Hello dear ones,
We’re experiencing a lot of rain here in LA, and it has me in this reflective and dreamy state that feels fitting for Pisces season. I hope you enjoy these reflections.
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Over the past year and a half, I’ve experienced a string of romantic and intimate disappointments. Many promising first, second, and third dates. Conversations about our shared commitments to vulnerability and emotional openness. Lots of really sparkly sex. But then something happens. A conflict arises. A switch gets flipped. And the romance ends before it can even truly begin.
As a Cancer sun (total romantic) with a Sag rising (possibility is everywhere!), this endings have led to a lot of disappointment — one of my least favourite feelings. Why couldn’t it work out? What can I do to ensure it works out next time? These questions loop in my brain for days, weeks, sometimes months after the connection ends. My desires and expectations frustrated, yet again.
One of the hard truths about opening ourselves up to intimacy is that we will be disappointed. Intimacy, if we so seek it, requires us to practice being disappointed — to build our capacity to experience this emotion. Because, the other side of possibility is disappointment. We can’t have one without the other.
Knowing this, I’d be lying if I said that keeping myself open to intimacy – and thus open to disappointment – has been easy. Intimacy requires vulnerability. I return again and again to the words of Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt in his aptly named poetry collection This Wound is a World:
“Love, says cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, ‘always means non-soverignty’ but only if we think of love as what opens us up to that which feel like it can rupture the ground beneath our feet. Berlant insists that love requires that we violate our own attachments, that we give into instability, that we accept that turbulence is the condition of relationality as such.”
To be vulnerable, to love, to be intimate with another, is to open ourselves up to the possibility of being let down, and possibly even wounded, by another.
At the same time, as the title of Belcourt’s poetry collection attests, a wound (which I’ll use here interchangeably with disappointment; disappointment as wound) can open up a whole new world. In fact, it is my disappointment that helps me imagine and move towards the forms of intimacy that I so desire. Disappointment, as praxis, can be a kind of world building.
I remember a few years ago, back before I started making memes, I made some posts about dreaming:
In the caption, I wrote:
“I’ve always been a dreamer. As a kid, I’d get my parents to take me to model homes so I could dream about the house I’d have one day. At some point along the way, I was made to believe that my dreaming was naive. That I wasn’t being ‘realistic’ enough. And so I started to tuck my dreams away. But they’ve persisted still — and I now understand that dreaming is activism and activism is dreaming. If we want to build better worlds, we need to dream them up. In my own personal healing work, dreaming has kept me alive. In moments where dissociation took over and all I felt was trauma, I still believed that it was possible to heal. That one day I’d know my window of tolerance much more intimately. I’m now starting to feel that dream come true.”⠀
On the second slide of this post, I shared a call for others to share their dreams:
And then I waited for folks to share — but their responses didn’t come. When I asked folks why they felt resistant to sharing their dreams, I realized that when you live with complex trauma, dreaming can feel terrifying because you might not believe that you deserve good things. That dreaming will only lead to disappointment.
Dreaming also requires us to admit that we want change — another terrifying thing for us trauma bbs. When we dream, we say, “I’m not satisfied with the world as it is.” When we dream, we say “I believe that something else is possible for me, for us.” When we admit our dreams out loud, we must reckon with the possibility that our dreams will not come true, and that causes us immense grief. So it’s better, safer, to not dream. In not dreaming, we protect ourselves.⠀
And, it's not just my trauma brain that’s at work here. The systems of oppression that we live under want us to be happy with things as they are. They want us to believe that this is as good as it gets. Power does not want us to dream, to invest in other possibilities. And so it is scary to dream, because dreaming is resistance. When we dream, we build new worlds inside and outside of ourselves.
I want to encourage a praxis of disappointment. We must build our capacity to be with dashed expectations, with being let down. And, in order to do that, we have to open ourselves up to the possibility that we will be disappointed. We have to dream, imagine, conjure. We have to take the wager of intimacy. We will not always get what we want. But that doesn’t have to be considered a failure. Every time we experience disappointment, we’re being given an opportunity to clarify what it is we want for ourselves and for the world. And it is from this place that we build the worlds we dream of.
As with all trauma work, we can start by dreaming small. We can dream of things that are easily accessible, like our favourite ice cream, or swimming in the summer. When our trauma brain sees that those dreams are possible, then bigger things can start to feel imaginable.
Can you make a list of 5 small things you're dreaming about? Can you try sharing them with someone you trust? If writing down your dreams feels too scary, you can do something more abstract, like making a collage.
Do you want to help make someone else’s dream come true? My dear friend Carolyn Collado of @recoveryfortherevolution has 8 days left to raise enough funds to bring their book to life! — and they’re halfway to their goal.
Here’s a bit about their book:
Answering the Call of the Ancestors: A recovery guide in times of reckoning and revolution is a book based on my lived experience as a queer, trans, non-binary, neurospicy, two spirit, Afro-Taino human recovering from intergenerational substance use struggles, codependency, people pleasing, and perfectionism. This book is meant to support those who want to shed the ways the histories of colonization, imperialism and systems of oppression inform how we relate to ourselves, to each other, the divine, and to our planet. In validating and contextualizing how my life and our lives are informed by the history of colonization and systemic oppression, this book points us towards ways we can recover ourselves from the impact of these histories and systems.
A mix of memoir, history, and supportive practices, Answering the Call of the Ancestors provides a roadmap for how we can dismantle systems individually and collectively. This book begins with some history and context for how we got to the present conditions, moves into practices intergenerational impacts of colonization and racial capitalism, and ends in unpacking the challenges and the hopes of living in these times answering the call of our ancestors for healing and liberation.
Even if you don’t have the means to back their book, sharing their Indigogo on your social media goes a long, long way!
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