Another Possible World @ 50

another epistolary correspondence from exile

Dearest Becoming Ones: By the time you open this email and begin reading I will have arrived at my 50th year. Today, July 30 marks the day of my birth, and when I was in college, I did not have a future for myself, but the people from whom I was learning, my professors, inspired me!

I never knew what to do with my curiosities and my desire to be a loner and just think and read and devour information.

I didn’t know what to do with my question.

I still don’t know what to do with my questions. And, knowing what I know now about life and how people treat people has consistently been hard for me to metabolize.

I was often the only female (then) in class in the school of theology, and most certainly the only queer person in the room, something that later became challenging in the face of shifting terrain within the university politics and larger area.

Texas has never been too friendly to the rebel inside any of us.

My Hebrew Bible professor inspired me: Dr. Susan Pigott. She also terrified me, as most white people did and still do, to this day.

I learned important lessons form Dr. Pigott. My love for animals can be traced back to Dr. Pigott!

I’ve been taking some time off this month, the first time I’ve taken time off from publishing regularly on Substack. I wrote on forced assimilation on July 4, and then decided to spend the entire month reflecting on having lived 50 years.

I’ve been in therapy for the last 10 years with the same therapist. I think we are finally starting to get somewhere.

After reading What My Bones Know, I decided to dig further trauma healing and how to live a flourishing life living with Complex PTSD.

I’ve been working on academic publications this month, delayed on some other writing, and learning how to wrap my mind around auto ethnographic research, and then stepping into the fray to actually write the book!

Writing has always been very labor intensive to me, which is why I only wrote on Mondays and Fridays. I am a drafts person. I always have been. This Substack; this experiment in writing a new world into being pulls from an enormous canon, some canons only imagined and others not yet material! It’s why in an age of Large Language Models, when I asked my teacher, Michael McRay, on his policy of AI use, he said: nothing public is “AI generated or AI assisted.”

I like that policy.

It’s why I have chosen the lyrical essay as my genre for writing.

Lyrical and poetic correspondence that ebb and flow with the lunar cycle. epistolary correspondence from exile.

So, I have been reflecting on turning 50 for many years, now. Coming into an awareness that I could be murdered in my own country and it be my fault has unsettled me, again.

I’ve returned to some old texts, Gloria Anzaldúa, Fred Moten, James Baldwin. These writers keep me afloat. And, Ta-Nehisi Coats, too. He’s always been telling us the truth.

I arrived in Western New York on the 2023 anniversary of Charlottesville. I was able to text people and let them know I was in a safe place, only to learn that this area, much like the rest of the country is compromised by white supremacist violence, white apathy, and settler colonial histories.

It’s been deeply sad to me to see how the area where I live suffers from racialized capitalism, carceral logics, and extractive labor practices. I was even upset to learn that there is no class analysis here; and, no reason to respond to poverty.

Violence.

I have faced violence at every turn.

Fascism on both sides. I’ve said this here before.

The beings are alive here in Western New York. And, so are the gods of supremacy culture. It’s an all out war. Just like other parts of the country are at war. That same war continues to ravage small town America, where the rural environment has been gutted out and forgotten.

Now, almost three years later, I have come to see more clearly.

One of the best things I did was leave public life when I fled from Nashville to New York. The toxicity of the progressive movement and the ways in which I was not saying anything new, but being ultra transparent about how violent this world is and seeing the internalized violence in my own life and then not being able to unsee this in other people has set me on a path of being in right relationship with all manner of beings.

Leaving public life to become a writer and to actually bear witness to what I see and reflect on what the ancestors and those who are the underside of history communicate has been a good thing for me!

I have been hosting people for refuge here at the Hull House, and I get to spend time in community when folks roll thru this land! It’s humbling to host people and to share time cooking in relationship and sharing meals together.

I am working on the next book, and I am thinking about how to create something beautiful.

I’m even thinking of what kind of paper I want used, and should I just bind the book, myself, or create a small zine and bind it as an extra? I don’t know? What I do know is that I am working on sound for this next book: what is the sound of belonging and freedom: food, art, and ritual? Very excited about the sound scape that is emerging.

I’m preparing for my fall semester and to finish my time at Duke to devote myself to being fully counter institutional and nurture the undercommons of the Hull House.

My therapist really noted that it took me 10 years for me to unravel from academia.

Unraveling takes time. And, given the tenacity with which I was working to unravel from all things academia, the writing has been the hardest!

I’m reading poetry and a lot of creative non fiction these days.

I’m watching film for research: foreign film and independent film.

My home space is my program space is my research cave. It’s been great to lean in to everything since returning from both cross country train travel and my European adventure of being hosting by people all over the world eating with strangers and asking my research question, which is: how do we turn to(ward) each other right now?

The smells wafting from kitchens kept me afloat this spring and early summer! The hospitality and learning how to host also was a great lesson to learn from a wide variety of people!

I learned who cooks and who eats out!

I learned that Curry is one of the national dishes of the UK, now, displacing fish and chips and the All-American burger that is famous all over the world!

Everyone loves curry: curry chips, traditional curry, curry and fish!

Food aside, I have come to love myself and to tell myself in the mirror that it is going to be okay.

I read James Baldwin’s biography, a lot. It’s close to 600 pages, and I am learning how important his relationships were to him in his life. I am learning who those people are for me. I look around and almost everyone who said they were in are now gone, except some very key movement people.

Short-term commitment. Convenience. Eagerness without devotion.

I’m learning hard lessons in exile. So did Baldwin.

Baldwin wrote to almost everyone in his life. I do the same thing. She people respond, and some people don’t respond. It’s the way life goes sometimes.

I’m learning who my people are, a lesson that keeps recurring for me. Discernment is key these days.

At any rate, I’d like to invite 50 people to become paying subscribers during my 50th year to honor the abolitionist work that I am doing in community with people like The Emergence Network, Nexus, and the larger landscape of community supported scholarship.

The substack funds support the community meals I provide throughout the year, wherever I am.

Leaning into the nomadic contours of an assimilated life has taught me that living in exile can also feel like home.

And, leaning into the wooded forests surrounding me teaches me that nature ebbs and flows and we should pay more attention to her.

I am gutted by so many things, and the suffering continues on so many levels. What grieves me is the various iterations of the Manosphere in America. Even here, in rural America, the Manosphere is just as toxic as Andrew Tat’s following. Furthermore, conspiracy theories run rampant in this small village, and that actually is more terrifying than hilarious.

We are slowly dying because we are slowly killing the environment.

Money drives war.

When I realized that I could be killed in my own country, I started leaving for long stretches of time. I always found a gig in Europe to get out of the States. I am hopeful for artist residencies in Europe and other opportunities that seem to emerge in due time.

For now, I will bear witness to what is emerging and what I am experiencing. My work is not only creative non fiction; it is auto ethnographic.

Similar to James Baldwin, my writing is shaped by my lived experience. My life is one of the texts I consult when writing. Again, the canon…

Thank you for reading, and thank you for subscribing. I want to pull together some pop up gatherings or moments where we might be able to connect and suture social trust.

On my 50th birthday, consider sending this post to 3 friends and ask them to subscribe!

I’ll be writing and returning to regularly scheduled writing that might be more culture clique and strategy minded rather than the normal meditation that is sent out on Mondays. I’m still discerning what I want my 50s on Substack to be like.

Stay tuned!

Paz, —RCE+