If I So Must: A Personal Essay

It’s my Birthday. I now reside in twenty-nine. Someone asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate the day and I told them that my only wish was to be in prayer and in peace — just to be numbed by pleasure and coddled by my dreams. This whole season has been one of appraisal for me: what have I built around me, who have I called into my company, to where am I walking? I find myself in true contentment in tandem with the burning aries-esque ambition for the profundity I have yet to dream and do into being. 

You remember when Octavia Butler reminded us that in order for your Phoenix to rise from ashes, she must burn? Well, I died a sort of  death last year. In a crisis of health, I and all the things around me I believed I knew and loved died a necessary death. In my dark borough I had only the option to conjure my own light. When one is called to conjure light or anything for that matter, untrained and unharnessed, the quality of light is likely unsustaining. But out of desperation and the sheer will to live, the powersource within me and beyond me produced illumination so profound I was guided back to myself. This morose season of my life that spanned years I will always know as my crucible. The one that made me so ugly; left me so stained; shifting, disconfiguring, reconfiguring all the signifiers of my so-called identity. I broke apart in all the places I used to love. All my valuables, confiscated and discarded. As I alchemize new valuables and values, new signifiers of self, I rebirth a Raven so whole only pure can penetrate. And only I — and at the same time, not even I — know the true quality and density of the matter I’m made of. 

And so the celebration is in the poetry of my life. And not like the pressure to project my pain through the prism of my art. That’s its own thing, but what I speak of here is the very poetics of [the way and the spirit] in which I nourish my body and romance my friends and listen to the God in the ocean and interpret jazz and  hold artmaking space and dream my dreams —and how the sum of it all settles into my smile and my expression of self. And how those things lead to my poetry, and, reverse-engineered: my poetry leads to those things. Our Audre Lorde declares poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience in her essay, Poetry Is Not a Luxury. And if I have committed to one thing, I have committed to finding meaning, or if I so must: making meaning. So I celebrate that. That miraculousness. The glory of transforming absence into light. And I celebrate the light itself and all that it offers, known and unknown to me. And as awakened in us by the When I Get Home interlude, “we are the walking embodiment of God consciousness,” Black Women. Glory! 

One of the principles I’ve begun to practice on my Birthday is celebrating the people in my life. Those who nourish me, who teach me, who hold up the mirror reflecting my beauty and my ugly. It was the spirits who orbited me, living and not, that gave me the buoyancy to float back to the top, finding my breath again. Those who loved me when I couldn’t find the reasons to love myself, who looked at me, believed me and believed in me, touched me and trusted me, dreamt my healing for me and with me. They all collectively changed the criteria for what it took to be a friend to me and for me to be a friend to them. I spent the first eight years of my life an only child and I suspect that’s why I see my friends as siblings, loving them beyond the bounds of friendship, a thing I’ve long held shame for when it wasn’t met with reciprocity. But I am finding freedom from that shame too. It is my nature to carry love untamed and ungroomed, wild and on fire but as I mature; it's taking a more sophisticated shape, finding more solid ground. Where it not only considers, but centers me in a holistic and true fashion. I’ve found this way of loving and looking at love a deeply generative practice. The second tier to this deepened way of being is graciousness. Extending grace to myself and other folks invites God into the room. And I’m learning that there’s alchemy in the posture of a mortal in the presence of God.

Real gratitude lives for God’s pairing of me and my purpose— my craft, my work. Storytelling has freed me time and again. The mere knowing that I hold its power within me is, too, freeing. To have something outside myself, my community and my spirituality that I am committed to —oftentimes more than those things— that I can then I can turn around and pour those same things (myself, community, spirituality) into it, the container of story. A strange truth. An obsessive love, even. But a saving grace. Rooted in a love for humanity and its tangled complication. Storytelling is the lens through which I see the world and the filter through which I process it. Ancient and ancestral. Inherently African. At its core, it is language: the expression of thought, emotion and ideas. And though language includes speech, writing and gestures; language is not speech, writing or gestures. It is some electric blend of them all but not limited to them. And while my liberation has been teased, or maybe even revealed, somewhere between those tangibles, my life’s quest is to fully unlock that divinity and sing that liberatory song. Because somewhere along the line I had decided that language will be the route to my God.

And as fulfilled and filled as I am in this moment, in spirit and in life; I still feel something’s missing. Somewhere between projects and betwixt cities, I looked around me, so proud of the global village of people, makers and thinkers that occupy my company, and I realized there was a hole. There was no real community around my writing— Or at least not one that included and spoke directly to the people closest to me: my girlfriends and homeboys and cousins and aunties. No space for dialogue in the language I’m most fluent in. 

The oracle said I must make space to write in community, that I needed a room in the house just to talk to my people. So I’m bringing into being: The Jones, a digital mini mag delivering all that I’m jonesin’. It’s something like a digital newspaper in format and style but speaks to you like a blog, informs you like a newsletter, inspires you like a magazine and teaches you like a textbook. It is a space for me to critique art, theorize craft, share love stories, chronicle my travels, post events, share resources, walk through my wellness, review and rec books, promote mine and my colleagues' projects, share artists work, and all else I'm jonesing. I’ll show up in your inbox on the first of each month on time just like your Sunday Paper under the subscription model for $2.99/mo. One can subscribe to The Jones today to receive Vol. 1, No. 1 launching May 1st. Click the pusher below.

So today, on my twenty-ninth birthday, I sit here in the sun, with my fruit just writing. Activating text. Writing worlds of healing and magic and culture and wisdom and history and love and infinite doors, passageways, windows and skies so that I or anyone else can find some freedom between my pages. That is my prayer and that is my peace. I’ve spent so much of the year in motion and I have so much motion in the year ahead of me, I’m breathing deep today. 

And I think, in order for one to know me, to know me truly, they should know that I died once, yes — but really that I experienced the labor of my own rebirth.