Managing My Manifestation: Redefining the Relationship Between My Body and Reality
Originally Published in FIFTY54 Magazine
There’s nothing as psychedelic as seeing yourself in a mirror. It’s rude; it’s dysphoric; it’s pretty unfair, in a way.
This isn’t how I envisioned myself. This isn’t how I thought I looked.
Mirrors can be dream breakers, weaponizing the light instead of letting it pass and taking its vengeance out on our image. Feeling and imagining — hell, even believing — you look different than what the mirror shows you is a special hell. For me, I had to grow up as a black man in East New York, one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods in what some consider the most anti-black country of the Western World, if not the entire globe.
When survival is a daily chore, a lack of confidence is not viable.
That means growing accustomed to the body I would see in the mirror every day.
Even coming of age in the hood, I constantly found myself infatuated with black people and black bodies. I mean — the colors, the movement, the language — are untranscribable. The combination of our natural features — freckled cheeks, prideful collarbones, doe eyes, persistent moles — with the culturally curated additions of perfected eyebrows, gold crosses, silver ankle bracelets, and manicured nails….our bodies are diamonds resulting from America’s centuries of pressure on our rights, our skin, our kinship.
Me- I’m a summer baby, risen from the dry heat of July. I’m as comfortable with heat as music is sound, warm showers, warm clothes and warm sheets, warm receptions when I enter a room. with dance. I naturally love warm anything; warm food, warm climates, warm colors, warm There’s nothing like the warmth I feel when I’m with a person that I love. I’ve come to learn in my own journey in body positivity is that I embrace warmth in as much as possible, because there’s so much chilly things around me — in fact — within me.
Many people describe their relationship with their body through a relation to power or autonomy. Sort of the internal struggle of owning their bodies. I seem to relate to my body as a separate entity of my existence, sort of like my child. My body’s keeping me young and hip, and protects me more than it realistically can. My body agrees with my mind in not trying to be like the others around it, but both are stubborn at times and wants to do things their own way. They both collaborate to produce my dreams and imagine myself in them every night. In the end, I love my body. I’m not really in complete control or ownership of him, but he’s a piece of me that I curate to best exhibit its expression.
I no longer take what the mirror says to me as a threat, but as a question… the question of me. “You’re here, and the world can see you. What are you saying today?”
Right now, my message is “My body’s fine, he’s mine, and there’s nothing on it to hide.” I’m no longer allowing my dreams to falter to the image I’m hit with. The light can no longer be weaponized against me — I absorb it, and all its warmth, to fuel those dreams into a reality. After all, the pressure of manifesting those dreams is greater than pleasing the wandering eyes that fall on me, starting with my own.
For the sake of my own perseverance, I’ve stopped reflect the icy environment around me. This summer — and every day after — I’m out to be the summer time fine as my body wants to be.
Trust me, we’ll be more than fine. I’m positive.
