Let me give you a bit of a truth about me. I am a news junky. Getting the news from multiple places in the world helps me understand how the world goes round, the state of the human condition. At one point, I had a membership with Lemonde, Jeune Afrique, Mediapart, El Pais, the Washington Post and The NY Times. Yep. All at the same time. It was that bad. Now I just have three of those memberships, so I am still a news addict.
One thing I had learned early on from my readings however, was not to let myself get suck in by what I was reading. Instinctively, I had managed to remove myself emotionally from the onslaught of news I was subjecting myself to.
I recently came to question this ability I had acquired to remove myself from the news, when my social media feeds became a stream of black and blue squares. All days, every days, there would be uproar, pain and hurt from something we’ve heard on the news. And I started wondering if I too, should start putting black squares when the news required it.
Then I realized that what I was feeling was guilt. Guilt that I am not as sad as everyone else seem to be. Guilt that I was moving on while a lot of people where halted. Guilt that I was feeling ok.
A phone call with a friend and a re-reading of our cherished Toni Morrison put it all in perspective for me. A lot of us are out there fighting a white supremacist system and let’s be real, the system is fighting back. Daily killings of black and brown people, packed prisons, failed education, broken health. It never seem to stop. All days every days. And what do we do ? We stress over it. We fight against it. We condemn it. We cry over it. We make ourselves sick over it. We fear it. We create initiatives around it. We let ourselves be drawn to it and we drown in it.
And that’s their plan. To overwhelm us with sadness.
Frankly, what we are going through at the moment (and the moments before that) is a special kind of torture. A madness.
They want us to cry every day. And we do.
They want to exhaust us. And they do.
They want us to focus on the fight. And we do.
They want us to forget. And we do.
We forget the point of life. We forget that the point of life is to thrive, as Maya Angelou was telling us. We are stuck in survival mode. We forget to breathe. And that’s what the system ultimately want. They want us to forget about our own humanity. They want us to forget that we are not only about fighting and surviving, but we are mostly about creating, being happy and thriving.
The story I want to write is not about resilience and strength. We have enough of it. I am tired of it. I am tired of reading about survival stories. Really. We are strong and resilient people, I think we have proven that time and time again.
I want to write and read about fragility, ease, rest, and joy. Only. I feel most human when I am able to connect to my joy and creativity. And they will not steal that from me. Never. I connect to the divine when I connect to my creativity. And it’s that joy and creativity that brings me freedom. Financial freedom, political freedom, social freedom. Freedom to be myself. That is how I free myself and that is how I will free my children.
I will be joyful, I will be creative, I will be happy. And that’s what they fear the most.