Influenced by: adrienne marie brown, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Emily Nagowski, Marie von Franz, Carl Jung, Bayo Akomolafe, black liberation theology, queer disability justice
Indoctrination, individuation, reckoning, revelation, personal truths, universal lies, power, pleasure
Saturday, December 3, 2022
This week, a sturdy, persistent reminder has repeated in my mind – ‘keep your eyes on your own paper.’ This phrase soothes me when I’m confronted with morally outrageous and injurious circumstances. ‘Keep breathing. Keep your eyes on your own paper.’
I fail often, swerving out of my lane and into another, then righting my course. I remind myself that I was indoctrinated into the lies of superiority, inferiority and hierarchy from birth. I remind myself that failure is inevitable and that my response to the fall contains more power than any morally judgmental characterization or feeling that is conjured in my body. I remind myself that the only place where I have agency is within my body, my mind, my heart. I remind myself that stone-hearted self-righteousness paves the path of evil. I remind myself that love is a practice and a value. These are the personal truths that live inside me as I write these words today.
Individuation, personal truths, reckoning, revelation
We all have truths inside of us. There are as many personal truths as there are bodies. In this way, truth is not universal: truth is personal and individual. I say this not to diminish the importance of one’s personal, individual truth or body of truths. On the contrary, I believe that excavation and inquiry of our own personal truths and specificities are vital to our continued survival as a species. Carl Jung referred to the process of identifying and reckoning with personal truths as “individuation.”
“Individuation means becoming an “in-dividual,” and, insofar as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.”
- C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1928
Creating space for personal truths to emerge is an essential element of psychotherapy (as I see it). Our desires, our fears, our environments and our inheritances all coalesce with the truths and the lies within us. Some personal truths shift and morph over time and some stay the same. As we individuate, the grip of our indoctrinated ideas of assimilation and sameness loosen, allowing for new connections with the self and with the collective. In this psychic space, differences can become sources of strength rather than sources of fear and strife. Freedom and curiosity are born outside the confines of mainstream, modern thought.
Power, pleasure & lies
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos and power of our deepest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
— Audre Lorde Archival Tape "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” [linked below]
Without on-going processes of individuation, we are prone to identify with universal and collective lies. The lies of coloniality teach us to believe that we are entitled to control and extract from the bodies of others. Or that we, ourselves, must become sites of extraction and production in order to survive. These lies harm and disable all of us. These lies confuse, distract and dissociate us from our true sources of power.
“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need. The principal horror of any such system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power, its erotic life appeal, and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities.”
— Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
Fact, fiction, fantasy
In his 1963 speech “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist,” [linked below] James Baldwin begins by asserting that “the trouble with such things as moral responsibility of the artist… is that in order to begin to deal with such a subject at all, one’s got to begin by being extremely reckless and extremely simple-minded.” This is my attempt to do so on the topic of (dis)ability:
Disability is an inheritance of ability. To be “able” is to have the capacity to become “disabled”. Our bodies, our feeling capacities, our imaginations, speech, thought, language, limbs become disabled – sometimes momentarily, sometimes for a lifetime. All functions of life and being are subject to disabling forces. (Dis)ability, temporality and uncertainty are facts of life.
Modernity relegates these facts to the edges of our collective consciousness in an attempt to stabilize and categorize the wild, ungovernable nature of our world. Disability is assigned to “the other.” The masses are distracted and commodified. This is, time and again, how the tide of fascism rises.
What could come of an intentional queering of these words and concepts? What if fascistic tendencies live within all of us - in our fantasies and desires to rule over and change what is? What could be uncovered if we locate and give voice to “the other” within ourselves? What could be revealed to us if we sit in acceptance of our ability to disable and disrupt our claims to power over one another? What might become possible in the relinquishing of familiar tools? What can be found on the ground where we’ve fallen? What might be left with the earth as we slowly rise?
There is a place within me, when I put the hand to the body, that is open to inquiry. I write these words with child-like hope that this could be/come universally true.
NOTES & THANKS:
As always, thank you for reading this newsletter!
- is hosting an evening discussion for those interested in gathering virtually on December 14th from 6p-8p Mountain Time: “This discussion will be a space for people to talk about their responses, losses coping mechanisms and strategies for establishing and re-establishing social connection in the wake of massive disruption and damage to a global social media platform.”
Big gratitude for Emily Nagowski’s new podcast, Come As You Are — adrienne marie brown, author of “Emergent Strategies” & “Pleasure Activism,” joined Emily for the episode “Prelude: Pleasure is the Measure". Such an enlightening conversation - transcript here.
Audre Lorde reads “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” — first published in “Sister Outsider,” 1984
James Baldwin’s 1963 speech “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist”
“I am a fact. All of you are collective and individual facts. And the city in which we stand and the country in which we find ourselves are facts.
Like rain, like thunder, like lightning, like fire.
The fact of the artist has always attacked – and it attacks now and as far as we can tell it always will attack – all of our notions of safety and all of our notions of health.
Speaking, if I may, for a moment simply as an artist who tries to work with words: any literary artist soon realizes that all words are at least double-edged.
There really is such a thing as health… but there is also such a thing as what society thinks of as health which is not the same thing. Now when you are trying to suggest, for example, what health is you are forced to attack all the assumptions of your society. Because it imagines health to be collective.
Whereas the artist is forced to recognize and is obliged to make you know that health is single, individual and uncertain. There is never a moment in anybody’s life when the job is, as it were, done. You may make it on Tuesday but you’ve still got Wednesday morning to face.”
- James Baldwin, The Moral Responsibility of the Artist, speech given at the University of Chicago on May 21, 1963
Great read, Elena. Wow.
Excellent. It’s funny how as we age we come upon more and more disability at a time when we should be and often are learning more about self and the ways we seek truth. Great read.