The Garden Salon

Mine is an invisible weight. A mess of a ball of stuff. It hangs in my body like a sogging rock, suspended in a cavity in my spirit. Shame feels like being pulled down and uncertain if I can get up. Shame has never lasted forever.

When shame arrives, anger makes a good cover.

Somehow and eventually, that anger points a knife at me.

I know my rage though. I understand the knives. Rage tells me this treatment isn’t right. My rage is an alarm saying injustice has occurred, that the act of loving has been met with disrespect. My anger is sacred. I give thanks to Mona ElTahawy for helping me to this knowing. Shukran.

Recently, curiosity has pushed me to consider my shame. I am open to feeling the dull ache. I watch it float around the areas of my heart, lungs, and gut. I listen when shame announces itself. Noisey in the areas of money, women, this one thing my dad said when he was drunk, that my grandparents died and I didn’t really know them. There’s more, I’m responsible for behaviors I don’t want to recall.

I am practicing looking at what shame shows me. My mind’s eye retreats quickest from the scenes where I betray myself. I used to ruminate on these failures, rageful at my assailants and past and current me. Now, I can sit a little longer and ask myself, why did I stay quiet when I should have fucking screamed?

Trying to stay safe. Always trying to stay safe.

Maybe anger isn’t a cover, but a delayed response. Overcompensation is an additional critical assessment of the rage I could add. I don’t find that critique helpful or necessary though. Why is it that when we are failed in the area of safety we also cannot get angry? How is that an acceptable response in a place that rarely gets to the root of the lack of safety to begin with? I do not subscribe this restraint anymore. I defend myself and maybe there’s more flame than necessary at times, but maybe situations that provoke vigilance and a need to defend one’s self should not occur in the first place.

My identities, and the way I live and think are not welcome here. Excavating my authentic self, the me who arrived at birth, includes learning and listening to all the things the world has told me are ugly, inappropriate, and undesirable. I am more equipped to protect myself now because of this listening. It’s a practice that is scary at times and deepens my erotic power. I use fire instead of hiding.

Shame and I are getting acquainted. I know my rage and my rage is like a person; someone new every day. Knowing is a lifelong practice of learning. I know my love, frictionless and without bounds, sometimes buried away, always expanding and curious.

And my love has started asking, what about the shame of others? What ways does it pull at the people I consider my enemy and my blood? How would white people working through their shame make the world easier for us all to live in?

Enemies. In that, the social order they refuse to acknowledge as a collective, and therefore will not dismantle- but benefit from, is trying to kill me. Enemies in that complicity and complacency is deadly.

How does the story of superiority, reinforced by creating so much lack and suffering, manifest in the experience of shame?

My love is not here to absolve, it is curious. My choosing to know shame is not about eradicating it. I consider the european blood in my lineage, my body. In my veins because of the lie of ownership of my darker indigenous ancestors. I don’t want to own my shame, my emotional intelligence is not to be shackled for control. I welcome a conversation.

For is it not rooted in shame, the need to control every aspect of ourselves? Control your anger, control your tongue, control yourself, your body, your mind, your hopelessly romantic heart. Where is the point of living, when you must be such a slave to your Self?

This is the behavior of someone who separates shame from who they are. Like the european separated himself from land with a “holy text”. I rebuke anything that tells me a man has dominion over my mother(earth) or me.

Asking my shame what it means to tell me is my resistance to assimilation and white violence. Asking shame is the refusal to colonize the wisdoms of my emotional self. That invisible that is not only trying to keep me safe(always) but expanding my power as a being with tremendous capacity to love and trust.

I trust I can be angry and not cause harm. I trust shame to show me how to do better, by me and others.

What happens when the people at the pinnacle of a brutal social lie, refuse dominion over the earth and all living beings, and exchange that for knowing themselves and the rest of us?