Resilience as Porosity
written on 8/27
The smoke of the last week has constricted my chest and lungs and reminded me that my body’s reliance on my environment makes me vulnerable. It also makes me so much more expansive than I have the capacity to imagine myself in my most constricted moments. If the smoke is inside me, then that means I am in the smoke. Pieces of my being are floating alongside the charred molecules - traveling companions to the dry underbrush, the bark of my beloved redwoods, a family photo, a plastic toy, someone’s Black Lives Matter yard sign. There is no escape from our porousness. Many days this terrifies and paralyzes me deep in my body, the constriction in my chest spreading to my limbs, making them heavy. Resmaa Menakem describes resilience not as a thing to be developed, but a flow to be embodied. We are least resilient when we are stuck, when there is no flow, no adaptation, no energy released and transformed to find its way to another body. It is when we are holding our breath, refusing to be porous.
The world outside is soaked in sepia tone; it is dark in my house making time feel even more slippery than it has already felt for me over the last few months. If reality is what is created through language, through repetition and habit, then is reality destroyed through silence, through disruption to habit, through the creation of a new reality? I feel inside of deep destruction of reality, of ways of being that we are in the midst of losing and grieving. Perhaps this is the right time (whatever that means) for us to have a reckoning, for White people to finally stop to grieve all that White supremacy and its play cousin capitalism takes from us. These social orders we created to enrich the few among us yield both comfort and terror, disconnection and temporal pleasure, and deep psychological soothing to numb very old wounds. The result has been the most far reaching Ponzi scheme ever imagined and a slow and deliberate calcification of our porous collective White body. I wonder if no less than a near complete destruction of our sense of reality is needed for us to begin to imagine anything different for the future of White bodies.
Trauma scholars agree that one of the things that our bodies need to heal from trauma is to reclaim an identity not defined by the trauma event or conditions we survive. For so long, the vast majority of White bodies on this land have found their identity IN the trauma we collectively cause and continue to repeat like the most violent of traumatic retentions. That repetition, habit, and corresponding language has created our sense of what is real. History teaches us that when White people are confronted with the disruption to that sense of reality, we flounder for a while, unmoored. Some of us violently thrash, dragging all those around us beneath the surface of possibility, some of us freeze, immobilized by fear and thinking if we just wait it out, we will emerge with both our sense of control and belief about our own innocence intact; some of us flee, seeking to find a sense of self elsewhere - in India, inside the spiritual and identity practices of other bodies, anywhere but in our own families and communities.
And there are always some of us, yet never enough of us, who root into our wholeness, love ourselves and fellow White people through our fear, disconnection and isolation. We mobilizes alongside and forge deep relationships across difference to envision and co-create a shared sense of what’s real: both about ourselves and about the world we live in. We believe them when they say that White supremacy makes monsters of all of us. Our limbs slowly and painfully tingle as they awaken to the truth of our experience and our resilience can begin to flow through our pores again. And we get to work to make it so that this time, there will be enough of us.