Blue: Harmony

Welcome to another chapter in the PRIDE! Blog Series. 

June has most certainly been a month filled with transition; something I both live & thrive in and can't stand. I like to feel steady, centered, and balanced. When things change, I get a little shook. (Perhaps the living and thriving are my Sagittarius Sun & Libra Rising vibing with that energy, while the need to feel steady, centered, and balance can be attributed to my Capricorn Moon?)

We ended the distance learning school year at Great Oaks and I closed out my Year of Service! It was a lot, to say the least, to keep up and try and survive this year, but we made it through it. 

I'm thankful for the friends that became family that I had to say goodbye to this past month. Thank you for your presences in my life, for accepting and understanding me, and for loving me. 

To Cheyenne, Jazmine, Mercy, and Dahlia- I have missed your energies during these past few months that you haven't been with us! I miss walking into the 8th grade hallways and just seeing how y'all interacted with your kids. I miss y'all and hope you're staying safe and healthy.

To Shayna, Jessica, and Dianne- our goodbyes (but really "see you later's") were filled with such precious, cathartic, necessary tears. Thank you for proper closure to this version of our relationships and journey together. 

To Cherice and Shannon S.- GALS Imma see you! Don't be tripping. I'm LITERALLY in New Haven for FOUR years! If I goof up and forget to contact you because I'm so bad at it, call me TF out. But also, thank you for your continued passion for our kids. I'm excited to see y'all be leads next year!

To Roddy and Rebekah- thanks for signing a contract to stay stuck with me for two more months! I'm excited to see our work with the kids of the Urban Scholars Youth Summer Program (which started officially last week!) and I'm ecstatic to live with you for one more month and explore this city with y'all!

Also! I moved to New Haven a few weeks ago!

And my best friend turned 23. 

I wanted to go to PRIDE in NYC this year, considering my proximity... but that didn't happen obviously. :/

That's about all that happened this month. 

Blue: Harmony

Blue is the color of the Pride Flag dedicated to Harmony or Serenity. 

For this post I'm going to talk about what I felt like was a transformative time for me that, subsequently brought me into Harmony with much of the inner workings of my wholeness as well as places in my life in which I feel disharmonious and need to grow into still. 

Harmony

Some of the things I'm going to talk about in this part may seem a little repetitive for those that have read my October 2019 post "New Beginnings 2.0" and my January 2020 post "Red: Life" as well as those who have read or heard my God Forms Me With a Purpose talk that I gave for Emmaus back at Weekend #30 in November 2019. 

To talk about the harmonious parts of my existence, I have to touch upon the concept of Eras that I brought up in "New: Beginnings 2.0" 

Like I said in that post, I believe that I'm currently in a fourth major era of my life; a time in which I'm establishing a sense of home within myself and figuring out what the future has in store for me as well as continually loving myself more and more while learning about, and coming to terms with the more disharmonious parts of my being. For this post I'm going to be mentioning the transformations that I underwent between "Eras" 3 & 3.5"

I'm going to go into detail about how I believe my life circumstances have been God forming me with a Purpose between this post and the next. 

I'm going to talk about how I'm breathing life into all the parts of my being, because, I'm ready to explore and grow and live as fully me. I've been ready and I'm never going back to the false version of myself that I was before all of these transformative experiences. 

For those that knew me before Era 3.5, I don't apologize for being who I was and needing to grow into who I am now. I don't regret the messy relationships that I had with people because they helped me learn and grow. Some parts of me wishes the people that loved me before stayed along for the ride to see me grow and evolve. Without these losses though, I'm not sure if that would have happened. If you did stay, thank you. I appreciate your presence in my life.

During what I like to call Era 3.5, which encompassed my last two years of college, I made commitments to prioritize and love myself; something I'm still working on a lot and will always be working on. While this has been a mostly positive change, it has led to some feelings of disharmony in my subsequent lived experiences, as well (especially see the last part of Disharmony, below).

Many queer people might relate to this quote by @alexand_erleon on Twitter that I've quoted a few times in this blog and beyond: "Queer people don't grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we've created to protect us."

I think I started this process my junior year, the process of undoing and unpicking the false parts of myself. The transformations I experienced were me finally becoming the me I need to be. 

There were many things that brought me closer into harmony with myself that either occurred right before or during my junior year of college. 

One of the first things I did, when I decided to prioritize myself and my well-being, was to make a physical change by cutting off my dreadlocks. For so long, I believe my hair was a symbol of me hiding behind something in order to not be my true self. Additionally, it was a physical reminder of the many different things I chose not to take care of, for sake of ease. I didn't value my body enough to learn how to take care of my hair; I simply chose to wash it and let it grow however it wanted. 

I started seeing a therapist my junior year at my school's Counseling and Psychiatric services center. Seeing a counselor was a resource that was offered for "free" to UVM students and I finally took the opportunity to commit to bettering my mental health. At first, my journey in therapy was a lot of unpacking unhealthy friendships that I had with people that are no longer in my life, but as I've continued post-college, I've spent time unpacking some more heavier emotional traumas, like sense of abandonment and my family's mental health. I've felt extreme loneliness in multiple areas of my life and therapy has helped me address them as well as other emotional traumas that I need to unpack in order to be the best version of myself that I can be. 

I started my journey as a student activist during junior year. There was a proliferation of white supremacist messages on my college campus that specifically targeted people of color and the administration was not as responsive as we expected them to be. My blackness was not something that I explored in as much depth as I needed to, but since 81% of UVM's population is white, my blackness was made salient in the many microaggressions I experienced from peers and in the fact that I would oftentimes be the only black person in class, or, let alone, a group. These, and other worldly experiences have led me to be much more conscious of race and have helped me establish the knowledge that my lived experience as Black is valid Blackness, despite what others have tried to make me feel. 

Due to the lack of administrative action, student activists on campus, called NoNames4Justice, took it upon themselves to draft up demands of the administration and scheduled protests and rallies in public spaces to call attention to the wrongs being committed on the campus. I had the privilege of being an integral part in bringing the list of demands to my college's dean and subsequently helped to found a diversity and inclusion fellowship within the College of Arts & Sciences. Within me sparked a need to challenge authority and confront people on what I believe is wrong. I was affirmed in my abilities as an advocate for social change and have continued on my journey of being a critical, nonconforming, activist.

I restarted my blog during my junior year! I finally started writing posts that I think described my current life journey, relatable content for people that I know and love, and discussed deeper themes of identity formation and self-discovery.

I started my position on UPB and learned a lot about the type of program development and community building I enjoyed doing.

I grew through exploring religious education for the first time, and subsequently learned more about systems of power, oppression, hierarchy, and their histories. I found what I believe to be my actual life purpose through this education and through finally letting go of pre-med and neuroscience for my future. 

I transitioned from robot-like, no feelings ESTJ Jamal to all-feelings, all the time, and also still deep philosophical understanding and growth-focused ENFJ Jamal! The personality type I had for 6 years suddenly changed as a result of my sudden changes!

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, I came out publicly on Social Media in October of my junior year. I finally dropped the facade I had tried to keep up for so long; I finally let myself breath life into a part of myself that has caused so much inner damage and mess. I think that, once I allowed myself to be all of me, life was suddenly much more weightless. I'm thankful for the people that continue to love and support me through my journey of finding harmony within myself. I love you.

I believe that I'm becoming this person so as to better realize my life's purpose. I need to help others find their sense of identity and place in the world. Like I tell many people, I want to make meaning-making resources more readily available for marginalized youth, especially queer and trans youth of color. I want to provide the resources that could've helped me reach harmony much sooner in my life than I did. I want people to not have to fight so hard to learn to love themselves and to equip them with tools to find a home within and among themselves. I believe God is Forming me with this Purpose.

Disharmony

I think the part of my life that I felt has been the most disharmonious has been my struggle with body image. While I'm working on better and better ways to take care of my body and health, through the gym and working out, through analyzing and tweaking my diet, and through showing gratitude and praise to my body for the things that it is able to do, this is still something I need to work on. 

I haven't prioritized this part of my life as much as I've pretended to, as much as I would like, or as much as I should. I'm continuously learning and growing as I listen to my body and my mind more. I'm making smarter and healthier decisions, but overall, it's going to take much more time, energy, effort, and prioritization for me to have actualized changes. I've grown in my understanding quite a bit since my childhood, but there's still a long journey ahead. 

Another disharmonious part of my life I need to analyze and learn to sedate more and more is this overwhelming feeling of impostor syndrome. I've noticed myself receive compliments from brilliant friends that I've gotten to learn alongside or work with, and have seen myself shrink and not fully accept these compliments. There's always this inner voice warning me that the people in my life haven't seen all the sides of my being, and, if they did, they wouldn't be able to say these nice things about me. 

I need to realize that these are not true. 
I need to develop a healthier inner voice so that I don't let these feelings overwhelm and consume me. 

I think the most important part of starting this work for myself is realizing it and then, subsequently, analyzing the cause of those feelings. While these feelings have developed over time through how I view myself, I feel like they were further highlighted by my struggle through a major that I ultimately didn't like, or from my friend group that didn't reserve enough time or energy for affirmative statements, and, of course, from me not appreciating and prioritizing myself enough. I'm sure there are other, deeper reasons as well, but this is not the space for personal processing that I would like to be private, like in my therapy sessions. 

Related to this feeling of impostor syndrome is something that I've been feeling a lot more lately: the thought that the people in my life don't actually want me. I've found that, for a lot of my further away relationships, I'm frequently the one reaching out for some time in a video call, or I'm the one who has to drive the distance to see people, or I'm the only who reconnects with old friends from yesteryear because I think of them. I feel, oftentimes, that it's not the other way around. In many of my friendships I've felt like I fuel them with energy that I ultimately don't really have the capacity for, but use for the sake of maintaining that friendship. 

I don't reach out as often as I want to, for many reasons: I want to provide others with the opportunity to reach out to me; I don't want to seem too aggressive in my needs for human connection; I want to make sure that I'm living in the present and focusing my energy on the people around me, unlike pre-2017 me; lastly, thoughts crowd in with the fact that I'm ultimately undesirable and people are better off without me. 

I've talked about this with my therapist, and she has provided some thoughts on why friends might not reach out or fuel relationships with as much energy as I do. Some of these thoughts have been met with some of my own cognitive dissonance, most are helpful reminders for me to tell myself: I'm a person who has a lot of capacity for maintenance and the friends that I have may not; maybe they're just bad at reaching out; this is the first year that I've been out of college and visiting people in Burlington hasn't been possible since quarantine has started; quarantine is weighing on everybody's mental health; of course, my friend's lives don't revolve around worrying about my feelings of undesirability; lastly, disconnection happens- it's natural and normal and you can always catch up with people who love you less often than what may feel comfortable or than you would like. 

I've been spending some energy on deciding how much of this is a me-thing vs. a friend thing. I could be more communicative about these feelings with my friends and not just talk about it in a blog post that I hope they read. I should consider myself worthy and deserving of friendship and love. Maybe more work needs to be done on not feeling like I was the Common Denominator in the drama that occurred in my previous relationships AND/OR I need to further realize that I was a toxic contributor to those relationships, and I'm not that person anymore. Perhaps people were right and my standards and expectations for friends are way too high and that's why I'm so disappointed and exhausted all the time. Maybe I need better friends. There's a lot that could go into it, but I know the things that I can personally take time and energy and space to work on, think over, analyze, realize, and move-on from. I know these feelings aren't forever and I know that, one day, I will reach a better level of harmony with them. 

Until, and continually after, then, I'm going to keep loving, growing, and evolving, keep grounding myself, and keep sharing what I feel like I have to offer to others. 

Thank you for reading.