I could care less, pt. 2
on how asking "have you read___?" sometimes means "can I really lay down here?"
Hello gentle-people,
I know sometimes I bring a carefulness to my work that produces beauty. And I know sometimes that that sense of caution and restraint scares me. I know sometimes it keeps me quieter than most people are comfortable with. I know it often means I deliberate into an unending loop—
But when I close my eyes I remember my head hurts. I remember that I am thinking too hard again. I become aware that my body needs something and I remember how good water feels as it subdues thirst. I remember I am human. A human some want to put superhuman hopes onto. A human who sometimes feels like she is denied space in the real world—to the extent that it may take an obvious invitation to feel like a part of it again.
I remember I am a human who is getting good at survival because every day feels like earning a new certificate.1
So I mean it when I say:
I sometimes don’t care to know if I am my ancestors wildest dream. I just wanna know…can I really lay down here? Just for a sec…multiplied by the rest my ancestors are owed.
some onboarding
This is a follow-up to “i could care less, part 1,” where I promised we would get to the burden….Here we are.
Here are some definitions of care I am working with in this series, in case the paywall keeps you from delving back through part 1:
Care as a tending (or attending), once again, with particular emphasis on attention. Since we have been here before, let’s stick with “tending.”
Care as an attachment or interest. Let’s stick with the word “attachment.” It often feels like the things we care of are a part of us..sometimes we are indeed connected.
Care as avoidance of danger or risk. I will “caution,” instead here, since I also love the phrase “throw caution to the wind.” We can do some fun poetic things with that.
Care as a troubling, a feeling stirred up by what we brood over. I will use the word “burden” here, since something of this definition reminds me to remember the weight.
I will also be playing with caring and carrying in order to drive home one central point: we all have a carrying capacity when it comes to care…even if we hate to admit it.
Today’s post reflects on definition #4. (Part one deals with definitions 1 through 3)
Also the poem “Water Sign Woman” by Lucille Clifton anchors this series.
28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
—Matthew 11:28-30, NRSVUE
have you read…..?
I will never stop pointing to Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes’s work, especially her book Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. It upended my life and saved it. It’s hard to know, really, if this version of me would exist without that book. I started writing affirmations around the time I was reading it—the two worked hand in hand to help me being to stand up inside myself.2
As much as I love reading new books when I find them,3 I often reach for the same books over and over to ground me. I am also in the habit of recommending books to people, when they ask me for them. And I will share what I read from these books, hoping to connect with others.4 But I am never going to make someone feel bad by saying things like, “I can’t believe you haven’t read____.” I know the feelings that come with stumbling on a book, a chapter or a quote from a book I wish I had read earlier. I felt this most recently throughout my time reading All About Love by bell hooks, which I started a few years ago and just finished this summer.
Some part of me reflecting on the question “Have you read “Too Heavy a Yoke?” is a reflection on the circles I’ve been in since my time in undergrad, where I first heard this question. I bought the book years after the question was asked (May 2021) and didn’t read it til months (September 2021) after purchasing it. Something about it terrified me: I knew I would learn about myself. I knew what I would learn about myself would change everything. I didn’t know if I was ready (and maybe I’m still getting ready). When I recommend books to people, I do so now knowing how long it can take to digest what is good for you…and I am still taking this book in.
Dr. Walker-Barnes breaks down the socio-spiritual5 harm of the StrongBlackWoman6 myth and outlines suggestions for pastoral and/or clinical care. She puts forth a suggested approach to care that both acknowledges:
practitioners who do not identify as Black women need to develop skills that fill the cultural gaps and
often times, when Black women ask for Black caregivers, that preference points to a desire to be known and skip the work of laying the foreground.
I once had a therapist who I asked “Have you read “Too Heavy a Yoke?” She found it incredibly helpful and even used Dr. Walker-Barnes’ 12-step approach to guide our sessions. But to those who are on a similar journey as me…where life has led you through many spaces where the StrongBlackWoman myth molded expectations of you; where you were pushed (or pushed yourself) past your breaking point on a number of occasions and found little support to move towards balance, ease, and rest. Those on a similar journey of taking their life back from a fall where people are high-fiving you all the way down—if reading this book sounds like the journey for you, I am here for it. But I truly don’t want to ask you, “Have you read [insert revolutionary text here]?”
I’d rather ask that question to everyone who considers themselves a caring person in your life. I’d rather ask that question to the spiritual leaders who are creating spaces of care where you can lay down. I’d rather live in a world where you don’t have to even ask or master foregrounding your reality in order for someone to say “I see you and I hear you.” I’d rather you not have spend five years in seminary earning degrees to analyze (and negotiate the terms of) your survival.7 I’d rather you have more time to just be.
Hell, I’d rather have more time for me to just be.
The “Have you read ___?” question has been on my mind for some time because I am in the literary world. I am a reader, writer, and book hoarder. Sometimes reading a certain text can feel like it brings me closer to something and further away from something else. Sometimes, in that something else, are some people who haven’t read that same book. I feel icky admitting it, but it has felt like a problem for a long time. More than the desire to talk about books I’ve read, I want to sit in the feeling of knowing we share similar ideas, hopes and dreams informed by that reading. More than the book itself and the camaraderie it shapes, I often reach for these references sometimes to figure out if I can lay my burdens down…without minutes, hours, days and years of contextualizing….so I can simply ask, Can I really just lay down here?
Or will one of the legs break off because it wasn’t built to support the weight of the world that often accompanies me into my dreams?
don’t trouble yourself
Mezamni tèt chaje (wi)!
—overwhelmed Haitians somewhere/everywhere/right in front of you
As I wrote this and planned this series, I have wondered about what we mean when we say someone is “troubled.”8 We are often pointing to wider situations of conflict and oppression in the lives of “troubled” people. We are sensing and responding to lack, instability and neglect. When we ask, “what is troubling you?” we want to know what is on the mind of someone whose affect communicate worry and anxiety.
I used to have a different first language, but English became the language of survival, squashing any accent that recalls the place where I was born.9 But I am not always loyal to its rules, perhaps because I am a poet.
It feels like a miracle sometimes to be called a good communicator. My past reminds me there was a time when not knowing the difference between “by accident” and “on purpose” got me in trouble.10 I also used to read the dictionary for fun11 and I remember being confused by the word "archaic,” which denote ways words have fallen out of use. In a search for stability and concreteness, I regret that I used to think words that weren’t in the Oxford Dictionary weren’t worthy of my time.
But recently, as I embrace poetry and the poetic, I come to language with an understanding that it often takes tremendous power to shift the weight and meaning of a word. I sometimes cannot write because I get caught up in how I want to carve the words I write with precision. When I am caught in that place, I call it “brooding.”12
It is a place where care as tending, attachment, and caution meet in the weight of what I am carrying. I have written about the dark here and how we should behold Blackness as beautiful. So here, in this place of brooding, I am learning what is worth the trouble.. .Because I want to care deeply…but I cannot care deeply about everything. There is a capacity to this brooding place and sometimes I need not to “trouble myself” on some things while creating good trouble where it matters.
In Kreyòl we have a term tèt chaje,13 which is an idiomatic expression in response to a reality of troubles. When I say it, I may suck my teeth or let out an exasperated sigh. I draw on this language from my people, because we’ve historically been trouble and troubling: We troubled the concept of freedom for the enslaved and the meaning of nationhood with our own liberation in 1804. Founding Latin America, we also took on the troubles of others by joining the liberation fight in countries like Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Yet we face the conundrum of being seen as face of the troubled in ways that are deeply disempowering. We constitutionally ensured that any enslaved person was considered instantly free when they arrived at our shores. Yet, our migrants and refugees are currently being sent away to sure death and suffering.
“To be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege.”
—James Baldwin
I understand myself as diasporically Black, which means my Blackness is shaped, in part, by being “African without memory,” as James Baldwin puts it. But I cannot add that I am “American without privilege.” Not when US citizenship carries with it access to a world of dreaming new possibilities for families like mine. I say this to say, coming to America as a Black person from another country may look like you laying some burdens down…and it can certainly involve picking up new ones:
We came here with troubles.
We found new troubles.
We are told we look like trouble.
Don’t trouble yourself when making a way out of no way
looks like getting no help at all.We say “don’t trouble yourself,” when the person reaching out to help will only get in the way of us figuring out how to help ourselves. We mean to say “that won’t be necessary” or “I’ve got this.” Sometimes we even let people know “its the thought that counts.” Sometimes we even say “please don’t go through the trouble of doing that for me.” We preface our asks with “I know its a burden, but…” or “If it’s not too much trouble, can you…?”
What we want to hear is “You’re welcome” or “It was no trouble at all” or “Don’t mention it.” Something that communicates that what we needed wasn’t a major lift. I can’t help but think about underlying these interactions is we hope we’ll find a soft place where our burdens can be laid down or received. Sometimes it feels like the barrier between me and the best rest of my life is knowing where I can lay down, for real. Is knowing in whose company I can take off the burden of contextualizing.
I have been in classrooms were communication shuts down because someone decides someone who has never read [insert book title here] isn’t worth their time. I have also shared a hug with a stranger (who is now a friend) because he mentioned an author I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about at the time. So if I ask you “Have you read_____?” I maybe a product of my Boston education, where every new book that hits the zeitgeist can shape community and alienation. Or maybe I am wondering if we can embrace a shorthand together that allows me get past the epistemic chasm that might be between us; a space that does not exist between those who share my embodiment.
There are other stereotypes that paired with the StrongBlackWoman myth to f**k up my life: the mammy figure in particular.14 I think about those who do not have any qualms about laying their burdens down in the presence of those socialized as Black women. They know when they come to us, because of our intersectionalities, we have the contextual foundation to help them feel understood. They know they will find compassion…even if they are not cognizant about how much personal suffering shapes our ability to journey with them. As a demographic, we are highly educated and credentialed. We have high levels of emotional intelligence with problem-solving skills and a slew of hobbies we can turn into side hustles at any time. We also give the best f**king compliments. But the minute we seek reciprocity, our problems and the solutions they demand are too heavy and too much. I learned at an early age that empowering people to realize they can help me paradoxically comes with asking for help often.
But I ask because an invitation to care is an invitation to trouble:
to make my problem your problem.
To make your problem my problem.
To see our problems, the challenge they present and the weight that we do not have to carry on our own if we can help it.
I am weary of explaining—all I want to know is a community of literate hands that reach across the chasm in ways that reflect care through our imperfect moves.
I am weary of explaining…and I want to be close already.
What to expect in Part 3:
I want to talk about what it looks like to share some burdens and alleviate others through an ethic of communal care.
We will return to Too Heavy a Yoke and discuss the importance of “co-journers,” which are “spiritual companions brought together on a common path for a particular time.”15 I will draw from the wells of my reading this summer, which include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
And I may even tell you why along with “Have you read___?” the question “Have you heard of [insert creator name here]?” makes me want to swear in three languages.
….is “A Gentle Landing a “safe space”? Am I a “safe space”? WTF is a “safe space?
[also a note to white readers in the footnotes]16
These are some questions I have been asking in light of some feelings I am carrying today as I write. A brooding I am pushing through. I recently removed a paid subscriber who moved in a way that was disrespectful of me and my time. This person identified as a white woman. The broken heart that does this work, that knows the violence of whiteness, personally and historically, understands this is “business as usual.” So the shock is not surprise as much as it is memory. Removing her and refunding her (a whole years subscription) was liberating, if not expensive. I was reclaiming my time, as Maxine Waters says.
Yet, I feel the need to reassert that this space is built by a disabled queer Black woman becoming at ease with herself. I writing for and with those who live at the intersection of these identities, those on this same journey. I have made this work open for anyone to read and support, with the (honestly anemic) hope it helps make this more sustainable.
I cannot measure impact, which is why I suppose, I had trouble finding my way back to realizing this brief interaction (and months of “hmmmm” leading up to it) is a blimp in an otherwise fruitful practice for me. I enjoy writing. I often enjoy sharing. I love reading comments from people who let me know how the words are sitting with them. I love finding out I am not alone when I go looking for family and familiars.
Aliah Sheffield sings “I don’t like people all up in my house,” and that is my general mood, offset with the welcome that is always open to the most marginalized and oppressed. I have wondered what to say in light of this to white readers. I suppose on some level, they get to experience me as a teacher. bell hooks reminds me that we live in world where most people have not had Black women as their teachers.17 So I am inclined to name this power dynamic: they can do harm to us as they learn from us. They have. They do. They will. They will take issue with this generalization.
I do not want to create a dynamic that demands a performative response…but that perhaps cannot be helped? We will see.
I am shaped to remember where I am scar[r]ed and avoid exposing myself to more pain.18 I used to carry the burden for them, as an underpaid teacher in their predominantly white schools and a pastor with no future19 in their predominantly white churches. In order to belong, I grated my own soul against theirs theologies to prove I was safe.
I am safe, I am safe, I safe!
Quick, come see how easily I bleed…yes, it hurts about the same as it feels for you.
Believe it or not, I am safe!
—what every piece of my writing circa. 2014-2021 tried to say
My bitterness is memory. Safe is measured in time spent around a nervous system recalibrating from a flinch to a handshake. Where am I safe? Where is my zone of safety? My safety net? I write to gather all the feathers I can find to answer those questions.
I am not interested in creating the illusion that this newsletter is a “safe space.” And I definitely never want to refer to myself as a “safe space.”20 I am a human with flaws. I experience care in practice and performance. We all have a part to play in cultivating care in such a way that that practice and performance is not a charade.
I will not try to develop telepathic abilities to discern if any of you really mean it when you say you care.21 But I know safety can be experienced when the context you’ve laid down points to the truth that you care. I know there are risks to care and hearts can be as slippery as hands—but we can all work on how we carry the burden.
So rather than waste any more breath on a situation that cannot be helped, I will return to the reasons I write in the first place:
I was falling. I keep falling. I keep seeing us fall. I keep grasping for feathers hoping I can use them to soften the landing. I keep getting up with new bruises and scars and I keep having to apply more salve. I keep testifying to how I am still here. I keep meeting new survivors…we call and respond to one another. I use eloquent words when I find them but I honor the silence, the hum and the scream when words fail.
I keep marking the places I have perched so I can remember where I have been and who I will be. I keep hoping we can land more gently together…because I keep falling and because I keep rising, too.22
I keep, I keep, I keep. I keep on car(ry)ing.
🪶 ✨ Trying out a new thing: I will make a feather for every gift (regardless of amount) on Buy Me a Coffee. These feathers will help me have a visual reminder of this supportive community. Right now, I have a goal of collecting 220 feathers ($1,100) in order to pay off medical bills.
And yes, that is me singing!
landing tracks
Check on everyone:
It’s no longer “check on your strong friend,” or whatever.
It’s always been “check on all your friends.”
Let’s stop trying to do guess work to evaluate who is strong and who isn’t.
Let’s assume people’s inner worlds are foreign to us—because they are.
—Rose J. Percy, from Apple Notes, July 6, 2024
Take some time to reflect on where you feel safe to lay down? Was this space cultivated by work you and others have done to ensure it is restful?
Is there a book, song, or movie that guides your communal care ethic? Do you find yourself leaning on a shared experience of reading, listening or watching something to name “this is what care looks like to me”?
Sonya Massey, #SayHerName. I have been light on the internet lately because I am grieving the recent murder of Sonya Massey, a 36-year old woman who called police because she thought she heard an intruder in her home. She opened the door to them saying, “I love y’all,” and “please don’t hurt me.” After they searched the perimeter to find that there was no intruder, they should have left. Instead, they made her the subject of interrogation, coming into her home and ordering her to turn off the stove on a pot of boiling water…then she is accused of using it as a weapon, to which she says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” These were her last words.23
I have been searching for ways to mourn and found my burden was shared by my sister Sharifa, who already wrote a heart-wrenching lament. While I wanted to weave a reflection on this into this post, I think the weaving speaks for itself. Some of us will read, seeing our names all over the burdens in this poem. Some of us need a very naked invitation: Bear witness to our burdens…make them yours.
During this season of unemployment, I did earn a few certificates.
In a previous post called “more & enough” I put it poetically this way:
I keep standing on my own And loving how tall I am My spirit used to sit so Low inside myself but I now feel her touching Her own ceiling saying "Hey look at me!”
And I love finding them. Also you are always welcome to tip me via Buy Me a Coffee or check out my wishlist, in case gift giving is your love language!
In fact, I could see myself as a bookshop owner someday. For now, this cute little Bookshop will have to suffice.
This is a word I get from a class I took during my STM program called “socio-spiritual care,” led by Dr. Heather DuBois at Boston College (via cross registration). One of my favorite seminary classes!
Some more on the StrongBlackWoman, as Dr. Walker-Barnes frames it: While the StrongBlackWoman myth was imagined to combat a slew of negative stereotypes about Black women, it is also shaped by pitting responsibility on Black women who were blamed for the downfall of the race. She frames it within the American context, drawing on history from the Reconstruction Era. She also points to the ways our spirituality and church cultures, especially Christianity, uphold the myth while operating in ways that depend on the self-sacrifice of Black women. The most startling statistics for me come from the connections Dr. Walker-Barnes makes to health disparities and how the myth operates within society to disenfranchise care and invisibilize the pain Black women experience. (Also want to know that combining the three words into one word was maintained by Dr. Walker-Barnes’ throughout the book).
HELLO?!
Here are some definitions. I especially *love* that the example says “Rose sounded deeply troubled.” Because it is true. I am. 😭
I have talked a bit about my ESL journey here and even have a few poems on it in a project I hope to release in a book someday.
Imagine: a mostly Black and brown Kindergarten classroom in New York City with a white woman teacher who mostly yelled when asking me this question.
Words are worldbuilding, people! Let’s call it shopping lol
I am still thinking about how to release the
Google Translate uses “terrifying” as the equivalent, but it can be used to express incredulity and overwhelm. It literally means “head loaded.”
Too Heavy a Yoke deals with the other stereotypes and how they conflate with the StrongBlackWoman stereotype in chapter 3.
From Too Heavy a Yoke, quoted from Boyd, Marsha Foster. "WomanistCare: Some Reflections on the Pastoral Care and the Transformation of African American Women." In Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation and Transformation, edited by Emilie M. Townes, 197-202.
Dear white people: I actually wrote a whole post just for y’all inspired by this. I spent hours on it…then I quickly gathered those words back into myself to help them find their way to being for me and mine again. I remembered what Toni Morrison said about racism being a distraction. And Natasha Marin said “close your eyes/make the white/gaze disappear.” (from Black Imagination). I have spent at least a 3rd of my life learning how to say things to y’all, in the hopes that it humanizes both of us…and it feels like self-flagellation to try to do that work here. Finally, Robert said it all here in this post, which also includes a great interview clip of Toni Morrison talking about the white gaze:
She says this in Teaching to Transgress and tells a story about walking on campus finding a misbehaving student who sees her and immediately says something like “that’s not a teacher, it’s just a Black woman.” Furthermore, she talks extensively about how marginalized epistemologies are challenged in the classroom by students.
As Lucille Clifton says in “why people be mad at me sometimes,”
they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep remembering mine
I will write more on this someday. For now, I am so glad I rejected the church mammy vocation they had lined up for me.
Okay so, what do I use instead of “safe space?” I will ask the question this way, though I don’t necessary believe I am substituting safe for “cultivated,” in the way “brave” was subbed in recent times. I will often say “cultivated space,” or “cultivating sacred space,” because in caring for plants, you learn that different conditions and space help them thrive differently. Cultivation requires a reflection on the history of the plants, checking for the health of what is visible and invisible…it also requires knowing which species to plant near each other and which help each other thrive. I could go on.
As a recovering StrongBlackWoman, I do often contemplate developing telepathy. Sometimes trauma tells me I already have it.
Could not get here without Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”
You can read more about the story on the internet and decide for yourself you should watch the video. I skipped details of the violence here so I could avoid having additional caveats at the beginning of this post. The gruesome details are enough to make it more difficult to type here as I write.
Wow. Your voice. I love you.
I love the care you put into your work and words so much. Was that your voice singing in that video? My sister what can't you do? Grateful to be in community with you. A true example of what it means to stand for your truth.