on healing

cw: s *i*ide mentions

There are many observable truths we cannot deny as a species: we are born, we will die, everything is therefore temporary, and I love my husband, wholeheartedly, enough to know my love for him will outlast me, reverberate throughout our children and their bloodline, and will reflect itself into the inevitable gene pool of humanity until its last breath, and even inside the very last gasp of the very last human, within that breath will be a reflection of a learned pattern I saw at one time, in my husband’s sleep, as his chest rose and fell beside me, or within every deep, passionate kiss where he has left me breathless. 

This huge gesture of arrogance that our love is enough to make it through species death is not a gimmick, nor an exaggeration of my love for my one and only, but a testament to give you a fraction of an idea of how unconditional, unadulterated love is a truth in my life, really the only truth, and that is was the single catalyst for true change in my life. 

Trust that I am well aware of my age, my perceived naivety, my honest inexperience in the vastness of life. Trust that I am also well read in theory. Trust that I have still yet managed to live many lifetimes in my brief sojourn of breath, in fact I have been almost every archetype of femininity, even as a transgender person, simply because I am perceived as a woman more than I like. I have been the Virgin, the Mother, the Harlot, and the Witch. I rejected and disavowed monogamy, and still do for most people. I never expected myself to discover the rare miracle of falling in love and being loved back. Not to say I had any trouble falling, I fell in love at least twelve times a day and still do (although, differently now, obviously). And even so, I believed unconditional love was a myth of cisheteropatriarchy, even on a biological level between families. I believed love ought to come with quite a few conditions. I believed true love was something to work for, fight for, make out of circumstance. 

I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the notion of change, particularly Octavia E. Butler’s description found throughout all of her works and most famously in her Parable of the Sower series. Because I was raised an only child (even though I didn’t end up staying one), I tend to have to digest lessons personally, working internally as a process until I rupture out and am forced to think externally. So, of course, I had to look at one of the most life changing moments of my time and arguably the 21st century. During the 2020 crisis and as we continue today in early 2022, I know intimately there was a profound change within me, a call to adapt without really thinking about anything else but action. And in that call, I realised suddenly that my entire process of living had changed. I became better. I became happier. I was interrupting previous cycles of violence towards myself. And after all this time, I realised the primary catalyst for that was being wholly and unabashedly loved by Jack Dorfman. 

I will be the first to tell you I do not hate life, but rather I love it so much and find it so awe-some in the original intent of the word that I felt for a long time I did not deserve to be in it. Many people have said to me that when people try to kill themselves, they often stop and turn back, ashamed at what they’ve done and try desperately to live.

I will also be the first to tell you that I have lived through eleven attempted suicides and one freak accident in which by all intents and purposes, I should have died or at least have been injured. Every single one of those times when I awoke or was stopped from what I was doing, I was not happy. I was furious. I was ashamed not because of what I’d done, but what I couldn’t finish. I was further depressed. I was further  enraged. I was worse towards myself. I grew increasingly violent in other ways. And yet, God had other plans for me. God was not finished with me then and I believe God is still not finished with the work I must do here in God’s name. I do not believe in love or God because of what I was given, but because of what was taken from me. I do not believe in Love or God because of my successes, but because of my failures. And it wasn’t until I fell in love and was loved by Jack Dorfman I realised why God wasn’t finished with me all those times I tried to kill myself. I had to live a life with my husband, there was life to live with my husband, and nothing or no one would take away this beautiful gift God had prepared for me. 

I do not endeavour to do what we seemingly self important activists call “this work” because I am so concerned with the radical notion of Black Imagination that I am an eternal optimist fantasising loudly without any concept of our collective material conditions. I do this work, the work of creating a life for people outside of myself that is better than the life I witness, because I was given heaven on earth before I ever intended or thought possible for myself. No matter how bleak, how abysmal, or how violent the world becomes or how I feel towards myself, my darling, angel man of a husband commits to our happiness not only as a couple, but as the best of friends. The purpose of healing is to make amends with your loss and intimately understand there is no beginning without something’s end. 
Every time I ended my life, I kickstarted a new one. Every relationship I ended or refused to really start led me to my husband. Every choice, every atom, every reaction led me to heaven with him. I fully intend on sharing my slice of heaven widely simply because heaven is not for the deserving few, but for the deserving masses. There is not one single person who does not deserve the bliss I feel when Jack places his sweetest chin in the crook of my neck, placing his hands on a body I have learned to relish and not antagonise. I am alive, I truly believe, not only to work but to simply love and be loved. This is a privilege now, but I promise to fight and fight hard so that future generations know this love as a right of all peoples.