Where do we go from here?

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, 2020

It’s finally here. The post-Trump era. The moment we’ve been waiting four long years for. The moment that many of us feared would not actually happen, due to the rise of fascism and an attempted coup and threats of impending civil war.

It feels pretty fucking weird to write those words without hyperbole. And even as I write them, I know the threat is far from over. There are a lot of angry people out there, and we certainly have not heard the last of them. To imagine otherwise would be foolish and dangerous. Just as it would be foolish and dangerous to place our trust in the Biden administration, or in electoral politics at all for that matter. The fight is far from over.

And yet. A major battle has been won. A really major battle. And I don’t know about you but I feel like I’ve barely been able to process it. Maybe because my media feeds are split between neoliberal newscasters waxing poetic about the restoration of U.S. democracy (ew) and doomsday activists warning us that EVERYTHING IS STILL TERRIBLE AND WE MUST NOT RELAX FOR ONE MOMENT LEST WE DEGENERATE INTO COMPLACENCY (oof).

But while I agree 100% that our work is far from done and that we all need to remain active in pushing for the kind of progressive change we want to see, I also believe that hypervigilance is a trauma response that we need to be careful about advocating for.

Hypervigilance is a natural response to an unsafe environment, when the nervous system goes into high alert as a method of self-protection. I for one have been in a state of semi-permanent hypervigilance since November 8, 2016. We have all experienced the collective trauma of living through four years of having to be constantly on guard for the next unpredictable act of violence by someone who wielded an enormous amount of power. Obviously, some people bore the brunt of the violence much more than others. But at some level, we’ve all been subject to heightened levels of psychological harm.

It makes sense that we are still feeling hypervigilant.

Excellent advice from the New Georgia Project

The thing is, though, that while hypervigilance is an effective survival strategy, it’s not actually going to get us much further than that: survival. Neuroscience tells us that as long as our brains are being controlled by our limbic response to an external threat, we are physically unable to do the higher-level cognitive processing required to do things like innovate, solve problems, or figure out how to dismantle militarized imperial capitalism once and for all.

To be able to do that, we have to find a way to soothe our central nervous systems, to calm our minds, to literally allow our cortisol levels to drop and our dopamine levels to rise.

It’s pretty hard to get in touch with your utopian dreams for the future when you are locked in an existential nightmare of the present.

So I’m proposing that we explore the possibility of releasing the hypervigilance — without releasing our commitment to radical movement building and anticapitalist revolution. What would it look like to allow ourselves to begin to let down our guard a bit, to relax a bit, to close our eyes and take a deep breath? What if we heeded Prentis Hemphill’s wise words that "rest does not necessarily equal complacency"? What if we gave ourselves the time and space we need to restore our inner equilibrium, to calm our central nervous system, to actually begin to heal?

We are in Aquarius season, which is a time to focus on collective well-being. And it’s no accident that Aquarius is ruled by The Star, which is the tarot card associated with the deepest healing work. I think healing is the thing we need most right now. And healing cannot be seen as external from social justice work — as something to do on the side, if you have time. Because the truth is, the world that we create reflects who we are. If we want to bring an end to violence and inequality and trauma, we have to undo the damage that those processes have done to us. And whether you are on the side of the privileged or the oppressed, you have been damaged. We all have.

Tara Brach talks about how instead of survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the nurtured. And it makes sense, because it's really the only way to explain how, after centuries of violence and oppression and exploitation, marginalized communities still persevere, still struggle on. It sounds corny af but yes, love is stronger than fear. And ultimately, it’s going to be our love for our communities, for ourselves, that is going to break the machinery of the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Cristy C. Road, Next World Tarot

So, to all of us (myself included) who have been in advanced stages of hypervigilance for as long as our nervous systems can remember: what would happen if we took this opportunity to pause, to take a breath, to feel the ground beneath us, to notice where in our bodies these feelings of threat and urgency and anxiety are living. What if we try to create some space around those feelings, acknowledge why they are here, maybe even thank them for doing their job to protect us. Chances are, these feelings are going to stay close at hand for some time — which makes perfect sense. But, to borrow a metaphor I love from Lindsay Mack there’s a difference between buckling them into the backseat and letting them drive the car.

I don’t know about you, but fear and anxiety have definitely been driving my car for awhile. And again, I’m not at all suggesting that now that the orange menace has departed, we are somehow in the clear. Absolutely not. But I also know that when we let our hypervigilance take over, we tend to drive around in the same circles over and over again. And what I want to know is: what happens when we try moving in a different direction?

What does healing look like for you?

Each of us have entirely unique brains in entirely unique bodies, so it’s not going to look the same for everyone. Some people need the endorphins from a cardiovascular workout, others need a quiet space to curl up with a good book. A lot of folks I know (myself included) really benefit from a regular meditation practice — for me, though, it took a lot of experimentation to see what worked (for me: listening to a 10 minute guided meditation during my morning stretches and listening to a 45-minute Yoga Nidra meditation while I fall asleep at night) and what didn’t (attempting to sit completely still in half lotus while trying desperately to make my brain shut up).

And sometimes, what you really need is to call in some guidance or support. Our bullshit individualist ethos teaches us that we aren’t supposed to need help, that relying on others is a sign of weakness, and that if we just push ourselves and work harder, we’ll do it all on our own. I don’t have to tell you this is garbage. But, if you’re like me, even if you know it’s garbage, you probably still have some internalized shit around asking for help, or making yourself vulnerable.

And here’s the kicker: acknowledging our own vulnerability is actually the first step toward healing, which means that by teaching us to repress or disavow our own vulnerability, our society basically raises us to be healing-resistant. It’s a mind fuck. As in, our minds are being fucked. And not in a fun way.

I am someone who has a hard time asking for help. I am someone who would prefer that vulnerability did not exist. I am someone who absolutely internalized all those messages and believed that repressing my own needs was somehow a sign of strength. I prided myself on being the person who everyone else went to for support, but never myself asking for support. In ten years of therapy, I only cried in front of a therapist once.

It’s been a relatively recent epiphany that the behaviors I previously associated with strength were in fact maladaptive coping mechanisms, and that it actually takes much more strength and courage to be vulnerable than to repress all feelings of vulnerability (thank you, Brene Brown . And even though now I see interdependence as a gorgeous and necessary part of a healthy ecological system, it’s still been hard to put these theories into practice for myself — although I’m working on it (I wrote last month about how being forced to ask for help transformed my perspective on the value of receiving versus giving support). And one of the things I’m doing is actually calling in other people to help me with this process. I am incredibly fortunate to have a whole cadre of folks whom I pay to help me on my personal healing journey. I have a therapist, a coach, an acupuncturist, a Reiki practitioner, and a Tarot teacher, among others. I realize, of course, that not everyone has the financial ability to regularly compensate a full squad of healers, but even if you’re in a precarious economic situation there is more free and sliding scale mind/body shit out there than ever before.

What I’ve found as I’ve begun to invite in more support is that not only has it vastly improved my life, but the impact is actually amplified many times over. When my cup is full, I have so much more to give to others. As a coach (and a teacher), I know that showing up as my best self will have a direct benefit on my clients and students.

And no matter what kind of work you’re doing, as you begin to prioritize your own healing journey it will undoubtedly have a ripple effect on those around you.

I’ve noticed that lot of folks (myself included) are good at encouraging other people to engage in self care, but we have a hard time actually practicing what we preach. And it makes sense that we harbor some resistance, whether it’s because we don’t believe we deserve it or because we are too hypervigilant and activated to be able to receive meaningful forms of self-tending. And to those of us I want to say: if not for yourself, do it for the sake of everyone else. Because ultimately, the future of the collective depends on all of us. If you want to participate in creating a future that breaks the patterns of the present, you have to do that work along with all of us.

When I was trying to process all the events of last week, what I really wanted to see were some messages of radical hope sprinkled in amongst the naive celebrations and apocalyptic warnings. By radical hope I’m talking about optimism about the capacity for change in this current moment. I wanted to see radical dreamers putting forth their visions of what we might accomplish if we continue this momentum. Because we do have momentum. There has been a definite shift in consciousness. The past four years brought to light a great number of injustices that marginalized folks have been struggling against for ages — brought them into mainstream discourse, so much so that corporations are aligning themselves with Black Lives Matter and the White House website now offers gender neutral pronouns Sure, we can critique the limitations of multicultural capitalism and the dangers of political cooptation — this is not the stuff of revolutionary anarcho-socialism. But let’s also acknowledge that there has been a political awakening, one that does have tangible effects on peoples’ lives (hello deportation moratorium ). If it’s possible to find a silver lining in the Trump era, perhaps it’s that it drove a significant number of people left. And, even more importantly, it activated a significant number of people who were already generally aligned with leftist principles but needed to be pushed into action.

To me, that’s worth celebrating. That’s movement building work. It goes deeper than a presidential election, and is ultimately much more powerful.

It wasn’t Joe Biden’s idea to offer gender neutral pronouns, or to cancel private prison contracts. Those were specific policy wins accomplished by the hard work of community activists. It is their work that deserves celebration, and if we cleave to the idea that the next four years won’t be any better than the last four years, we do a serious disservice to everyone who has been fighting to push progressive agendas. Is the Democratic Party going to be our saving grace? Hell no. But the people who mobilized to get Trump out, to turn Georgia blue, to pressure the Biden administration to make good on their campaign promises: they just might be.

As Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, "I believe that when we look back in 10 or 20 years, it is likely that the right wing rage will be seen as backlash against the ripening vision and movement toward a more just and equal world. This is not a given, but it is a possibility; what we do going forward determines whether it is so."

And we have a very important choice to make right now. We can sit around talking shit about the Dems, or we can look around to see who the real leaders are, what organizations are out there already doing what needs to be done, and we can follow their lead.

And this is an exciting moment, because there is really incredible organizing work being done on every single issue you can think of. So many liberation movements of the past were hamstrung by single-issue politics, or lack of intersectionality. And sure, there are plenty of organizations (especially large national ones) who still suffer from these same problems. But there is also a whole lot of cool shit that is happening now, from transformative justice and prison abolition groups to youth-led immigrant rights and climate change organizations to disability justice and indigenous food sovereignty movements, to name just a few.

This work isn’t new, of course. We can see through-lines from the civil rights movement, from feminist and gay liberation, from migrant labor movements, from abolitionists and suffragettes and yes, even those OG revolutionaries, the founding fathers (thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda . There have always been movements for social justice and liberation. Where there is power, there is resistance (thank you, Foucault).

To what extent the resistance succeeds in implementing lasting changes, of course, varies. From a historical perspective, though we can generally say that when the resistance adopts the systems and structures of the existing status quo, they are less successful in advancing their visions. We know better than to employ the Master’s tools (thank you, Audre ). Which is precisely why now is the time for us to employ our radical imaginations, to look beyond existing systems and structures, to dream bigger.

What I’m dreaming of is a post-fascist future, a post-work future, a post-border future. I’m dreaming of the collapse of the American empire — not a violent overthrow by spiritually bankrupt angry white mobs, but rather a steady decomposition over time as existing systems and structures are replaced by sustainable alternatives rooted in radical love and collective well being.

Our images and metaphors of revolution are so often overdetermined by an assumption of violence. It makes sense, because even our most romanticized versions of revolution are steeped in masculinist militarism (hello again, Hamilton). And I’m not a strict pacifist by any means, especially when it comes to self defense, but I wonder what would happen if we shifted our definition of revolution — perhaps if we put the emphasis on evolution. Because we are evolving. In the past our society has put its literal and proverbial eggs in the basket of technological evolution as a means to domination. But let us not forget that there are other possible evolutionary directions. One place to look for possibilities is to art that envisions new modalities of life. The current exhibition After Life (we survive) at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts contains myriad examples of powerful future visions and freedom dreams from queer and trans BIPOC artists — including the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto piece above. Curator Thea Quiray Tagle writes that these artists “offer us ways of recognizing our ancestors’ survival strategies that we may have forgotten. They inspire us to interact differently with other people, animals, plants, and the environment so that we can live in right relationship with one another. Finally, they dream of and fight for a future that is more humane, hopeful, and livable than our present reality.” Similarly, Tourmaline’s recent show Pleasure Garden offers a reimagined utopian future in which Black femme pleasure is centered as the subject, posing this question: “How is the world that we dream of—one of abolition, self-determination, and housing and health care for all—already here?”

Tourmaline, Summer Azure, 2020

As we emerge from the wreckage of the Trump era, not to mention centuries of white supremacy and genocide, let’s take this opportunity to allow ourselves to be inspired and moved by the visionary imaginings of these artists.

We have the choice to remain tethered to the limited and limiting possibilities of the past, or to transform our present into the future we long for.

Tomorrow’s full moon in Leo offers potent energy that can help us to detox from the past four years and welcome in something new. Ruled by the Sun, Leo is at its best when it’s able to step out of the shadows and shine in all its brilliance. Joining the Sun in Aquarius, the full moon in Leo can help us to recognize the potential power that comes out of collective healing. Leo energy isn’t interested in staying small — it’s fierce, unapologetic, and here to slay. This full moon asks you to envision the future that you haven’t dared to dream of — and to step up and fulfill your own potential in bringing that vision into reality.