Still Breathing: a Disabled, Black Survivor
Content Warning ⚠️ : oh I dunno, are these even useful? Lemme know. Anyway - police violence, chronic pain, being Black, mad and femme, healing is messy, institutional oppression and tings like this, oh and suicide yessir
This photo is from a folder in my phone called “I like me”
Writing that has made me want to change the name to “I love me”
I’ve never known self-love or embodied love like I have at this point in my life. I’ve never been so deeply intimate with myself. It’s changing my relationship to my breathing. Especially on the days when I have shortness of breath and my intercostal (rib) muscles are inflamed.
Being an afroqueer transfemme, mad, disabled, abuse survivor - it is hard to imagine and dream of an everyday sovereignty that integrates the very real legacy of being a descendant of war. It’s hard to dream of freedom while weighed down by unprocessed energies swirling around inside - quite occupying.
My parents are still alive, actively archived and were in the Biafra war. My indigenous peoples of Igboland have not stopped fighting for our sovereignty, autonomy, home and recognition. We feel the ache of punishment, not only from white supremacy stakeholders, but from our siblings in the diaspora: a disapproving side-eye for this archetypal disruptive, rebellious spirit. I readily reflect on Igbo Landing when considering how I dance with chronic suicidal feelings: considering the safety of the sea, the soul and the soil as far safer than the loneliness which is naturalised in our age. I reflect on the diasporic stigma and shunning of suicide: how convenient it is - the betrayal and blame that is clung to in order to deny how fucking understandable it is. We’ve collaborated to make a extremely unliveable world and then are incredulous when souls opt not to consent to the masquerade. Please.
I speak as someone who has attempted suicide many times and also been bereaved by suicide. I need more access to space that is rooted in and expressing from lived experience. African, mad, trans, queer, disabled experience: I find it nourishing when I encounter that. I find it healing when I connect with people who can share understanding of care-related trauma, poverty and being unhoused. I find it grounding when i see someone who looks like me admitting that it is a battle to stay and it’s still the dream.
So here I am. Popping my head above the parapet: peeping, waving, sighing, exhaling.
Many of us have have war in our nervous systems: inter-generational trauma is epigenetics is science is magic.
Chronic pain among Black mad, magical beings is an essay in of itself.
Somatics is starting to feel like another new-age white certificate system to dominate/colonise ancient indigenous movement medicines.
You know how to move your body in a way that feels good. Even if it isn’t clear right now, I trust and believe that you know what you want: You know when you need stillness. No one can sell you your self-trust. You know how to dance, you do.
Dance is sacred and simple and soulful and complex and ancient and alchemy and a birthright.
So is song.
Please with the gate-keeping and words and superiority and virtue-signalling around justice.
It’s weird.
What the hell is law?
Hello Libra season👋🏾
Awakening to another part of self, breathing recognition into being a domestic violence survivor, practising embodiment after years (maybe even lifetimes) of dissociation is radical in a world complacent in misogynoir and transmisogynoir.
It is hard to stay with ourselves.
Being a Black soul raised as a girl - who has survived child abuse - I’d like to admit that it’s really hard to forgive the world for how it treats us. I’m trying. But forgiveness is hard, it cannot be forced and I might not manage it.
I still shake when I hear sirens: so defunding the police is a everyday tune with no reprieve. The police officers that felt able to molest, attack, violate and put me in a cell when help was called for me during a suicide attempt: felt very empowered to racially profile and criminalise my madness. They are probably still earning a salary. I fought hard and won my legal battle against the Met Police for their wrongful treatment and imprisonment of me while unwell. But I’m aware that it lingers in my psyche, the knots and tender points from their illegal prone hold - embedded in my shoulder and neck, in the bottom of my ribs, in the middle of my back - still too raw to look the institution in its ugly eye.
I dream of experiencing spiritual, transformative justice for this. One day.
I’m aware that I’m one of many disabled Black souls raised as girls that lack accountability and collective healing for embodied injustice. I grieve that. I grieve for myself. I breathe and release.
I realised yday that my imagining has been dampened by the silt and protective soot of past stories. That an unburdening is required to dream that something new is possible that I’ve never even met. A safety in the body needs a confrontation with the inner critic and self-hate operating systems that are fed by unintegrated traumas.
Self-flagellation is an ever-recruiting cult.
Not enough healing spaces speak about self-hatred for my liking - or formulate a shared understanding regarding embodied love.
Burps, farts, tears, sick, sweat, poo, piss, dizziness, exhaustion, screams, confusion, heart palpitations, ease, warmth, calm, stomach gurgles, rawness, release - these are all potential manifestation of embodied healing.
What is liberation if you have a successful career but do not care for your heart-ache?
The heart literally pumps your blood, life force, vitality, secrets, hopes, messages and dreams around your whole body - are you serious? But we still doing this silly gendered, relegation of having feelings as a “femme” thing to be tamed. Like the “Age of Enwhitenment” (coined by moi) treated Mother Nature herself - as something to be used, consumed, exploited and captured… but the Creator that I know loves us and want us to be.
To be
To be
To free
To free
To free
I am learning how to respect my body more and my heart and my mind and my spirit and my soul. I have a Virgo stellium (4 planets in this sign - Sun, Moon, Venus and Jupiter) and OCD and no one knows the decimation of my insides like me: it’s unkind and super strange. I didn’t know I experienced self-hatred until I did a course of Compassion Focused therapy in 2022 (Info: it was on the NHS and for Complex PTSD treatment - I recommend asking if they offer it because they’re unlikely to disclose it as an option. I found it extremely supportive and life-changing although there were definite difficulties in it being facilitated by a white femme psychologist. Comment if more on self-compassion would be supportive). I remember when I journaled the realisation that there was a very harsh energy running through my body that hated being alive and being me and participating in all of this: it didn’t feel like mine but it was familiar and has been around since I was a child. I remember also realising that I had an understanding of compassion but no embodied relationship with self-compassion. Learning this about myself has changed my relationship to healing and to others.
True self-love is fucking hard and involves play, experiments and holding yourself while you’re on the floor on your knees, not only when you fit the mold but when you’re a fucking hurricane.
God is hurricanes. So can you love yourself when you’re a natural disaster?
Maybe it’s eternity and won’t be “finished” - are you allowed to be honest with yourself today? Even when it doesn’t “make sense”.
Aries ♈️ on the north node of the moon is a strange force to run through my Virgo ♍️ stellium. I’m learning a lot from an embodied study of Aries - the “first fire”, honouring the wounded soulja that surfaces to protect boundaries, assert “I am” and beckons us to listen to the heat of our instincts.
It’s a miracle I’m still alive: the realest testimony to the Divine.
Still breathing - navigating a rotten health and social care system, unhoused, in pain & in the hurricane - still me, rooted and afloat. Grounded in air (shout-out Tobi Adebajo).
Very cool Amara.
To be.
ID: igbo, dark skinned afroqueer transfemme earth angel called Amarachi in a green dress with a black walking stick in Jamaica. Smiling. Ezyi. Amarachi is an initiated Ezenwanyi - an Igbo high priestess, shaman, healer, student, teacher, oracle, seer, soul guide.
#suicideprevention #mentalhealthawareness #babewithamobilityaid #nofilter