needs as practical magic
I think the godliest and most sustainable form of love is love as truth.
And in that spirit, most days, I have no idea what that means or how to put it into practice. In fact, most days it feels like a platitude that I’ve absentmindedly divested from a former religious consciousness, one that ignored curiosity to survive. On my meaner days, it is something so foreign to me that I begin to resent it.
I like to get cozy with the things that make my skin prickle, and upon further investigation it appears that our entire existence is contingent upon the unspoken agreement that pretense and the appearance of placidity is the preferred mode of being. We have built a world around avoiding our needs with such a voracity that speaking to one’s needs is more often than not deemed difficult, overbearing, unprofessional, etc etc the list of evocative (and gendered) words goes on and on.
Somewhere along the line, through colonization and industrialization and the crystallization of patriarchy and whiteness, we were made to believe that success, happiness, fuckability, fulfillment, upward mobility happened in spite of one’s needs. We monetized and created entire industries aimed at ignoring our needs in one way or another.
We’ve been duped. We’ve been sold a damn lie generations over and we owe it to our ancestors to stop believing it.
All that is to say, the days that aren’t most days, (that I’m trying to make all days) I have been trying my hardest to celebrate godly humanity by radically speaking to my needs. These are the days I feel so full that I can take up the space that a different iteration of myself would never dream of taking up. I’m learning how to translate these shining solitary days into small, sustainable moments that can be strung together like pearls and worn. Pearls are formed when an irritant invades an oyster and the oyster emits a fluid as a defense mechanism that coats the irritant over and over and as I refuse to just let science be science, I have to take this to mean that honest loving and embodied listening takes much practice as it is a defense to something as unnatural as ignoring our own bodies for the sake of politeness or productivity.
This practice of binding needs to action looks different each day, and is not exhaustive; this work is deep healing work, and should be individual to each of us. Some days it looks simply like making notes of what is happening and how it lives in my body, checking in with myself. Other days, it looks like processing anxiety by reminding myself that while I am an amalgamation of everything I’ve ever experienced, I have agency over my present and future with every choice I make. It looks like asking for clarity, asking for space, time, silence, solitude, an explanation beyond “that’s just the way it’s done”. It’s honoring one’s self and our role in the forward momentum of our communities by saying something does not sit right with me, and while tears may pour down my cheeks as I ask for justice, I will be heard. It looks like having the grace to take accountability for when we don’t live our values and the humility to hear that news from those we love.
Like our season’s centaur, it looks like rooting the power of your gorgeous legs straight into the ground and breathing before we take aim and fire forward. I challenge you to love yourself so profoundly that you can’t help but speak your needs. Frankly, I beseech you to drop into your body and translate its ancient rhythms to verbal needs, so that they who love you will feel empowered to do the same; and if the goddess is you and everyone that loves you, I hope you perform godly love today, so that we all may.
Keeping my cup warm:
Nail wraps...as in the last vestiges of capitalism femme internet culture I'll engage with? (Unlikely.)
This massive accidentally anti-capitalist disruption to the coming thursday formerly known as thanksgiving
Sagittarius season, my season, a time to seek divine truth, laughing all the while