Releasing the Burden of Being Complicit In Our Own Suffering

For the Worldbuilders Ep. 052

Augusta Savage with her sculpture Realization in 1938. Collection of The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center. Photo: Courtesy of CCS Bard. I came across this photo after/at a talk titled “Black Melancholia as a Critical Practice” at the ICA at VCU given by the curator Nana Adusei-Poku presenting her research on “Black Melancholia”. “Black Melancholia pushes beyond the iconography of melancholia as an art historical subject and psychoanalytical concept to subvert highly racialized discourses in which notions of longing, despair, sadness, and loss were not only pathologized, but also reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. The exhibition aims to create a generative space for inspiration, solace, and refuge through a presentation that blends new and recent works with pieces from the late 19th to mid-20th century by artists whose careers never reached full recognition or potential during their lifetimes due to systemic erasure.” — CCS Bard

Mad methodology also, sometimes, entails letting go: relinquishing the imperative to know, to take, to capture, to master, to lay bare all the world with its countless terrors and wonders. Sometimes we must hold tight to steady ourselves amid the violent tumult of this world—and sometimes we must let go to unmoor ourselves from the stifling order imposed on this world. I am describing a deft dance between release and hold, hold and release.

— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, “Mad Is a Place”, pg. 11

Dear Worldbuilder,

It’s Thursday, the day For the Worldbuilders and today we’re talking about releasing the burden of being complicit in our own suffering.

I too, have put more value in the things that hurt because suffering is familiar.

I know her. I know suffering.

And I have plenty of evidence that the shelter of suffering has kept me safe, kept me “out the way”. But at what cost? There is rent for living underneath the shelter of the suffering we facilitate. As with everything, there is a sacrifice. The cost was often my inner child who needed me to tend to her wounds but I couldn’t bear her pain so I just kept looking away. The cost was often my body which needed my attention, my care, my tenderness, my grace but was often treated as a liability instead. The cost was often my dreams that needed my power, my protection, my faith but seemed too wild to be safe, too pleasurable to count on, too good to be true.

I just want us to consider how exhausting it is to be in perpetual disbelief of our power.

This Week’s Reflection

What becomes possible when we counter decades of sheltering inside of fear with decades of running toward love’s shelter?

Where the only rent here is surrendering the stories of white supremacy culture.

Letting go of the burden of disbelief.

Letting go of prioritizing despair over desire.

Letting go of prioritizing pain over joy.

Letting go of prioritizing substance over shadow.

Letting go of prioritizing legibility over illegibility.

Letting go of prioritizing scarcity over abundance.

Letting go of prioritizing civilization over wildness.

Letting go of prioritizing governance over ungovernability.

Letting go of prioritizing control over care.

Letting go of prioritizing certainty over change.

Letting go of prioritizing comfort over transformation.

Letting go of prioritizing defensiveness over accountability.

Letting go of prioritizing self-isolation over vulnerability.

Letting go of prioritizing fear over love.

This is the practice of release.

Releasing the burden of being complicit in our own suffering.

This Week’s Invitation

How can our creative practices and weekly dispatches help facilitate this healing cadence of release and hold, hold and release?

In this week’s episode we also answer the question “What is a Weekly Disptach?”:

A weekly dispatch is a weekly mini-offering from inside your world made possible by the daily seeds you gather throughout the week and a sacred time block protected on your weekly calendar.

The 5 Categories of Weekly Dispatches:

1. Creative Writing: Essay, Poem, Short Story, etc.

2. Podcast

3. Video

4. Social Media Live

5. Wildcard: Playlists, collages, meditations, recipes, self portraits, code snippets, drawings, experimental recordings, a quilt of all the above, etc.

Weekly dispatches are weekly ceremonies of remembrance. Where we commit to cadence of creative practice full of self-compassion and grace. Where we refuse ableism and assume we will miss a week or three and rest knowing our Zone of Desire is far too irresistible to stay away from for long.

Regardless of the container or category, we need your Weekly Dispatch! And in today’s episode I introduce 9 reasons (also found in the summer syllabus) why you might need your weekly dispatch too. I hope you’ll join us inside this cadence of release and iterative worldbuilding.

🌤️ Download the Summer Syllabus to learn how we seed a practice rooted in desire. Alternatively, you can register for the free worldbuilding workshop happening on Tuesday, July 16th at 12PM EST and I’ll send you your own copy of the syllabus inside your registration confirmation email!

May we continue running toward the horizons that seem too good to be true and make them so. May we remember their truth. Day by day, week by week.

So be it, see to it, breathe through it,

Ayana

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