Don’t Let Me Burn Out
Artwork by Trinidad Escobar
“Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness…”
— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
One month away from my twenty-sixth birthday and I am carrying the deepest despair that I have held in my body. I retreat, curl up, fearing the cut, the isolation. Fearing that I have no other option but to hurt so much, or go numb. I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t want to take up space. I don’t want to have to feel so shattered and worthless.
It is devastating to constantly remember all of the ways that this system robs us — kills us. I keep trying to hold on to this vision of a world where I can see myself existing. I keep doing what I can to not let that vision break.
Holding both depression and anxiety makes for this frantic heaviness and your chest feels like it is either going to rip apart or implode. It is having all of your fears hurtling around a racetrack at 4am, and finding yourself unable to leave your bed at 4pm. It is feeling as if you are running out of time, to constantly fight to keep yourself from breaking and ending everything now, because you don’t want to find out what happens after the last grain of sand falls — a crash?
Silence?
When I first came to understand what resistance — revolution — looked like, I was about 10 years old. I thought of it as torture, disappearance, death — I had nightmares of these things often, for years. What they don’t tell you is that the day-to-day of navigating accumulated trauma can also be a slow agony:
Manufacture. Justify your existence through constant, draining labor. Prove that you deserve to be here. Set aside your well-being, your relationships, your joy. Your wholeness.
I am an autonomist leftist — we are builders, activists, organizers, artists, educators, care-givers. We are often forced to choose between fulfilling those roles necessary for our basic survival and those that both empower ourselves and enrich our communities. We committed ourselves to the struggle because we saw a possibility for us to get free — but we are intensely aware that we are caught within a world that operates in ways destroy us.
How do we move beyond mere subsistence?
In mid-July
The sun ruptures
Bleeds its palette into the sky
As it sinks past the
Dividing line
The street below
Still hot with the sound
Of lingering blasts
Leftover liberty
The celebration of that freedom
We have never seen
The Town
Two months deep
Into a summer
That belongs to
Familiar sacrifice:
Restless,
Relentless
Ruthless
Rough times
Come back around
With the rattle of coins
Poured out from the change jar
Slow, steady grind
Like jaws clenching in
Troubled sleep
A moment -
Can we pause?
As dollars keep
Draining like the casualties
Capitalists collect,
Casually.
Oakland. I have fallen for this town. My love has grown out of a shared grieving, of a weight that comes from the frayed edges of bus seats, of the same scuffed up pair of shoes pacing the same streets. I want to capture all of the things that I know of this place before it is disappeared, reduced to colorful narrations of what once was. I tell people that beauty lives here, I have seen it in eyes that still dance when they meet mine, I have felt it in words exchanged with strangers and in handshakes with rough palms. I see strength in the dark richness of pigmented skin all around me, grinding against the monotony of wrinkled dollar bills and cracked pavement.
I have always cherished the resolution to live, to go on. That is what I found here — and among many other things, that is why I stayed. This is where I learned to fight my way through, at times crying, drained, defeated, other times yelling, screaming, marching resolutely. And there have been moments when, surrounded by the people dearest to me, laughter has escaped me, resonating through empty alleyways, unfurling, blooming out into the sorrow of a cold night.
There is rage in me as I witness this place get eaten up, generations spat out, histories aborted, erased.
How many more years, months, days will I be able to soothe my trauma — these legacies and histories inside of me, sounding like eulogies even when I say them as battle cries. Power from my people. Power for my people — we shall survive.
But how?
There is that ember in me
Again, that
Old fury, that disgust
Stealing my rest
Forcing me to befriend
Darkness, to know these late hours
Too intimately
Again, this
Sacred sorrow
Both
Pain and
Preservation,
Suffering and
Sustenance
It is just before midnight and I am cradling my partner’s head in my arms, rubbing his back as he tells me about how tired he is, all his life, of being poor. We do what we can to hold onto our meager savings as the bills pile up — debt, arbitrary numbers that form an invisible cage: the credit cards I leaned on to make ends meet while I was jobless, the incessant nagging from loan collectors, the cost of an uninsured visit to the Emergency Room to reset the rhythm of his heart. The rent, month after month, like a stubborn leak at the bottom of a boat that repeatedly floods us with water. Our bodies ache, sleep is temporary solace until daybreak…
A close friend lost her home of more than twenty years and now finds herself transplanted from one place to the next. She has lived through so much, and her body becomes more and more tired. We clasp our hands together, creating the essential shared space for vulnerability. We listen to each other, we cry, we don’t know how we will keep on…
Fundraisers for housing, for those who have lost their means of income, for keeping community spaces open, for those escaping abusive situations, for people with urgent and climbing medical costs, for funeral expenses — an ongoing stream of crises, an overflow of unwellness…
I learned recently about the phenomenon of collective trauma from a piece by Kai Cheng Thom:
“The sociologist Kai Erickson once wrote that collective trauma is “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together [. . .] so that ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged, and ‘you’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as linked cells in a larger communal body.” Simply put, if a group of people is traumatized — terrorized — enough, they will cease to feel connected to one another. This disconnection is a defensive response, an attempt to shut off the pain of being associated with the group. As a result, we become withdrawn, isolated inside the story that we are alone and without hope.”
As a community builder, a radical Brown femme in resistance, a question I cannot get away from is one of pain. I am wondering how we move through our despair together when triggers are embedded, rooted, and entangled so violently within us, like poisonous barbs in our being. How is it possible for us to join in struggle when, often, our sorrow speaks — at times lashes out— before we do?
Any theory about revolution that doesn’t also grapple with how we have endured so much pain, that doesn’t trace it and seek to extract it from all of the deep, dark places that it reaches into…any theory of revolution that is unable to talk about collective ways of recovering from anguish, that fails in the first place to look at and confront all of the ways in which we have been hurt, badly, by systems of exploitation and degradation — is a mere exercise in intellectual abstraction.
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
— Adrienne Rich
Several months of unemployment, financial instability and severe emotional downswings meant that I hadn’t been able to engage in movement work in a long time. The workshop “On Self-Love for Our Liberatory Futures” looked promising, and it was also being facilitated by adrienne maree brown, co-editor of the visionary science fiction anthology Octavia’s Brood. That collection offered me strength, a reason to keep myself open to infinite possibilities — “All Organizing is Science Fiction”. Weary and battling a light brain fog, I made my way to SoleSpace on 17th and Broadway. There was a bit of rainfall that evening, unusual in the midst of this drought.
The space was sweet, comforting, raw. I shared out about my reasons for being there: I identified as a community builder and yet it was difficult for me to return when it seemed that, time and time again, I found myself falling back, tending to basic sustenance — food, shelter, health: physical, mental, spiritual. I was there because I needed, badly, to find ways to make it, to stay.
I heard from others who wanted to make a firm commitment to self-compassion, to showing ourselves kindness. To stepping away from toxicity, the celebration of depletion, burnout, overwork — because we each are only given one body, one vessel, and it is a precious thing. To reaching for what deeply enlivens and enriches us, even as we navigate through the grueling heaviness, the burdens of this world that threaten to crush us.
We ended with an exercise: we split off in pairs and were instructed to face our partner, to make eye contact, to focus solely on them. My partner and I had trouble maintaining eye contact, there was some shy laughter — but then, in front of a complete stranger, I began to cry. We were asked, in turns, to speak about our “bottom line”, the practices of self-care that we were unwilling to compromise. And from there began an intense, genuine openness and resonance. We spoke of depression and being unable to leave the safety and quiet of our homes, of sadness. We exchanged words of affirmation. For me there was an unexpected feeling of relief, of release.
After the workshop, adrienne approached me, said “Thank you. I saw you really opening up.” We hugged. And I remembered how crucial moments of connection, of being seen, are for each of us — and for us collectively. I am glad that I went.
I followed up with a message:
“I just want to find or remember what truly speaks to me, what kind of work brings me life and joy — through exhaustion, exploitation, illness, sadness — but it feels like such a faraway vision…
The verbal articulation and recognition of pain can be empowering, versus a silent, widespread, yet isolated understanding of struggle. I had not spoken about my pain in a long time. I had become afraid that my traumas would act as triggers for others, and I retreated inwards. This is where the tears came from.
Many of the people closest to me are deeply hurting. It can be heavy to know this — to know that we are on the margins and fighting to even remain here — and to be so attuned to the vast suffering in this world. I had been sitting in a cyclical contemplation that almost became resignation.
But I saw that there were more places to seek light.”
So -
When the new day
Is more a threat
Than a promise
When monotony
Becomes madness:
A constant,
Throbbing
Grief
I wonder
Really,
How thick is
Skin?
How much force
Can it absorb, disperse
Repel -
Or does it hide
Too well
The explosions
Searing,
Blistering,
Raging -
Consuming us
Slowly
At our
Core
How do we resist collectively when it is a battle for us to even push through each day for ourselves? How do we meet each other in our anguish?
How do we sift through each others’ ashes — of loss, of grief, of despair — and still find something that resembles life?
A flame can be destructive, can devour us so thoroughly and reduce us to nothing but smoke and charred remains. But it can also be sacred, can signal restoration or rebirth. I want to move away from this solitary mourning towards warmth, illumination, and regeneration.
There are times when we must light signal fires, carefully and intentionally, to let others know that we are here. That we need to be seen. That we need to be held. That we need help.
There are times when we must light signal fires to keep ourselves from being consumed, alone, in the dark.
