Then, I had to sit right here
Autumn opens the portal to liminality and we prepare to endure a dark season, yet again
I learned to love the rain last year
I was stuck the eye so clear
I was going wild that year
Then I had to sit right here — Toro y Moi, ‘Last Year’
The quality of Autumn light is some of my favorite light: it’s diffused and warm from the softbox of an always cloudy sky, sun rays just barely peeking through. When I found my apartment in Chicago, I was immediately enchanted by the massive picture frame window in the living room, filled with a tree whose leaves would signify the passage of time.
My first few weeks in my place were incredibly stressful as I had moved the entirety of my Los Angeles life out of two UHaul boxes with myself, my dad, and the assistance of one friend. I also was fighting for my life trying to find freelance jobs and chase down payments to ensure I could even move into my apartment.
Each day, I vibrated with that particular tickle of anxiety and hope that comes from living precariously.
I was enthralled by how much physical and emotional pain I was willing to endure to cross this threshold. I have always had a high physical and emotional tolerance for pain, and I imagine anyone who is a survivor of something has an unusually high tolerance for pain due to having survived that which is often unsurvivable.
When the seasons begin to change, I always find myself thinking about the long history of humans enduring to reach one stage of being to the next. So, being back in the Midwest where I can see, smell, and feel the seasons change, I am thinking about my survival in ways I was largely unconcerned with survival even just twelve months ago.
Moving back home while juggling a career change and navigating the dissolution of a decade-long relationship has been incredibly precarious.
My industry has become even more challenging to navigate than when I was starting with no ‘name’, no connections, and zero resources. Gigs are non-existent and when they do come, the negotiations around rates are extensive and exhausting. I’ve been here before, I’ve survived one iteration of this and so I know I will survive this iteration as well.
I can endure.
My endurance is bolstered by my reliance on community and, by relying on others, I am fighting through the false feelings of being a burden — capitalism tells us there is nothing worse than being a burden, a problem others have to solve. Part of my survival in the past has been rooted in being useful to others, often to my detriment, so part of this year’s attempt at survival is learning I can, should, and will be cared for.
I don’t have to earn care, because being in a relationship means navigating a burden of mutuality — I am responsible for/to you and you are responsible to/for me.
Autumn is a liminal stage.
We watch trees shed their leaves, the sun doesn’t rest on our cheeks as often as it does in the summer or the spring. We watch decay happen in real-time and that decaying is a sign that death is just around the corner, winter is coming. Before the land around me goes bare, it becomes jeweled in color — rusty reds, piquant yellows, gourd oranges.
There is still a transformation occurring even if the final result of that transformation is a sort of death.
To move from one stage to the next, things fall apart. Patterns are broken. Old ways are disrupted. Some amount of difficulty and pain is endured. I know now that enduring isn’t noble, and doesn’t make my humanity purer than anyone else’s. I also know that endurance is too often part of my practice for many reasons, and I am working towards finding the ways and means to endure less and live more fully a life that isn’t so dictated by Puritan notions of living a life.
As I’m writing this, I am multitasking, waiting to speak to someone at the Department of Human Services about food benefits while some piece of extremely comforting piano music plays at me, lulling away whatever annoyance was bristling up my fur. I think about the news piece I read recently about how most of us in this country are barely making ends meet, despite the rising costs of living, and I scoff because, well, Black people have rarely been able to make ends meet here.
Everyone else is simply finally feeling the sting of non-citizenship we’ve felt for too many centuries. It’s a liminal space — we’re here, but who cares for us as though we actually are here? We exist, but how often do the other people around us remind us that we often, for them, do not exist?
I’m listening to lounge music in my wireless earbuds and thinking about empathy.
How overused, how watered down that word has become. The DSM-V states that, as an autistic person, I should struggle with empathy, that I shouldn’t have any empathy based on how my brain works, but I am over-empathetic if anything.
It’s not difficult for me to imagine myself in someone else’s situation. I think of the red thread connecting me to all others around me (Everyone you’re looking at is also you) and that thread is experience, or perhaps the ability to recognize my experience isn’t singular but collective.
The entirety of my adult life thus far has been marked by precarity and precocity. Ahead of the curve intellectually, and artistically yet consistently struggling to get to a place of certainty.
My cells are encoded with experience, many of which I share with the people around me. I offer my personal experience with others to see if they’ve survived similar challenges. Maybe we’ve vanquished the same dragons? Maybe we’re still trying to endure the same indignities. Fellow feeling, I think this is a better definition for what we’re trying to get at when we talk of empathy and who has it and who doesn’t have it; how to create more of that fellow feeling.
When the Earth begins to shed its skin, when the days become shorter and darker, we all get a little bit closer to our primitive origins — huddling together in front of a fire for warmth, to see the dark world clearer and less alone.
We come together in fellow feeling to endure the old and new indignities of human survival.
As I am shifting my practice towards making art, or perhaps having an artistic statement I am seeking to explore more fully, I am thinking about what endurance actually is and what purpose it serves me, if any purpose at all. I’ve become less and less tolerant of ideas of unnecessary sacrifice, martyrdom, the nobility of suffering, of the constant cycle of violence, pain, grief, and trauma.
More and more, I want the connective tissue of human experience to be full of fellow feeling that encompasses ease and care. I want to be liminal in the way of shaping myself and the world around me in any way I see fit, in all the ways that suit me and I want the same for everyone else around me.
Survival and endurance aren’t enough for me, anymore.
I want victory and lusciousness for all of us. I know I can’t be victorious if the people around me can’t obtain victory for themselves. I want a better way of imagining a stateless world.
When we come together, huddling for comfort and warmth near the primordial fire, I want it to be because we no longer fear the vast expanse of the darkness before us because we have conquered it and we have shared this victory with each other over and over again.
as always, your writing speaks straight into my heart. thank you for sharing it!