Obsessed with death
Obsessed with death.
My father suffered from addiction to opioids most of his life. It began as something everyone was doing in the 70s in North Jersey, but ended as a secret, with everyone pretending not to do it in the 2000s. It was shameful to have an addiction because society breeds us for it, but there is a veneer that violates the truth by creating a false narrative of happy marriage and violent structures of oppression and power, painted as freedom for all.
Barely anyone is buying it anymore in the US, yet we can't seem to get out from inside it. You have to leave and see another country, less privileged, to understand the complexity of privilege. You have to live under the burden of the ways it keeps you too busy to pay attention to what and who matters, to those suffering the most.
Perhaps the world ends here.
I've always known the darkness; the not knowing was an important part of this mysterious thing called living. In school, they suggested I had ADHD, which to them just meant I would take medication. Sometimes I wonder if I had taken it, who I would be. Would I be able to help others heal through their own wounds as well? Would I remember to wake up and move my body freely and make all the sounds and breath I need to create a day rooted in wisdom instead of just fear? Would I remember the importance of staying in my body if I hadn't spent so much of my life outside it?
Obsessed with death.
"The House of Hidden Meanings" is the book title of one of my muses, RuPaul. In it, he describes going to an AA meeting in support of his boyfriend and feeling a recognition like no other in the voice of an older woman describing herself and her addictions. I too know this feeling, this glimpse that hits like lightning, that not only am I not alone, but I have work to do, and it is good. That underlying sense that something was wrong I always had growing up was true. In an instant, because of someone else's truth, we can wake up to our own. This is how it's always been for me. Even if it was in a song or a poem, I could feel when someone else's authenticity was ringing, like a bell, the feeling of that struck chord reverberating through me, and I wake up, again.
Obsessed with death.
We find out what it means to give our unique gifts today, as if they are already enough. To reach out to others who may need the same reminder we do in this moment. Our dreams returning with each sip of this tea slathered in too much or just enough honey. We, you and me I am assuming, find pleasure is no longer something to avoid but to care for, to learn from. Pleasure not just in the fleeting moments but learning how to extend it through our day-to-day, let it transform us in the moments of quaking vulnerability, and let it hold us when we are unable to access her, swimming in the lost worlds of discontent, disconnected, and discomfort.
Who said we were supposed to be comfortable all the time? They say trauma is not in the event but in the way our body stores it and shows up in how we perceive ourselves and the world. Pleasure can expand our capacity to be with what is arising now, for the sake and in service to all that lives beyond the limitations we were presented at birth. The voices that surround us are lost in their own webs of unworthiness that do not believe people can change or be loved right where they are.
In this obsession with death, we remember the past as a portal into a more liberated present. We respect the way it arises, no matter how hard we run, hide, and hold back.
Obsessed with death.
Here for the living. Hold on, it's a wild ride.
Ps. Join our 9 month mentorship and facilitation training community here. We begin in July and will support you in somatic education and becoming your own sexual and spiritual healer.
