late night Love notes
some ppl confuse empathy and/or spirituality with hyper-optimism & I think this is dangerous. whether the hyper-optimism comes from a place of privilege or is itself a self-defense mechanism to keep their own painful emotions buried, when ppl respond to other ppl’s pain with hyper-optimism it often further invalidates that pain, which ultimately only leads to more pain. I view emotions as energy frequencies, ranging on a scale from high to low, so it only makes physical sense to me that low-frequency feelings, such as depression, for example, are not going to suddenly bounce up to the high-end range of the scale, & even if they did, this dramatic shift would be unpleasant & maybe frightening, forcing your energetic system to adjust from one polarity to the other. my own energetic system used to do this all the time & it was excruciatingly painful, known to some in the western psych world as rapid-cycling bipolar disorder and/or the rapidly changing emotions that often accompany the class of symptoms the DSM calls ‘borderline personality disorder’ (which I have a *very long impassioned theory about that I will maybe share at another time*). So anyway if someone is feeling on the low-end of the spectrum it makes sense to me to 1) validate those emotions! Emotions are energetic signals – they are telling us something, even the unpleasant emotions we would rather not hear from. We are energetic beings & exist in so many more multi-dimensional ways than our physical bodies. Low-frequency/painful emotions are messages that something is wrong, & some might say “well yes there is a lack of serotonin in the brain” but that still doesn’t answer *why* there is a lack of serotonin in the brain (and sometimes it has nothing to do w/ serotonin or the physical brain at all so neuroscience as the universal foundation for figuring out emotional pain really doesn’t cut it for me & also largely ignores or at least does not center the roots of trauma & sociopolitical oppression), & if you’ve been my facebook friend for a while you know I am all about getting to the root of things. which brings me back to my favorite topic: QUANTUM PHYSICS. I believe that feelings are composed of subatomic particles just like everything else in the universe, which means I believe that our feelings have a direct impact on the physical world simply because feelings are, at their subatomic root, already a part of the physical world. BUT – I believe it is dangerous to translate this into the idea that hyper-optimism is the key to transforming painful emotions into less or not-painful emotions (this is known as the cringe-worthy concept of “positive thinking” as the cure to all yr woes), because to do so is to ignore or resist the energetic messages those painful emotions are sending us, & it is **resistance to energy** that is most painful of all. I believe painful energy needs to be processed & before it can be processed it has to be recognized & validated, & to me recognizing & validating where people are currently emotionally at is the first step in extending true empathy. and this true empathy is, at an energetic level, the highest frequency of all!!! I call this highest frequency Love & it is so fine & so electric & so infinite & multi-dimensional that you don’t even have to speak it for it to do its work. it works subtly, beneath the surface of what we can see, so that when someone is in pain & you choose to empathize with that person instead of project hyper-optimism or what *you* think they *should* be doing/feeling, you are both meeting that person’s current emotional need, an energetic alignment which helps provide some energetic stability, (which is much healthier than jumping from low to high anyway), AND stirring up the subconscious or perhaps unconscious high frequencies of Love that will continue to do their work even after you are finished extending empathy. this is why when we are in pain we cringe when someone tells us to just “cheer up” or “snap out of it.” that cringing is a sign that their energetic vibrations are not what we currently need, otherwise their messages would feel good! often we know exactly what we need: someone who is willing to listen & validate us, which is why it feels so good when someone does. that good feeling is the subtle work of Love as we process our pain. we need empathy/ Love.
a lot of hyper-optimism comes from privileged New Age thinking that does not empathize with sociopolitical experiences outside of the status quo, which is partly because we are currently living in a global empathy deficit & it is exhausting & downright awful. yet somehow I have hope, & I swear that’s not hyper-optimism lol.
I love you. <3
Willful in speaking/ Willful in shutting up
As a white person, how do I speak about shutting up? Is it better to just do it, to just shut up?
I’ve been thinking about this for several hours now. I have other things to do but am stuck on this question & won’t accomplish anything else until I attempt to answer it. And by answering it, am I answering it? Because obviously I have decided to speak about shutting up.
But only to say: White people, we need to be better at shutting up.
And by shutting up I mean literally just stop talking so much. Less output, more intake. I say this to you and I say this to myself. And the intake is equally important, because there is a second part to the act of shutting up, to willfully shut up, to make your shutting up make a difference, and that is to actively listen to the voices that your white voice inherently drowns out by being white. And this listening has to be active, meaning, you have to go searching for the voices of people of color. Don’t expect these voices to show up just because you’ve stopped talking – they won’t and that’s the problem. Marginalized voices are in the margins. It’s our responsibility to find them.
For white people shutting up has to be willful because racism is willful. Because oppression is willful, designed to be willful. Because privilege is willfully invisible, operating on the illusion of not existing.
For white people shutting up has to include active listening because racism is systematic and institutionalized, which means white privilege is systematic and institutionalized, which means no white person is exempt from white privilege. Shutting up will make space for the voices of people of color, yes, but if we don’t actively listen to those voices and continue to examine the function and manifest of our own white privilege, the voices we make space for will only continue to be marginalized every time we speak, because white privilege is inherent in how we speak, how we are heard.
I speak often about the act of speaking, about willfully speaking, about taking up space, reclaiming narratives and reshaping realities, about the patriarchy and the intersection of abuse, trauma, rape, sexism and gender, and how so much of this has robbed me of so much of my voice. And it has, but that doesn’t change the fact that my voice is a white voice and heard as one. And recognizing the fact that my voice is a white voice and heard as one doesn’t negate my own experiences of oppression. And that’s what intersectionality (a theory first named by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, by the way, yet still not recognized as a word by either tumblr or Facebook (Google?), which is evidence alone of how even vocabulary about marginalization is still marginalized) is all about – this crossing of ideas and experiences and being able to recognize and think about all of them with both criticism and empathy, recognizing that within systems of oppression exist other systems of oppression. Oppression is not a ladder but a multi-dimensional web and so our thinking must be multi-dimensional.
Combating racism is one thing to think about and another to do, to willfully practice. Critical thinking itself is a willful practice but I’m thinking about how this manifests in the world, what we do with the thinking, how it shapes our words and interactions. And the practice is hard work because the practice is inherently flawed, i.e. my practice is inherently white (which does not excuse its whiteness). My critical thinking is inherently white, and that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it but actually that I need to do it more. I need to think critically about how I critically think.
And while there are specific things to do (surround yourself with voices of people of color, absorb yourself in the art and literature by people of color – emphasis on “surround” and “absorb” because tokenizing is anti-productive i.e. read Claudia Rankine but don’t only read Claudia Rankine), I also hesitate to make a list of things “to do” because combating racism is not a to-do list. There is no “checking things off the list.” There is no “end” to racism, and if there was it wouldn’t be up to me to define it. But I can help define the beginning of the end of racism by defining the beginning of racism i.e. myself i.e. white people.
Now, stop listening to me. Here: