

In the last 7 years only one of my aunts has given me even $1, i ‘ve had noone and absolutely no one in my family to even think or consider asking for support. It continues to break my heart. And so i don’t want my family to say that, i continue to support my brothers and sisters when i can, even if its fifty dollars here and there just so that they know, that they have the security that comes from knowing that when if they should need $50 quick, i will be there…. that brings a smile to my face.

So i;ve been planning/scheming, all  of it has been keeping me up at night, knowing that i need to position myself for the betterment of my family, for the betterment of myself, that the ways that i sacrificed..it is two way…my darling sisters have lived without me for the past ten years in the sameways that i have had to live to live without them, its been a two way street and i think of it and ask myself WHY? Because we are African? Why all this suffering everywhere, all over the place?I know i’m not the only one suffering and that makes it worse..noone to say oh let me lean on you because you are really enjoyin…no everyone has their cross to carry.

I guess I have resentment because when i was leaving 9ja, the teenager that i was,, i thought i was coming to bE with my extender family they would provide and care for me as this was my initial experience staying with one of my uncles but after that initial experience, this was no longer the case….

Perhaps that is the only left over hurdle from immigrating unexpectedly without really knowing what i was in for..but then again how much could i know, i was a teenager. How much do i know now STILL..very little as this reality scares the hell out of me, i will have very many learning curves, steep ones at that before i can be well adjusted, perhaps that is what well adjustedness is about? In anycase i plan.

I am tentatively, anxiously making all these gutt wrenching plans about my livelihood, my lovelife, my spiritual life, my physical person, my character, my skill set..everything is being carefully crafted…knowing just how much there is at stake, or at least i’ve convinced myself that there is indeed so much at stake..what am I saying, there is so very much at stake….MY Life!!

my everyday monsters – disability, love and capitalism

I got really depressed when i lost something worth about $600 dollars. I lost my phone. It may seem like “its just a phone” But it simply is not. First of all i can hardly afford a phone of that much and have not been able to for many months/years now that when my other phone died – waterdamaged and i was just too tired of not having/ not having enough.

Based on my meritocratic, ableist, patriachial upbringing i have been faced with and struggling with my choices in spite of what people might say about me attempting to acquire access/power and resources and pRIVILEGE to what ends besides my immediate apparent/seeming power that does not nothing to deconstruct the world/system of domination we live in . I dont fucking know all i know is maybe i would be more inclined to listen to, maybe even consider what these people were saying if they themselves even in the fight/revolution were not already enjoying life aka middle class/upper/ class.

Meanwhile like good scrambling immigrants me and the one poor friend i have, who both have MUST survive below the so called fucking poverty lines. I choose i shiny new, black and blue slider phone with the qwerty keyboard for my one handed self. I was thinking about what it means to have a MAN around, about how easy, how practical it seemed to have someone there to half the bills, to buy groceries, to HELP OUT, to put up pictures in my apartment, to help me when i grocery shopping, to carry all the bags into the apartment, to rub my back to offer me care,to deal with the euro immigrant priviledged bastard super who really wants to fuck me, to shield me from the victimizing, over sexualizing gaze of the the “super”, TO HELP and to support. For these things, for these reasons i have chosen to stay in relationships that were toxic to me, that i was unhappy, that i allowed myself to believe that the care that i recieved in thier hands when i was ill, which i often am indebted me to be loyal, ssubservient afterall they had bore the bore the burden that is me with smiles, with creativity and had even welcomed it. Who the fuck would not welcome such fucking care so that one that infantilize and make monstrous the disabled, victimized body.

Out of this reality of my life, out of the knowledge of how hard i work unceasingly, persistently, how many times i drag my ass out of bed to exist in a world that was not made for me, my kitchen hostile, bathroom, i slip and fall, i hide the bruises, fucking everything hurts ALLL the time, whether i talk about it or not, whether i look it/perform it (as in wear dirty ragged i dont know exactly what the fuck the ableist construction of looking in pain/damaged it…ask them) or not. iT is always there. My tears flow freely as i write this and my cat has come to sit beside me, Ihave been thinking about what it means for me as young disabled woman to live alone, to choose to live alone, to choose to not engage at my expense with people that are indeed damaging to my spirit while telling myself that i was getting “CARE”

This has always been my soft spot getting “CARE”, anything to fucking do with CARE. True i can be persuaded to do almost anything for you, lick your ass figuratively speaking and otherwise (OK i am a FREaK and generally love to lick the ass hole of the right man or woman as a sexual practice thats meant to get me going..BIG TIME) But as i was saying most of the horrifying painful relationships i have been in have been about that CARE. I was either looking for someone not to love (too romantic and often unpractical plus really is a construction that i may/may not manipulate all to say that i never really allowed myself to love, be love, didn’t know it was possible, didn’t comprehend it as possible untill my last two relationships the marriage and the poly one that i started to really exercise my heart willingly if you will. i have always adopted my mothers attitude to love: it is not neccessary, it is a distraction (maybe thats why she let him beat her her for so long she mortgaged her health and youth for her life now….)

For me i may fall in love with you but it means nothing..i can/ am supposedly strong enough to deal with heartbreak. What matters, has always mattered but is starting to be crystal clear is what you do for me and this is tied to do you care for me. Because if you care then you will keep it like a factual piece of information, like my eyes are brown that this my pain is almost always in constant, i dont get how people can forget????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????I dont get how people can forget how it is that i supposedly have one hand and a stump. I usd to think it was my internalized ableism, used to blame myself thought that al i could do, if only i’d just make the stump unapologetically visible then they couldn’t forget, then they couldn’t blame me for forgeting. But that is such BULLSHIT. To be more  elaborate it is  a power  sustaining/reinforcing /maintaining, blame the “victim, downlaod  responsibility, hide  frpom your own actions  while  pretending to help the lesser than poor  oppressed ..it is  in my own  understanding colonizing , oppressive, dominating horseshit.  It  should be obvious why …but in anycase  i was too busy trying to be visible,  reproducing my own internalized ableism that i was distracted  and contradicted and questioned my own understandings of what was going on so often that i dared not, and often chose not to speak them, they often came out in explosive burst or till i could really no longer deny then untill i chose to let them out in fuLL force well as full as i could muster.  Whats worse even in face of my presence, visibility, they still forget, people will willingly ignore what is in front or claim top forget anyway but not when they have decided that you cant do the dishes without getting water everywhere cos you have a disability or watch you and wonder at your cooking in the kitchen or how it is that you are so brave? so powerful? so ALIVE? so angry? how is it that you inspire so much fear in them? makke them so very unconfortable at diffrent times? The very act of forgeting is indeed not forgetting, it is no innocent, something they just did, cant be blamed for meant to disarm the rge you position towards then. FUCK NO, that so called forgetting is “active, persistent..dare i say tenacious”   ERASURE, it is a very consistent, insistent will to always remember to forget, erase, construct as deemed fit. It is a shamelesss act of power, fear and control.

In the times that yes i have wickedly refused to play the game burning myself in the process no doubt it has become clear that that is really all there EVER was to it. In all my relatiionships, couched in all the so called CARE, affection is POWER. MOstly  i play along until i stop thinking its worth it, until, basically they buy thier own hype and bullshit and they they are actually in control of a system that i merely colluded with. I’m not a bad ass, i merely have choice. I am not afraid of being seem as amoral, unetthical what does all of that mean to something who has had to lived with the construction of a monster anyways? All of that aside it hurts, it hurts and hurts like HELL. The shock never fails to mark me because somewhere along the line i believe/d unquestioningly. i felt thier warm two hands ease the pain in the small of my back, i felt felt held as i slept and rested my tired body, i ate food that they cooked, clothed myself in clothes they had washed…they had kept my lonsely self company many a night and day becase they wanted to. And they desired me and i desired them.  At some point regardless of all this theory stuff, regardless of my convictions about power, hierachy and the ways in plays out on my body, the ways that i choose to interface..i allowed myself to be there, to be present, to find and appreciate and yes to grow to be committed to them untill it starts to hurt too much that i would rather very much rather be alone again. Its like slow poison, like smoking cigarrettes, you get your high and wake up one morning with cancer knowing all along that you choose to pay, seek after every cigarette you ever smoked. Its kinda like that.

The care thing, the courage to heal, stigmative and construct survivors as “survivors aka permanently damaged monsters” would dictate that i blame this apparent vulnerable as a direct result of the lack of care, attention, that i did not recieve from parents, families, loved ones in my childhood. iT is true that in my teenage years that kin of nurturing was not really part of my reality. mY my parents being the ableist igbo christians that they were loved me very much. Infact, i have only started to admit to myself and my family that i am indeed something of a favorie daughter, recieved too much attention compared to my siblings, but it was too often poisoning with thier abliest view of what is neccessary to raise a disabled daughter, that they were so easily able to let me go that they have indeed been able to let me go but i was “CARED” for. I was hugge, kissed, finiancially NEVER allowed to want, sheltered constantly that i remember rebelling against my mother and learning to wash my own clothes. I remember being 11 and sending my bed sheets home from boarding school to be laundered and returned all this with fuel scarcity. I was also forgotten many times, sent far way from home none the less i was thought about so much more and prioritized in my house. I know that from hearing my sister speak, from my other siblings.

As i write this i think about how people have tried to twist, manipulate to use the information that i have offred and shared with them about who i was, what i had lived through and how i thought about myself. How sad that instead it had all turned into a hatefull, hurtful exercise but not a waste for me though, it has forced me to dig deeper, search for myself, understand, reason and see for myself and then to decide, confidently and with convicted for myself. i dont know if it has made me stronger wiser etc perse not that cliche bullshit no but it has shifted,  moved and offered me more of me which i have grudgingly accepted.  Somethngs hopefully will never change and i dont want them to ever change for me, that i am number for me, straight up. Cos really and trully who else is meant to be number one

Yeah so you see why i thought i was going to lose to lose my mind when i lost the phone? whyi was totally depressed cos i thought that surely the gods were indeed punishing me, that surely i was meant to suffer, that surely i was not to know my place to not aspire to thing such as an slider phone ? Ah..but the power of capitalism… is real very real for me, i do not see an alternative to change, dont know where it will come from, dont trust that something better will evolve. I’m not sure i want to save the world, i’m not sure i believe in saving the world or thinking that i am sort sort of knowing better than everyone else elitist also fucking delusional view that i am part of a revolution/leading…not sure. Everything i continue to do has not addressed what iactually want it to address, has not focused in any meaningful way on what i actually want it do which really is my country, my community, my family. Nationalist, tribalistic, bio family focused and specific is really at the bottom of it all what i am about. It is not about asking for acceptance but seeing myself there, challenging, speaking to the active erasure and remembering to forget in my family life is what i really think of everyday…but the tools i need, the words that i have i fear are borrowed from communities, cultures, westernized schooling and domination reinforcing knowledge production, i know this much is true….now what? I continue to try to wrap my head around it all

i’m a hardworker. I aint lazy and that don’t make me a capitalist whore either!

 

I am a VERY responsible person, and a VERY persistent person. I work HARD. I had work HArd for everything for things that most people take for granted. That is part of the way that my own oppression and domination take place…so excuse me when i chaff at the bit. All this month and from about half of last month I’ve been deconstructing the messages that I’ve been bombarded with all my life which is that I am LAZY.

See the story is BECAUSE of the fact that I have a disability I should be already and willingly and should have long since made peace with the fact that in order for me to achieve, succeed or get to be “normal” or have the things/access and privileges that “regular” “everybody” then I should already know that I HAVE to work harder, I HAVE to be stronger, I have to BE soo much more and hence the super crip, overachieving and most importantly passing disabled me was formed, reinforced and reaffirmed.

remember when I started to actively read and think the “feminist anthologies”: Susan Raffo, Eli Claire and other writers living with a disability that critique the super crip phenomenon but most of it is a simple stop resist and reject the super crip stance. This stance in reality is VERY VERY DEADLY for a person who is not white and middle classed and generally has a safety net of privilege to land on should they choose to reject the super crip phenomenon.

I have worked hard and I have always worked hard all my life. I say this with grave bitterness, most of the people who know me are familiar with this bitterness but it is a good bitterness, it is a good rage. If I didn’t have it, I would be worried because it would mean that somewhere deep inside of me I no longer can gage, I no longer can tell within myself the way that things are and the way that things should be. I would have nothing to look forward. Disabled people and trauma survivors of which I am both have suffered and continue to suffer a lot of hostile and violent STIGMA simply because they are who they are and they have this bitterness and this rage. I am not a friendly person, I am not nice, feel free to call me a wicked person, feel free to even call me a monster.

Anyways, the point of all of this is working hard is tough and it makes me weak, it makes me vulnerable to affection and care received from other people because I feel like they care and I am so deeply affected by a show/gesture of care and affection that might not mean as much to them as much as it meant to me, nor SHOULD IT, if I wasn’t soo tired or weakened or in so much pain in the first place. (it shouldn’t be that way to state the obvious, in a good equal world people wouldn’t say dumb and hurtful toxic destructive garbage meant to humiliate, embarrass and dominate crap like I wish I was disabled so I could get befits or its unfair that disabled people get special advantages that that they then turn around and take advantage of ..there would ALREADY be policies, structural practices and a general cultural understanding that these things are only the beginning in addressing the unequal ground that we exist in, THEY WOULD ALREADY BE IN PLACE< IT WOULD ALREADY BE UNDERSTOOD people would not have to be constructed as lying and cheating even as their labor worth and existence are being exploited for the power and dominance of more powerful others…. Like DUH!!)

it is in explaining this little fact and the share unfairness of the situation usually brings me to tears. Big time. It hurts, it a dagger through my heart and back BECAUSE why? Because it affects literally my quality of life, it affects the kinds of conversations that I can have, my feeling of security with others, my safety, my security, my confidence and assurance in others perception of myself….it breaks my heart when it come from people whom I love and have loved dearly. It seems to make loving, living, sharing with them of any kind almost impossible. I need help in this respect; I need help when it comes to finding ways to build alliances that are honest, respectful, and not harmful in this regard. I’m working through that.

I’m learning to work for myself and to offer myself care because I am realizing that when able bodied people and non trauma survivors offer care/support that they so within an ableist framework given that this is what they operate within on a daily basis. This therefore means that they are operating from an at best, questioned and slightly critiqued place of pity and save the monster or upliftment of the handicapped place where they unspokenly EXPECT you to be grateful or like they’re actually like really and truly saving you when in reality they are being patronizing, condescending, oppressive people only interested in sucking the little passion, resistance, fight you got in you when they insist that you affirm their dominance and power and my dear people that Is when, as in it is in those moments that I hold on tight and hold on to that precious feeling in your gut and NEVER let go. Those are defining moments…those are moments when you find out where and how and why the lines of power and colonization and the way that the colonization takes place. Those are indeed colonizing moments.

Most of the people in my life have tried to tell me that I was lazy, not fully there, not doing something right and generally and there is nothing like self validation, there is nothing like recognizing something and affirming your own power within yourself which is what I have to do and these days even as I work a 9-5 come home and work again, I remind myself that at least I am creating a life where no one else can exploits the fruit of my work especially when they do not even begin to comprehend what it means for me to live my life the way I do, or how much I have to work or how much I have had to learn in order to have things the way that they are.

So yes, I am in the process of working hard but it is because I think that I have little time, now that my body can handle it I have to do and do as much of it as I can and that’s cold comfort in and off itself. So that when the time comes and I’m chilling then I’m chilling.

I was saying before that a person living with a disability I cannot be fucking around talking about how I’m resisting super crip while the able bodied people achieve I think that one can do this with an awareness that we are existing and living within a capitalist, individualist system that working within it actually causes disability as a physical and social phenomenon and makes disabled people work harder by creating a system where their labor is exploited which is by the way what the save the handicapped people end up doing my undermining and devaluing the value and worth and quality of the work that their disabled friend by calling them lazy and irresponsible stuff that is not critically reminiscent of the disabled serial killer monster stereotype, but don’t you dare mention that cos you’d be pushing their guilt buttons which you MUST do to take advantage of them because that’s the only way your disabled self could have succeeded and gotten so far in your life, see cos you really should be in institutional care somewhere (what a mind fuck). Those are my thoughts for now.

fat naked women: it’s a good thing :)

picfrom just jared. Don;t know where i’ve been this was taken last year, dont watch tv but i’m totally looking to watch this. HOLLA!!

but wait: am i the only one or does monique looks smaller and BETTER than everyone else. I think it would have been better with indv. shot where the women could at least get one or two good shots of themselves individually in a pose that worked for them instead of looking like frightened deer in front of headlights. I can understand though: what with fat bodies constructed as diseased, nasty and to be hidden, i can understand the courage and amount of work it might have taken to get naked and try and look sexy for the camera. I like the rolls everywhere, i like the shape. I don’t like the set up/props or whatever you gotta change the landscape entirely you can’t use a setting that typically works for skinny girls for fat girls, they would have looked better if they appared to be in action, in motion (like she tiger there) i like seeing other bodie that look like mine. iTs a good thing.

According to Shuler Deardra of Afrocentrc News “Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance is about loving one another and building up each other’s confidence and saying it’s OK to be me even if I am fat. There is a difference between being obese and fat and there is a difference in being healthy and unhealthy. Some people say how can you encourage women to be fat? I am not encouraging anyone to be fat but I am saying love the body you are in” explained the charming comedienne who began her career on a dare from her brother.

wait for it: the requirements ARE: “The eligibility requirements are: contestant must be 21 years or older, size 14 and upwards, a citizen of the United States, and be in excellent physical and mental health.” I’m not hating on monique cos i think she is taking a step forward no a huge ass mofo leap in the right direction (there is a niche market for BBW women in porn by the way, I know, I modelled for one a couple of years ago) But why the whole excellent health thing without a deconstruction of what it means to have a ‘healthy body’: she lost me there. Guess no ‘disabled women are welcome to a fat chance so how can i say it’s a good thing then? ‘