you can explain yourself to life, too

misfit midrash 2.0, alt. title: who would i be if i didn't have to explain myself to survive?

Trying a new thing: From now on, footnotes for my posts will be for paid subscribers or "tenders" of this newsletter! 

hello gentle-people,

we are laying down some dreams and schemes.

if i am remembered for loving books, i’ve left the wrong legacy. but i don’t mind if i am remembered for wanting the answers for life and living. like an answer to this essential question: who would i be if i didn’t have to explain myself to survive?

my tweet from 2021: “Wishing a gentle landing to you who do not yet know that fighting that thing is not all that you are.”

I lament with those who have to explain themselves to death. I have been there before and will be again…but I see something of a beautiful revelation I get to live into now that I have spent four years here (in this newsletter) explaining myself to life.

I have been excavating the fragments.¹ I keep weaving them into something I could cover myself with. And now I have the weighted blanket I have been waiting for.² I decided I write to a “gentle-people”—and I decided to define that as people who seek a life similar to the one I see:

Grounded in a softness that is expressed through the gentle entanglement of dreams for the fullness of our humanity realized. Those who wished for more spaces to reflect on how they might seek that fullness through the narrow spaces we often have for rest and reimagining.

So defined this way, I never had to enter this space to argue or defend myself. I could arrive to explore, through depth and desire, what it meant for me to notice, attend to and create spaces of gentle landing. So yeah—I picked up a few languages along the way to get there:

I learned to honor the hum. To sing/yell/scream. To quote people like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Delores Williams, ebonyjanice and others. To whisper the poems of Lucille Clifton to myself.³

I hesitated to call it resistance,⁴ I offered instead that it might be an expression of Black aliveness. Oh, it most certainly was—To breath and simply be, in ways that did not center the ever present (White⁵) gaze.

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Psalm 119:71

It is good for me that I was humbled,
so that I might learn your statutes.

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I was often clever in my being and becoming. But I have also been foolish. I desired recognition and success in ways I now lay down. I rehearsed scripts of shame and envy I am still learning to challenge. I have made poor decisions and let my guard down with some of the wrong people. I misjudged, offended, and ostracized others in clumsy attempts to self-protect and assert boundaries.

It is nice to be able to take the fall in a community that embraces a gentle landing, where you could course correct (repent) and try again. To be reminded that some part of my work is to be gentle with myself, practicing the care I hope to extend to others.

For me that is what this misfit midrash is about, in someways. A course correction. I must now acknowledge that there have been some things I cooked up that I did not like serving:

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if you set 
yourself up 
to be consumed 

do not be surprised 
if vultures circle  
your dying dream

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*smiles wistfully*

I did some good, through— even as I wrote through omission, concealment, vagueness.⁶ Even as, in the dark, I shielded myself from discourse that felt like a harsh, analytical light, ready to dissect me with surgical hands. It has been a gift to hear folks say this work has “given them language.” It is the kind of compliment that has always landed with a little distress—how could that be true, I thought, if I am still searching for language? If I was still trying to figure out how to stop explaining (myself) and just be?

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1 Corinthians 13

For now, we see through a glass, dimly, but soon we shall see fully even as we are fully known.⁷

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before the good news, some bad[?] news:

There is a cost to translation.

I keep feeling it over and over every time I come home to myself in a new way. Every time I am blessed with a break from performing and wearing the various masks that make me palatable to the dominant culture.

In my resistance, I crafted my own poetics to build a world and speak my own language in it—and in my effort to bring others into that poetic playground, I sometimes forget that we are all just dancing in this margin of margins. I forget that what feels rich here is read through the eyes of oppression—and I must remember and dismiss this simultaneously to flourish.

I forget that calling this '“scholarship” invites that harsh light that I hate, puts me in spaces where the tenderness I seek is not what I find. So I am letting go of those words—“study,” and “scholarship”—and the performances that come with honoring their expressions.

What will I name what I do? What I write? What I notice and play with poetically? Especially if it is also NOT an expression of me explaining myself to death—but a hope to live by? Can these utterances that “give language” to myself and others be some kind of invitation? And if so, into what?

*shugs*

Listen, I am just like this—

Meaning making is part of the conflict and the joy.

okay now for the good news

So I bought a bundle of Apple apps that included Logic Pro, a music production program. I have been wanting this longer than I’ve wanted a weighted blanket. Years and years. I have been playing around (very unseriously) with Garageband, which is like a lighter version if it, for a few years, I said enough is enough—why am I suspending this dream? Why not pursue it today?⁸

Then I got some headphones I have been eyeing for awhile. They also support the amateur producer dream, with advanced EQ settings to play with. (They also have the added benefit of helping me better communicate in public that I am unavailable for conversation.)

Another thing I bought following this same reasoning—a hollow body electric guitar! Tune into EldestDawtahRage on IG to hear how it sounds.

Picture in the bottom left is me with the guitar around this time last year when I made the decision to save for it. So glad it was still there when I went back!

As I sat down to write this, I realized I write to make decisions like this simpler. Since getting to a point where I didn’t have to spend what I make from this newsletter for survival, these “Gentle Landing Funds” have been designated for flourishing, which usually look like creative and professional growth opportunities.⁹ But every once in a while, I give myself permission to just buy something that brings me joy without overthinking it.

So—who would I be if I didn’t have to explain myself to survive? The words I want to answer with are in the question:

I would be.

And, even if you might, at this point, feel a fatigue every time I say the words “come bear witness,” on some level you have watched me “shape[d] some kind of life,”¹⁰ through the culturally and systematically imposed invisibility that would call me suspect for making this claim.

It was a making of a way out of no way. And I keep hearing a “no way, no way, no f—king way” that calls me to argue and defend my existence yet again—¹¹

But today, I have a new software program to learn and a bunch of friends I want to make music with. I have songs I am ready to sing…and performances to participate in with agency.¹²

I also have a book on J Dilla to finish.

Landing Tracks

• If defense has been your reality: Who would you be if you did not have to explain yourself to survive? If it is not: What does it look like to listen to others into being?

• A literal “track” to land with, one of my favorite songs in the season. As both a preview and a content warning for those experiencing church hurt, here are some of the lyrics that hit me the post—it is usually where I start crying:

To be known by You, my God 
And just to sing right to Your heart 
There’s nothing sweeter

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