staring into the blue

reflections on a year away from working

I quit my job last June. Well, technically I quit as of October 1. But my last day in the office was June 1, 2018. It was a Friday, and we had a nice white lady come in to the office over lunch to lead us in an optional community-building activity: a painting party, like the ones you can do where you get together with your friends and drink wine and paint a sunset or a beach scene or something. The social committee at my work had asked her to come, and told her that our unit was focusing on social justice and could she bring a template painting that incorporated some visual representation of justice? She took it to heart. She made a rainbow peace sign with a power fist in the middle of it and gave us a demo for how to reproduce it. I painted the ocean instead, with a Ferris wheel and lights and a pier off to one side. I painted some rocks, and a little naked me sitting on top of one of the rocks, staring off in to the distance. Staring off into the place where I can see the most blue and the least detail – the most water and the most sky. That has always been what felt closest to “liberation” for me – the freedom to daydream, to watch the waves, to listen to the breezes and the birds, and to feel the perforations in the rock, the sharp edges pressing into the soft flesh of my feet.

When I was growing up one of our neighbors had a small poster framed on the wall in the bathroom. It was a very romantic photo of a straight couple, a woman in a flowy nightgown and a man in some very masculine pajamas, like the kind Daddy Warbucks from Annie might wear, sitting on Adirondack chairs on a sandy beach, looking out at a sunset (or was it a sunrise?) over the ocean. We see their backs. We see them holding hands. There is a caption in white, script lettering: “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” This was notable because it was the near opposite of what I had been learning about romantic love from my conservative Catholic parents, my extended, evangelical Christian family, and my Catholic church and school. From these places I learned that love was pretty intense and focused on the person you loved. It was about completely centering that person and protecting not them. This was not about protecting the safety of their personhood or their freedom, rather it was about protecting your connection to them, your access to them. It was about putting someone in a cage, keeping them “safe” and close, and doting on them all kinds of gooey lovey things. It meant making it so that they would never need or want anyone else, even if that meant they just never hung out with or saw anyone else but you. It also meant that if someone loved you and they were mean to you or caused you harm, you would stay by their side anyway. You would stay put in your cage, even if the door was flung wide open. This was called “family”. This was called “loyalty”. You were taught to believe the cage was there for your protection, when really it was to protect your abuser’s access to you. This was what love was about – you would commit yourself to them fully and wholly. You would allow them to do whatever they needed or wanted because if you loved them that meant that all you wanted was for them to be happy and satisfied, even if what made them happy was to hurt you. In return you get the “safety” of the cage.

Just now, out of curiosity, I googled the quote from the photo in my neighbor’s bathroom. It is from a very famous book called Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antione de Saint-Exupery, the French aviator and writer who gave us the Little Prince. I have read the Little Prince and seen many film versions of the story, but I haven’t really considered its author before, or what else he may have written. It turns out, Saint-Exupery was kind of a big deal and wrote many books. This one, Wind, Sand, and Stars is about piloting an airplane and seeing the world from the sky. I can’t wait to read it. It was first published in France in 1939, just as World War II was beginning. The quote is from an essay called “Barcelona and Madrid” and was written in 1936. Here is the full quote, according to Wikipedia:

No man can draw a free breath who does not share with other men a common and disinterested ideal. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort. Even in our age of material well-being this must be so, else how should we explain the happiness we feel in sharing our last crust with others in the desert? No sociologist’s textbook can prevail against this fact. Every pilot who has flown to the rescue of a comrade in distress knows that all joys are vain in comparison with this one. And this, it may be, is the reason why the world today is tumbling about our ears. It is precisely because this sort of fulfilment is promised each of us by his religion, that men are inflamed today. All of us, in words that contradict each other, express at bottom the same exalted impulse. What sets us against one another is not our aims — they all come to the same thing — but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.

Let us, then, refrain from astonishment at what men do. One man finds that his essential manhood comes alive at the sight of self-sacrifice, cooperative effort, a rigorous vision of justice, manifested in an anarchist’s cellar in Barcelona. For that man there will henceforth be but one truth — the truth of the anarchists. Another, having once mounted guard over a flock of terrified little nuns kneeling in a Spanish nunnery, will thereafter know a different truth — that it is sweet to die for the Church. If, when Mermoz plunged into the Chilean Andes with victory in his heart, you had protested to him that no merchant’s letter could possibly be worth risking one’s life for, Mermoz would have laughed in your face. Truth is the man that was born in Mermoz when he slipped through the Andean passes.

So, not about romantic love at all! A good reminder – when we strip things down to make posters, memes, gifs, we strip nuance. When we take concepts like “love”, or “self care”, or “solidarity”, or “friendship” and try to reshape and repackage them to try to fit them into structures like empire, or capitalism, they become sugary. They might look and taste good on the surface, but there is no nourishment there. The structure literally requires that the good stuff – the depth and nuance, the stuff that makes it personally meaningful – is stripped away. The structure of my job at the U was stripping away any meaning, any nuance in the change I was trying to make there.

There isn’t anyone sitting next to me on the rock in the painting I made on my last day at my cushy job at the University of Minnesota. This has been a year of recognizing that the things I was taught would protect me (a steady job, a decent paycheck, a good boss, a 401K, health insurance, etc.) are actually things that keep me caged, and keep me within easy access of all my past, current, and future abusers.  It has been a year of learning how to turn away from that cage despite the fear of destitution & isolation, which is what I have been consistently taught is what awaits anyone who turns away from their middle class destiny. It has been a year of learning how to love myself, and how to trust what I see when I stare into the bluest, haziest of places: the confluence of my heart, my mind, my spirit, and my body. It has been a year of facing my demons head on, listening to them, learning from them, and honoring them instead of trying to fix them, change them, banish them, or force my way through or around them.

I’m not trying to be vague – it is difficult to get specific without sharing deeply personal details that I don’t feel ready to share. I can say that I am not being metaphorical. I am looking at my behavior patterns, especially those most closely aligned with and that bolster and further systems of oppression, not to try and fix or even change them (because I’ve been trying that forever and wasn’t making much progress), but zooming out, getting high above them, like I might if I was flying a plane over them, first to understand them, honor them as survival strategies, and eventually, hopefully, to learn from them.

I have courted and experienced a fundamental shift in my foundation this year. I have completely flipped my framework for understanding myself and my work in this world by doing one basic thing in three parts: prioritizing the healing of my body, mind, spirit, and heart by agreeing to honor my experiences of violence as real, and by reckoning with the fact that the patterns of violence and harm I contribute to (whiteness, for example), I do so as a direct result of and response to the violence I have survived. I am learning that in order to heal this way I must be in direct communication with my ancestors – those whose DNA lives on in my own, and whose wisdom is available to me at this time, as at all times. By healing my current body, I simultaneously heal my ancestors, as they live within me in the present moment.

I did not get here alone. I have had many teachers. So many I am struggling to remember, to disentangle their teachings from one another and from my learnings, so that I can properly credit them, and send you directly to them so you do not get caught up in my thinking and are free to do you our own. One is Resmaa Menakem, whose workshop I attended before leaving the U and whose book, My Grandmother’s Hands, I am slowly, carefully reading as I work through my personal trauma. This essay, How Racism Began as White on White Violence, is a good primer and introduction to some of the thinking that helps me link my personal, individual body healing work to the work of eliminating oppression and toward collective liberation.

For the rest of my life, I intend to pursue this healing above all other work. I have decided to focus on myself, and am dedicating my life to healing as much as I possibly can before I transition to the next phase of this incredible, cosmic, timeless journey I’ve come to understand myself to be on.

My friends. My white friends, my cis friends, my masculine friends, my straight friends, my wealthy friends, my Christian friends – any and all of you who experience some kind of privilege and therefore power in this world right now – I am asking you to consider doing the same. I am asking you to look at yourself, acknowledge your wounds, connect to your ancestors within, and ask yourself, what would it take for you to be able to commit to your own healing? What fears do you have that prevent you from rooting out the cause of whatever pain you are living with right now? What would need to change in order for you to recognize your wounds? And the behavior patterns that result? Are you able to do that now? Are you able to do this in one weekly therapy session, 50 minutes at a time? How many days, do you think? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Lifetimes? I am asking you to take a look, be honest, and answer: are you willing to take real action toward collective liberation by transforming yourself first? No, for real this time? Are you willing to at least notice what it takes for those of us who do choose this work? Are you willing to help change the structures you cling to so they are more likely to support those of us who do choose to heal ourselves?

I can feel you resisting. I can feel it because I also resist it.

That’s an incredibly selfish, irresponsible thing to ask right now! There are so many people suffering more than your mostly white, mostly wealthy-ish friends and colleagues! How can you be encouraging them to focus on themselves and not on the work needed in the world around us??”– the bully in my brain, because the bully often sounds entirely reasonable.

What about the babies in cages? The children being sexually abused by people in uniforms you’re supposed to respect and admire, while separated from parents so desperate for safety they’ve risked trumpland? Think of what it must be like to try and live where they are coming from, that trumpland looks EASIER?? How are you helping them by staying in bed and ‘focusing on your healing’?? what kind of crap is that? – the bully in my brain

What about climate disaster and apocalypse? IT’S ALREADY HERE THERE ARE TORNADOES AND FLOODS AND HORRIBLE FIRES AND ISLAND NATIONS UNDERWATER AND FLOATING JUNKYARDS OF PLASTIC AND DEAD WHALES AND SKELETAL POLAR BEARS AND THAT ARSONIST IN TEXAS WHO BURNED HALF A MILLION BEES! – the bully in my brain

All the school shootings! Synagogues and Mosques and Black Churches resorting to armed guards just to hold services! White nationalism! ABORTION!!!!! Civil war is now! FASCISTS EVERYWHERE!!!!! – the bully in my brain

trump. Trump! TRUMP!!!!!!!! And OMG PENCE!!! – the bully in my brain

Staring into the hazy blue horizon, I’ve had time to hear all of this. Agreeing to honor it and try and learn from it has meant giving the bully in my brain the space and time go on ad nauseum, and observing it as it does. Agreeing not to try to change it has meant I’ve seen actual ends to these kinds of chaotic, manic thoughts, and to realize that they really have done nothing for me or for my work in the world other than keep my nervous system overwhelmed, so that I’m always operating from a place of crisis, chaos, fear, and urgency. Which, by the way, is exactly what a traumatized nervous system does. It seeks out crisis and chaos, because that is what feels normal, familiar, and “right”, even if you know it’s wrong, harmful, or dangerous.

Once I was able to hear the bully out completely (it’s still there, but the messages are just on repeat now, nothing new is emerging at this time), which did take several months, I realized the sense of urgency is a weapon used against me. One that prevents me from healing the wounds from my childhood, and from healing the wounds I’ve inherited from my ancestors. When our ancestors give us their DNA, they give us their wounds, but they also give us their wisdom, the learning they have accumulated for how to heal those wounds.

I am now in the early stages of learning how to access, translate, and apply that wisdom – the wisdom I’ve inherited from my ancestors, and that is alive right now in my physical body. I can access this wisdom sometimes with my mind, my brain, my thoughts, but usually it is held somewhere in my body that is not accessible through thought. I’m still not sure how to talk about it, but there is so much information in my body besides what is in my brain.

I do not believe that there is anything special or weird or magical or super about my ability to access this other kind of information. I believe all bodies are capable of this. I also believe that healing our ancestral wounds is imperative work, especially for those of us whose bodies hold European ancestry. I believe that for those of us who, in the US right now, experience white privilege and all of the power that goes with that lived experience of whiteness, the most important, helpful, selfless thing we can do is take ourselves out of whatever power game we’re locked into, and shift to focus on our healing, on connecting to and understanding our cultural and physical inheritences, and on stopping the violence embedded in our ancestral lines.

“Yeah but if trump would just get his ass out of the oval office and into his therapist’s office instead – wouldn’t we all be better off?” – a much smarter part of me, in response to the bully in my brain.

Throughout my entire 15+ year career in higher education, working in various student services positions, I have tried to be a catalyst for change among my colleagues. I’ve worked over the years with mostly white, cisgender, heterosexual women, most of them wealthy enough to own houses (with or without partners or spouses) and raise children in “good” school districts, should they choose the path of parenthood. Retirement for most of them is a given. Health insurance – got it. And it covers acupuncture! If this is your reality – you are who I am talking to.

Almost every single person I have ever worked with and who has tried to take on the work of fighting against racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, islamophobia, sexism, or any other form of oppression showing up on campus, eventually almost every one of them asked the same question: “when do we move from talking to action? All this talking – what good does it do?” For 15 years I’ve heard people say they are sick of talking and ready to act, and being frustrated that when they step up and try something, power smothers it, and it usually smothers them along with it.

My people, hear me when I say: INTROSPECTION IS ACTION. Reflection is action. Discussion is action. Our whole bodies are engaged in this kind of work. This kind of work is what leads us to create new neuropathways that can replace the old, racist ones. This kind of work is not profitable within the structures of capitalism and empire, so it has been devalued, it has been feminized, it has been disregarded and delegitimized. Our resistance to sitting in discomfort, to experiencing and learning from our pain and our wounds is what leads us to ask over and over again, “But what do we DO?” The answer has been coming at us, loud and clear, for literally centuries: CHANGE YOURSELF. AKA: Heal your wounds.

So here I am. Healing, experimenting, learning, and trying to offer teachings as I learn. And I am here, pleading with you: if you have access to excess, please don’t hoard it. Please don’t waste it. Use it to heal yourself. Take time away from work – make space for more QTBIPOC folx to be hired instead. Cash in your retirement now and use it to support healers whose crafts are unrecognized by the western medical industrial complex. And pay more than the low end of the sliding scale if you can.

As one of my beloved and very favorite teachers of love, Susan Raffo said during a conversation on the life-giving podcast Fortification, “We can’t all heal if we aren’t all healing.” This is so true. We are not individuals, after all. We are like cells, like minute organisms bustling around and on and in and through Earth’s living, breathing body. If we are behaving like a cancer to Earth, we have a responsibility to heal so we don’t spread illness. So we don’t spread dis-ease. We have a responsibility to heal the wounds that, if left unhealed, will continue the cycles of violence, greed, corruption, and ignorance threatening to destroy everything that matters. If we have suffered abuse as children, as I have, we have a responsibility to face, understand, and heal those wounds so we don’t unintentionally permit ourselves or others to repeat that violence to our children, our partners and lovers, our friends, our families, our beloved communities, and to anyone over which we have any kind of power.

How many of our supervisors have been abusive? How many excuses have we made for leaders, both within and outside of movements for change and liberation, whose problems containing rage or whose intense anxiety and need to control seep out into the workplace, the organizing strategies? How many times have we handed our power over to people who have been careless with us? Why do we keep doing this? Why do abuse survivors continue to find themselves in abusive relationships? Why do trauma survivors often find themselves caught in webs of addiction? Chaotic and highly stressful work-life situations? Cyclical patterns of destructive, controlling, and abusive behavior? I believe we already know the answer. We know that the chances of you becoming a target for sexual assault or intimate partner relationship abuse as an adult increase significantly if you survived such abuse or violence in your childhood (I’ve learned this so long ago I had trouble finding a source, but this one will work). I believe these correlations exist because violence begets violence if the wounds from the earliest instances of violence are not tended to and healed. In other words, I believe the biggest predictor of whether or not a person will enact violence (intentional or not – it doesn’t matter) might just be whether or not they have healed from the violence (trauma) they have survived.  If one is stuck in such patterns and feels unable to change them, that’s a good sign that the original wound from which all of those other behaviors and afflictions (addiction, depression, anxiety, abuse of power, and even oppression itself in all its varied forms) stem has not been healed. It has, in most cases, not even yet been acknowledged.

We cannot force our abusers to heal. But we can prevent ourselves from unintentionally becoming abusive to others by healing. We can prevent ourselves from perpetuating oppression by excavating, facing, honoring, and healing from our collective wounds. Through the teachings of adrienne maree brown, specifically Emergent Strategy, I have come to understand that it is only through doing this focused, intentional, in-it-to-win-it kind of lifelong healing that we will learn how to collectively and intergenerationally heal those other original wounds: the wounds of slavery and genocide. It is only through understanding how to engage in this process in our individual bodies that we will be able to scale up, to build the foundation necessary to do so on a broader, cultural, and intercultural level. This is what it means to build a new foundation – one that can support us through the tumultuous changes ahead. One that can float as the sea levels rise. One that can anchor us in the knowledge of what has gotten us through this and worse before.

As I focus on my healing, and here close to one full year after leaving the U, I am being urged by my ancestors and inner guides to share more about my process. I am being urged to help others chose to heal, and I have been exploring ways I can support those around me who are engaged in healing work. I am discovering that I am an intuitive reader of Tarot cards, and that I am gifted at listening, holding, and helping others through periods of tumultuous change and overwhelming decision-making processes, like career and relationship transitions, identity development, spiritual development, and coming into activism and community engagement. I am now working to develop a Tarot reading and spiritual counseling business, tentatively called Nonna Terra, or Grandmother Earth in Sicilian, so that I can support myself and have my material needs met as I both focus on my own healing and support others through their and our collective healing. 

I intend to honor my ancestors’ and guides’ requests that I share more widely some of my experiences with my personal healing process, particularly as I learn strategies that might be applied to our movements for justice and liberation more broadly. I intend to write essays regularly, posting them on a website I am currently developing that will be tied to my new Tarot business. I am also building an email list so that I can alert those interested when a new essay has been posted. I intend to keep people updated via facebook and Instagram (@ohmarciano), as well. I’ll likely be creating new accounts once I decide on my Tarot business name and logo. All in all, I hope to be fully launched and reading for people by August 2019.

I am still painting and drawing, too! I applied and was selected for a 2019 Early Career (Emerging) Artist Grant from the Jerome Foundation via VSA, a local arts & disability organization in Minneapolis. I am working on a piece that I hope to show publicly, using funds from that grant, in early 2020.