Saturday Free-Write: Unraveling, Listening, Imagining
Today is my free-write—the one day each week when I sit down to paint a picture with words, to tell a story that might interrupt a toxic pattern, and to imagine another possible world.
In my twenties, I first encountered Gloria Anzaldúa, and her writing shifted the ground beneath me in visceral and radical ways. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin—all shaped me deeply—but it was Anzaldúa who held together in her body what I was feeling in mine: the collision of colonial violence with indigenous blood and Mexican heritage. She gave me language for the ache, for the borderlands of identity and belonging. That encounter ignited a question that still animates me: What kind of Latine am I?
Later, in my PhD work, I braided Anzaldúa with Gilles Deleuze, weaving together poetics and philosophy, biology and theology, to make an argument that the body is always becoming. I remain proud of that work. And yet, even as I unravel from so much of my training now, I lean toward something more tender: narrative intelligence, paired with emotional intelligence, becoming—slowly—an emotional fluency.
But to speak honestly: I am also learning how to heal. Six and a half years of being targeted has left my mental health frayed. Complex PTSD lodges itself in the nervous system. Charlottesville, the pandemic, years of harassment—these have shaped me more than I wanted to admit. Conflict in my family of origin taught me to withdraw love when I most needed it. The result: disconnection.
emilie townes once told me over pad thai in Nashville, “You need to learn how to be with yourself.” She was, and is, right. Trusting myself has been difficult when I’ve been conditioned otherwise. And yet, as the Old Irish proverb says: all that is tangled will be unraveled. That is my work in this season—unraveling from cultures of toxic positivity, supremacist violence, extractive labor, whiteness, carceral logics.
As I write this from Durham, NC, I’m on sabbath with a dear comrade. Last night we shared a sabbath meal with movement folks, and I was introduced around the table as a “movement theologian.” I carry that name with humility, but also with recognition: I belong to a long line of people who dare to imagine another world and who commit to making it so. Sitting at the table, I listened. I am listening still. Listening to the room, to the story beneath the story, to the silences between words.
Harris III reminds us that worry is a misuse of imagination. I’ve come to believe him. Hearing his story has unlocked parts of mine that were long buried in my bones. Imagination, when it is not hijacked by fear, can become a tool of liberation. It can teach us how to narrate the impossible.
This is why I share my unraveling in public. Because I want others to know they are not alone in theirs. Because I hope my building-in-public might encourage someone else to invest in themselves, to risk telling the truth, to imagine into the cracks of the world a future committed to abolition.
The question I hold this morning is simple, though it carries weight:
How might we nurture life-affirming systems—with ourselves, and with each other?
May our imagination stretch wide enough to carry us there.
Paz, —RCE+
