Dear friend,
I’ve started re-reading bell hook’s All About Love and her words are like a potent, medicinal balm. In the preface she shares how fixation on the pain of previous lovelessness can foil efforts to seek love in the present:
“We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go of grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing . . . years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connection. When the mourning ceased I was able to love again.”
I’ve read that passage many times and each time the word “mourning” feels like the word my heart has been seeking for years.
When I first moved to Chicago, the person I was dating at the time introduced me to the metaphor of an albatross — a psychological burden that feels like a curse. Something that seems to be tied around your neck, weighing you down. It resonated immediately. I’d felt the heavy omen of what I called “loneliness” or “melancholy” since I was a little girl.
When my parents and I relocated to Houston a few months shy of my thirteenth birthday, that abstract loneliness calcified into a physical reality. Away from the places that felt familiar, the extended family I loved, and the friends I’d known since early childhood, everything felt hollow. Not only had so much been taken away, but every new person in my life felt foreign and distant. Like a mirage. There was some kind of abyss (my Blackness? my distaste for the superficial?) between myself and the new people in my world that felt impassible.
I remember more than once, my mother sitting with me in my room after school or on the weekends. Shaken by the inconsiderate words of someone at school, the dance no one asked me to or the sleepover that felt like a high stakes social game, I would lay nearly catatonic with sadness. My mom would hold me and say, “I don’t know why God is putting you through this, but it’s not for nothing. You’re being prepared for something.”
At the time, all I felt was doubt and fear. The fact that the four walls of my bedroom were the only place that I felt even the slightest sense of relief made me feel ashamed and isolated. My sanctuary was also my cage.
Although my reality began to extend beyond high school and my life opened up to a world bigger and more colorful than the small universe of my adolescence, the albatross of loneliness remained — just as heavy and constant. I would often think back to my mom’s words that all of this was not in vain. That there was something being created in the dark, achy place of my solitude.
Reading hooks’ words make me feel seen in ways few other passages have. For years, I’ve said to myself and others that “the next great love” is always in the future, never in the past. Even if that person, place or thing is something you encountered long ago, to commune in the present means to be seen and embraced for the you of this very moment.
What I think I’ve actually craved (what many of us crave) is to right the past. To somehow undo the the rejection, the judgment, the neglect that broke our hearts a thousand times over. To confront the caregiver who abandoned us. The one who refused to protect us. The one who caused us harm . . . To reconstruct a childhood or an adolescence that mirrored the friendships we read about in chapter books and watched in movies. Ultimately, the impossibility of time travel left me bound by a grief I didn’t have the words to name. Walking with a heavy albatross around my neck.
Since the start of the New Year, I’ve found myself at a stunning juncture — unknowingly leaving a season of mourning that colored most of my adolescence and young adulthood. It’s felt like the bird around my neck was not chained there but something I’d been adorning myself with each morning. Putting it on like funeral garments that mourners wear. One day I saw myself doing just that and stopped. I had mourned enough to no longer need the somber ritual.
I feel in many ways like I’m finally taking off the black clothes that have cloaked my heart for so long and feel ready to practice love in a way that was never accessible before. To imagine new futures with old connections. To archive the “evidence” I’ve collected over the years of my undesirability. To invite a first kiss with innocent joy. To hold hope for others while their arms are full of heavy burdens.
The other day, I was listening to Nina’s Simone’s version of I Shall Be Released and the chorus struck me like a jolt to the chest — “I see my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now / I shall be released.” I feel myself being released.
The maw of some mystical, merciful beast is unclenching.
There was a time when I couldn’t envision a happy life. I couldn’t imagine the love my heart ached for. I flinched at affection. I disowned my reflection. I hid from the sun.
Now, for reasons beyond my understanding, the prophetic “something” my mother spoke over me many years ago is arriving like the Spring sunlight. That something is a fierce devotion to community. That something is the start of an apprenticeship in love.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on the people I asked to love me or proclaimed to love when I was incapable of fully doing either. I declared confidently that I was ready but each year found myself humbled by how hard my heart was. How loudly the stories about myself and the “realities” of life echoed. It felt cacophonous to be alive inside myself. So loud, I couldn’t hear the hum — the soothing warm vibration that enveloped all of us at one point in our life (even if only for a moment): the hum of all-encompassing love.
When checking in with a friend the other day, I was replaying a moment in our relationship where she’d needed someone to listen deeply and I’d only had room for judgement — too caught up in my own callousness to hear her. In response to her reflection I texted “I was just thinking to myself, could I have held space for you the way you needed? And I’m not sure I could have which breaks my heart to think of. I’m just grateful for you watching and allowing me to grow in my own tenderness and healing.”
I know those callouses were formed to keep me from being wounded again — to safeguard against pain. To numb. And I’m proud of the attempts I’ve made (in the midst of a mourning season I didn’t know I was in) to love and connect. I’m grateful for the people who’ve been patient with me when those attempts arrived like a bouquet of unpruned roses: beautiful but thorny. I’m humbled to feel like radical gentleness is a possibility. To feel the callouses softening.
May these words serve as an apology, a confessional, a thank you letter and an earnest documentation of a miracle happening in real time: The beginning of my own journey (our journey together, if you’ll join me) toward, as hooks says, “that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed.”
With love,
Jas
some mystical, merciful beast unclenches its maw
Amen!