On Fear.
I have had a contentious relationship with being seen lately.
Realizing that there are parts of me in my life and circumstance that belong to the public… has rendered me without speech. That’s rare. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I, in fact, believe that existing in this way has expanded my capacity for love in such unexpectedly radical bloomings. I wouldn't trade this.
It's just that somewhere along the way of this year, I slowed down enough to be able to feel fear. And that hasn't happened in a really long time. I'm not, I'm not often, I won't say that I'm not often afraid; I actually think that I'm constantly afraid. It's more that I'm usually moving too fast to feel it. So I took some notes. I don't have a full essay; I just have this sneaking suspicion that if I verbalize these, it's gonna make someone else feel less alone in their fear. So... here I go.
Notes on dreaming / fear and where those two things converge. | The difference between there is no choice and there must be a different way.
introductions.
I never used to think about fear. I couldn't afford to. Poverty is (1) early and frequent exposure to premature death (that's a word to Ruthie Wilson Gilmore), and (2) a spectrum. Poverty is a spectrum. Me and my family were the kind of poor that could pay for the house and nothing else. Rent was something we regularly made within the first... five days or so. But you know, food, electric, heating or cooling, internet, transportation– they're all up for question at any given moment. We juggle priorities. I do not believe that I experienced the worst kinds of poverty that the United States has to offer. I have never been face-to-pavement homeless, for example. I did lose teeth though. So like, you know, balance, I suppose.
I don't know if I've ever publicly talked about my relationship to work, but I began working for a paycheck when I was 16 and I haven't stopped. I remember how sad my mom was when I got my first job because she knew it was the beginning of the end. She knew enough to have grief in a way that I myself didn't know. I was just excited to finally make some money and be able to help out my family. And she was looking at me becoming an adult while I was still a child, a minor. She was bereaved on my first day of work.
The summer I gained my first W-2 job, both of my parents lost their means of employment within two weeks of one another. And they waited so long to tell me– they didn't tell me until they absolutely had to. So I did not have time to be afraid. I unlocked those sensations in hindsight through journaling and many years past, right? A memory of a memory of insomniac workaholism.
That's not what it felt like then– that I was a “workaholic." I would have never described myself that way because that implies there was a choice that I could have chosen to do something else. That was not the case.
I used to scream in my car, like full on, full throttle, scream in my car on the way driving home from closing shifts so that I wouldn't fall asleep. And also just to deal with the frustration of never having enough time to sleep. I was home around 1 a.m. I did homework until I passed out on my books. At school at seven. Repeat. Repeat. Don't crash. Repeat. I was dreaming of college as this escape, as this means of stability for not just for myself, but for everybody. I didn't know that I was experiencing the first chapter of working under capitalism. I didn't know that I would spend the next decade of my life moving too fast to feel fear. In fact, driving back from work through the mountains was a really good metaphor for how my life has been moving: I'm going too fast to be able to slow down on these winding roads. Like I just have to grin and bear it and focus. But if I let myself think about it, I will realize how panicked and scared I am about the world. I'm terrified. My life is careening. We're moving fast. I didn't know, I didn't know life could be like this. I didn't know the world could be like this in so many ways. I don't know...
I don't know that I have time to be afraid.
Previously, it was never truly safe for me to be afraid, because it's like, what if I froze? That's not feasible. I was dreaming of another life because I had no other options. It's kind of easy to stuff the fear down into like the back of your underwear drawer (metaphorically), when you don't have the option to do anything different. I don't really fault these instincts.
That's the therapist training in me. I'm never going to yuck your yums when it comes to coping mechanisms; they are what they are because they kept you safe at a point in time. And now I am an adult person who is conditioned to move as quickly as I possibly can. In work, in life, in every one of my projects, I am conditioned to move as fast as I reasonably can push myself because I don't know how to feel fear.
I don't have any coping mechanisms for what it feels like when I actually do need to feel fear, when it's a necessary thing. I don't know how to slow down. Realizing now that I'm sober way more often than not– shout out to God, truly– realizing that I don't know how to calm down without drugs and that's a problem. I am not trying to become my father. Which, if you're listening to this, well. I don't know what to tell you, Learning to feel fear in adulthood can be quite useful. I have a couple theses, and then I want to get into expanding them.
(1) Being lulled into comfort is the easiest way we dull our world making.
(2) Feeling like freedom is comfort is a great way to get co-opted.
(3) Freedom is not comfort. Freedom is bliss. Freedom is a comfort that is regenerative and rejuvenating.
All right, let's begin.
Being lulled into comfort is the easiest way we dull our world making.
I'm afraid– like I'm deeply afraid of what is happening to our collective psyches watching the genocide in Palestine unfold. I see Palestinian people in the comments of every video that I see online, every one of them somewhere, they are in the comments begging for donations to get out of certain death– or rather, certain suffering. Cause it's not guaranteed that you die at this point. What do you do when you're alive with half a leg?
What do you do with 11,000 US dollars when your family needs 80,000 to evacuate? What do you do? Just like continue in this halfway area between life and death? It horrifies me. I'm horrified watching them turn into social media marketers. On TikTok, many of them don't even outright ask for donations anymore. The videos that I used to see would say, please, donate, link and bio, we're line 602 on Operation Olive Branch, please. And now they don't even ask for money. They ask people to use their “sound.” That's the thing that you can do on TikTok to engage with the video because asking for money is less effective than asking for direct survival. It's too uncomfortable being directly responsible for whether someone or a family of someone's lives or dies.
Witnessing the above makes it very difficult to remain comfortable. And that particular phrasing, it reminds me very vividly of being in New York, living in Brooklyn, making friends with my homeless neighbors. Every single one of them, when they asked me for money, started with, I don't want cash. I just need you to buy me some food. Every single time they'd say, just, I don't even need the cash. I just need you to buy me some milk. And I would say, "I'd be happy to just give you the money. I'd actually rather just give you the cash."
And I would have to convince them that it would be okay, that I would still speak to them, that it wasn't going to be weird, but that there was no punishment for taking it. Marketing tactics. These are necessary marketing tactics. We're watching people under various genocides use marketing in media and in physical life to hope for their own survival.
That terrifies me. my God, that terrifies me.
People not caring about dying Africans, old or new world, that I'm used to, but I was really quite foolish in thinking that Palestine would be different. Because the world said that their heart bleeds for Palestine. Isn't that what we all said? Right?
And now I see these comments under videos and people just ignore them. Like they're wayward beggars, like they're scam. Like they're the spam porn bots that we see advertising their services on Twitter. We just ignore them in mass. It fucking frightens me.
My god. My god, I'm scared.
Feeling like freedom is comfort is a great way to get co-opted.
I don't like feeling stuck. I don't want war in my homelands. The United States is very obviously heading towards civil war and I'm frightened. And the obviousness of it feels like a dull headache. Like the kind of right above your eyes, the kind that you can't ignore. The kind that I have to drug myself out of feeling. I think it's gonna be worse than the Balkans here. I've been reading essays from people that lived in the Balkans when their civil war broke out, how people just flipped, how desperate people get when they're hungry. Hunger causes you to do crazy things. And so many American people have no idea what it is like to be hungry chronically. So many people here don't know what it's like to know your neighbors or have to rely on them for basic safeties. I have no idea what it will be like when inter/intra community violence breaks out here. It terrifies me. My god. My god. It terrifies me.
People believe in the state too much, in legality, in the idea that we will all have the same common ground, in the idea that the common ground that we lack now will suddenly appear when a crisis emerges. Do you know how people get when they starve? Do you know what you're prepared to do when you've been starving for weeks? It's slow motion stuck, right? Like watching COVID punch holes in our healthcare system, like fucking Swiss cheese, like maggots eating through a block of brie.
Do you know how desperate people get when their loved ones are dying and the healthcare system has collapsed?
I'm watching it in slow motion, like a dull throbbing headache. It directly conflicts with the desire to focus on what's directly in front of you to just focus on having a good day, a meager day. Freedom begins to feel like the comfort of ignoring mass death. Freedom begins to feel synonymous with comfort. And that terrifies me because it makes it so easy to get tired of the world. my God, I'm scared.
I am also very afraid to suffer. It beats me on, I don't want to die. I don't want to die. But I especially do not want to suffer.
I slammed my finger in a car door like two days ago. This was supposed to get out on Tuesday, but that was the day that I slammed my finger in a car door and was like, “Well, no more typing for the rest of the day." No more anything for the rest of the day. I was in so much pain that I couldn't sleep. It wasn't just the digit that got smashed. All of the fingers, all her sisters on my hand were singing out in agony about their smashed brethren. And it's just my finger. Like, it's fine. I'm all right. It's not broken, right? It's badly bruised. There's a gnarly blood blister, but it's not like the worst thing in the world. And I am up all night in pain, trying not to cry. I want to call my mom and complain to her. My mom has cancer. I don't got any business complaining to that lady about chronic pain.
I couldn't sleep because I kept thinking of my baba. He got tortured when he was a prisoner of war, fought in the second civil war in the United States, the one to establish the Republic of New Africa as a sovereign nation. One of the ways that they tortured him was that they ripped his fingernails out. They ripped the fingernails out his nail beds. I fucked up one of my nail beds and it hurts now. I can feel it throbbing. It's been days.
I fucked up one of my nail beds and I couldn't sleep. I have no idea what it would feel like to withstand that kind of torture for being a revolutionary and I'm afraid.
Joy James says something like, you know, our generation (I'm Gen Z, I'm 26), we get real caught up in freedom dreams. We get very excited, rightfully so, about what the world could look like. And she says, like, what do you do with these people who don't have dreams anymore because all their freedom dreams have been replaced by freedom nightmares? What do you do with these people that have survived 30, 40, 50 years of imprisonment, decades consecutively of solitary confinement?
What do you do with these people that have suffered because the dreams that they were as certain as you are, those dreams did not come to fruition and they got captured. What do you do? What is your security apparatus? Are you prepared for that?
This is where I get to a point where I need to learn to feel fear in adulthood. I need to learn to slow down. I need to learn when I feel afraid because it's a good thing to be afraid of things like this. It's a good thing to slow down and to feel how frenzied I am about the idea, not of death at this point, of suffering. I don't want to die in prison.
And there's a lot of different kinds of ways to die.
When the people that we talk about, the people that we advocate for and march for, the people that we study and read and uphold as heroes, when those people don't feel like heroes anymore or martyrs, when they just feel like people, you really begin to feel the fear. It's in your body because it is your body. You are not so far from them. From dying like that, from living like that, from suffering like that.
It's people taking amputations with nothing but a Tylenol in wars across the world. And I'm thinking about that as I'm up with my finger that got smashed. I cannot sleep. This pain is so real to me that it's making their pain more real to me.
One of the ways that living in the core of the empire– I haven't been back in the United States in a while. This place is trippy. One of the ways that living in the core of the empire softens you is that it isolates you from physical pain. We are all walking around assuming that nothing is going to befall our physical bodies. That's going to put us in any sort of acute or chronic pain, even though that's a lie. Okay. COVID is out in these streets. It will literally incapacitate you, but you know, we live in this constant state of delusion that that's the case. And when you haven't been in significant physical pain in years, when that's a condition that is begun to feel unimaginable to you, I can too imagine how people that are existing in places that constantly expose them to premature death, domestically and internationally, all at the hands of the state. I can imagine how that begins to feel like a far away circumstance, like something that happens to those people over there, like something that happens to martyrs or heroes. When you begin to feel that fear and that pain in your body, those people become people.
I don't like feeling distant.
What I am most afraid of is how quickly I can sink into apathy. How quickly months can just disappear from my memory. What was I doing? Why don't I know? Why can't I recall? How did my mind get wiped like this? I don't like feeling distant.
Some of the revolutionary advice came to me from Sekou Odinga and he wasn't even talking to me. He was talking to Afeni Shakur and she wrote down this sentiment when she was imprisoned as a part of the New York 21 when they were working on their collective autobiography. It's called Look For Me In The Whirlwind. It's one of my most favorite texts that I have read in general. And...
She said she was talking to Sekou. She said, you know, he was the easiest person to talk to, even though he was this, you know, amazing man, this amazing revolutionary. He would make you feel like your problems were as big as what he was handling with, the ward outers. You know what I mean? Like he was just he was just like that. And I can I can I can co-sign those statements.
She said that he used to tell her, you can't beef with your mom and love the people, because your mom is the people.
You can't be in a sustained state of disregarding your neighbors or your classmates or your cashier or whatever and then claiming to love the people. Those are the people. The same people that are reflected to you when you step outside or look around your family system or go to your library are the same people that you claim to love. You can't be with your mom and claim to love the people. You have to learn to coexist and be nice. That kind of stuff.
Freedom is not comfort. Freedom is bliss. Freedom is a comfort that is regenerative and rejuvenating.
It reminds me that there is nothing theoretical about what I'm studying. And there's nothing theoretical about what it is that I say that I want. It exists in the minutiae of every day. I can't afford to view these people that I love or that I study or that I learn from as gods or heroes or particularly distant or foreigners or aliens or whatever. Those are just people. And I love the people because I am just like that. I'm just like them. Loving the people as a mass too means loving the people that are right in front of you. Not just a nameless, faceless conglomerate of people that it's easy to project whatever ideals are convenient onto. No, the people that are also in front of you, not just the ones that have been thrust into the limelight and made into idols who are also easy to project your ideals onto. No, the people that are right in front of you, that are disagreeable and angry and malnourished. Do you love them enough to feed them emotionally, spiritually, economically, materially?
I also have to love myself enough to remind myself that I am the people. I gotta love myself enough to remind myself to catch myself up with my life and to feel all the fear properly because if I don't, I won't be able to remember things. get distant, I get apathetic, and I'm very frightened of the way that I tire with the world.
And that bit that Baba said, you know, loving the people means loving your mom. She is the people. Well, damn. I can't be beefing with this lady that gave me my flesh. You know: boundaries, communication, et cetera. But if I try and keep beef with this lady who wrought me in my flesh, it will rot.
Moms is not excluded from the people just because she has my headache on her speed dial.
Early conclusions.
my tea is cold.
I always do this. ismatu, you always do this. You get to running your mouth and then your tea gets cold.
Conclusions: actually, I'm afraid all the time. I'm afraid all the time. The last time that I remember actively being in my body was August of 2024. I disappeared into the mountains for like, two weeks. I learned about farming Navajo blue corn. I remembered what it felt like to be physically connected to the land that you stand on and to respirate and sync with it. I don't want to only dream of comfort.
This is how the empire buys us out. Puts natural ceilings on our dreamings such that we could never puncture through the realities that they've woven. And this is where fear comes into play. It becomes necessary. When you're dreaming of survival, you're dreaming to an end of your acute poverty, right? Food, water, clothing, shelter, education, sanitation, medical care, and time. Those are the big eight. You want to be rich in all eight. And that's what we imagine freedom to be, where you want for nothing.
If you're not careful, you will never get past this dream of comfort. Revolutionary dreaming should also frighten you. They should be scary. In fact, they should scare the shit out of you. Not just because of the high risk of suffering, but because of the natural fear of the dark. We come to a point where we must necessarily ask, this cannot be all there is. The maturity of my fear has gone from:
- being afraid and getting paralyzed to
- neutralizing the fear so that I can move to being able to make decisions while I am afraid and
- knowing that fear is a necessary part of being alive.
The evolutions of my dreamings have gone from:
- I must dream of something else because I can't stay here, to
- I've gotten to a point where I'm actually comfortable, but
- this cannot be all there is.
The border strip flickering on the ends of my film life are people burning alive in a material sense. People are burning to death. Burning alive for the breath of the empire to continue longer. And they are the people whom I love so much. It is so, so likely to be me such that I cannot ignore them, not a one. I'm also not happy being fake comfortable. It's easy to want the shiny comforts of the empire, the fuzzy comforts of the empire, the cheap, dull comforts of the empire, because they compel your eyes away from the death. And once you make fear a habit, a discipline, it sharpens you. It reminds you of what is left to lose and what is left to gain.
I don't have any strong ending points other than that. I wanna learn to be afraid well.
I hope you have a good night or a day or whatever time of listening to this and I hope that the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.
Sorry it's been so long.
peace. ig
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