Practicing What I Preach: Taking Care of Self in a World That Ain’t Gonna

My refrain for the past few weeks has been “I’m tired.” Sometimes I don’t make it that far, to pretty enunciation and solid declaration. It’s “I ti-ud” or “I’s tyyyed!” Words start at a breakneck pace and then they slow to a death crawl across my mind, wondering if they’ll ever hit a page before my lids seal shut. The words gossip among themselves, wondering if any of their ancestors ever hit a page or a writing space. Then “I’m tired” — the Godzilla phrase of Word Town — chomps down on each syllable and purees the gibberish into my dreams.

It’s hard lately for me to read the news. The articles and alerts devastate me. Sometimes there is an event that calls for Rapid Action Now and I am too busy watching Tiredzilla chomp up all my opinions on what’s happening, until Tiredzilla becomes a huge gelatinous blob of disinterestedness. Tiredzilla and I have rediscovered the soma that is television. We like watching whole seasons at a time and making snarky comments at the characters. Tiredzilla and I wish Heroes weren’t so bad nowadays, for example.

Sometimes my sisters try to trick me into writing by being their clairvoyant, funny, and creatively erotic selves. They catch me in fits of conversational pique, and say, “You should write that! You should blog that!” And I declare in that moment that I will. I will! The trumpets blast; the drums roll… and then I get tired again. Because there aren’t many different words I know. I should read the dictionary, maybe pit Tiredzilla against Thesaurus for some epic dinosaur battles. Hmm… but Thesaurus is made of words. Tiredzilla wins. Hi Sylar.

I think I wrote to feel as if my thoughts had meaning. And they do; I know they do. But I initially started writing for validation outside of the law school environment. I rebelled against the institution trying to rewire my brain; I don’t think linearly. I don’t proceed in straight lines. Everything about me curves and contours — my body, my voice, my spirit, my energy. The lines and branches sapped my strength. But now that I’m out of law school, finished the bar exam, and can practice law — I feel like I slept through something important. Some life-changing moment that would define where to go from here got buried in blog posts and now it’s being consumed by an overbearing dinosaur word-eating beast named Tiredzilla. With the new year happening all around me, every second and keystroke and breath disappearing into the past, I realized I had to step into the future consciously. The past would not leave me if I stopped fixating on it.

So I started with confession. I created a private space and I started confessing truths to myself, crying as the sheets of denial fell away and I was facing a very naked and tired me. I still have a lot of confessing to do, and I know myself well enough to confess and to contemplate in moderation. But once I started pointing out to myself where I felt strongest, what actions made me feel weakest, what great and painful events shaped the better part of me — well, it made Tiredzilla want to ease up on some of those words trapped in its jaws.

Then I decided I wanted to move my body more. Tiredzilla likes beds of vocabulary and syntax; the dinosaur is slothful. Surrounding itself with its food and wrappers of justification for being so out of it and fragile — I didn’t like that. My habits and Tiredzilla’s habits began to merge until I was one sleepy woman full of half-chewed thoughts and epiphanies, bordering on being less of a philosopher and poet and more of a raving conspiracy theorist. So I pushed myself out of the reclining position and looked around for ways to exercise. I reassured myself: it takes three weeks to form a habit. I’m on the early part of week two, where I’ve been drinking 8 glasses of water a day, exercising three times a week, and keeping track of what I eat and how it makes me feel. (Today, I think a new salad made me sick. Whee.) I lost my mind with happiness when I lost one pound after the first week — can you imagine? How crazy would Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers commercials be if Kirstie Alley or Queen Latifah stood there extolling the loss of a single pound?

But since my goal was one pound a week, I felt ecstatic. I’m still moving on that little high, and I want to remember it so that if I hit a week where I feel upset or disappointed with the world, I can remember there’s something inside of me that is capable of working just fine and doing something wonderful.

During calorie counting, I lost my mind over a McDonald’s meal I ate. 1000+ calories for a burger, some fries, and a soda?! It was literally as if I’d never heard of Supersize Me or any of those news magazine stories that clutter my daily life. I then went to tell everyone I knew about my newfound fast food trauma, and they stared at me as if the burger made me grow three heads. “They’ve been saying that forever; where have you been?” I don’t know where I was before; but now I feel how disgusting that is. It’s like the double cheeseburger hooked onto a nerve ending and pinched the living daylights out of me. I got bullheaded. There has to be better ways to live.

My next step is to start reading again. I wish my book list weren’t so heavy; however, I need to revive my critical thinking chops with some fresh meat. Tiredzilla won’t appreciate the deluge of heavy concepts; it’s the equivalent of being overtaken by a gaggle of F16s. But my exhaustion can’t run the show forever. I’m taking a long period to learn how to rest, to study the movements of my hips and the rise and fall of my chest as I breathe, to laugh at silly things and smile at small children. It’s as important as the Rapid Action Now moments to my existence, and yet… not quite so draining and saddening.

I want to return to Rapid Action Now with a mind, body, and spirit capable of Rapid Action. So now I understand all that stuff I told people about allowing themselves to be. And it does feel good. Wow.

I’m learning not to speak unless I really genuinely have something to say. And I guess what I wanted to really genuinely say here is I love myself so that I can love you. Fully and deeply.

sans accoutrements, s’il vous plait

So on Tumblr, someone posted an abstract of a book titled Conspicuous Compassion:

We live in an age of conspicuous compassion. We sport empathy ribbons, send flowers to recently deceased celebrities, weep in public over murdered children, apologize for historical misdemeanors, wear red noses for the starving, go on demonstrations to proclaim ‘Drop the Debt’ or ‘Not in My Name.’ We feel each other’s pain. We desperately seek a common identity and new social bonds to replace those that have withered in the post-war era – the family, the church, the nation and neighborhood. Mourning sickness is a religion for the lonely crowd that no longer subscribes to orthodox churches. Its flowers and teddies are its rites, its collective minutes’ silences its liturgy and mass. This book’s thesis is that such displays of empathy do not change the world for the better: they do not help the poor, diseased, dispossessed or bereaved. Our culture of ostentatious caring is about projecting your ego, and informing others what a deeply caring individual you are. It is about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish. And, as Patrick West shows in this witty but incisive monograph, sometimes it can be cruel.

My first instinct after reading was yes, let’s have this conversation. Let’s do this. There have been some great and incisive writings about this point from Mai’a, Blackamazon and Sarah.

I am a thinker. I’ve never made a secret of my thoughts unless I felt it necessary. But that’s my main contribution to the world: I think. And when I feel it prudent, I think out loud. I synthesize. That’s what I enjoy.

But the question isn’t what I enjoy; it’s what I do with the thoughts and the synthesis for those around me. There’s a difference between telling people I am thinking and letting people have the benefit of my thoughts — giving them something tangible to manipulate, process, and exchange with me. If I deny that to anyone, I am not what I represent myself to be.

Too many movements hand out stickers, set up t-shirts and ribbons, prepare kitschy bumper stickers and pithy rhymes for a cause, and convince us that taking a few minutes out of our days or scraping the extra change out of our pockets can help change the world. But these organizations are not doing much to make us aware how fucked up it is that if we spent an hour, a few days, or even some months actually thinking of our actions and putting them to work for others, we could probably pull ourselves and our world out of a lot of fucked up situations.

How much would you risk to help another person? If your only claim to standing for something is wearing a costume, then congratulations: you’re a person in a costume! In our hyper-individualist society, we’re told that if it’s not about us personally, we should not have to care. If we potentially endanger ourselves helping another person, we’ve already given too much. If we try to help and wind up hurting people by accident, then society tells us it’s more prudent that we never act at all. But what is activism without risk of breaking something, of looking foolish, of getting something a lot worse before making it a lot better? Since when is changing your clothes or creative phraseology the equivalent of confronting jail, confronting death, confronting social isolation in the spirit of something you believe in?

The question is not if you had five minutes/red clothes/a new energy or space saver/more places to put your plastic/100% recycled paper goods, would you use it to save the world?

The question is if you had to act without the accoutrements, would you act or turn away? Would you make the workings of the world your business to mind constantly and actively?

And while it’s easy to say “yes” to that question, the difficulty lies in the doing.

No, it’s the stereotypes.

I’ve been trying to write a review of The Princess and the Frog for the past couple of weeks. Each version becomes more stilted, more labored by Overarching Disney Analysis and my attempt to create a Disney magic grading rubric. Draft after draft was disposed, and my ambition to write something that could make me some money if it sounded semi-coherent just went out of the window. Forget what you heard: I cannot write for money without running my brain through a sausage-maker a bunch of times. And that’s too painful.

Blackamazon finished her review on The Princess and the Frog, and I drank it in after a harrowing viewing last night of the 3D disaster Avatar. And while I agree with her that Disney lost a fatal amount of the magic and the enchantment it needed in telling Tiana’s story, I don’t agree that it wasn’t a simple problem of stereotyping.

There are many ways stereotyping can hinder a narrative and people in media; I’m going to focus on two.

The first type of stereotyping is when you have a narrative with characters two-dimensionally locked into a finite space and time of performance rituals depicting other people’s projections on their lives. KFC’s Australian commercial, for example, shows this two-dimensionality. West Indian cricket fans are not excited fans; they are a dancing, raucous nuisance around a white Australian cricket fan in a bitter sports rivalry. So what does the white guy do to make things feel less “awkward”? He gives the other fans fried chicken and declares the solution “too easy.” We know how brown-skinned people love fried chicken, anyway. Let’s make it a cross-cultural reinforcement. In this stereotypical portrayal, a sternly-worded letter to knock it off would go a pretty long way. West Indian people aren’t people; they are a narrative device. Create a new commercial where they have more agency and more of an identity beyond receptiveness to chicken, and there may be hope.

The second form of stereotyping is when you give characters agency, you give them dimensionality, and you give them promise. But you create a world for them that is so stifling and resistant to that expression that their choices become caricatures of three-dimensionality. A shared critique of this movie I’ve seen is people expected more than what they received. As Cee-Lo put it, why is this my life/is almost everybody’s question.

Disney, when choosing magic or politics as a priority for its film, chose politics. Politics, unlike magic, leaves little room for dreaming beyond the bounds of your life. You’re stuck with dreaming beyond the bounds of your position in life. Politics binds people in reality even as they crave surreality.

Disney placed its first black princess in a series of boxes and shuffled her among the boxes and called it magic. Tiana was a black woman with a dream of fulfilling her father’s dream, in a community with clearly defined places in society for people like her to occupy, with her preserving a loyalty to this world she occupied because she knew no other world that gave her enough love and wonder. When Disney tried to match the dream in Tiana’s head with a gospel-inspired, supernatural call to “find out who she is” even while she occupied a frog’s body, Tiana defaulted to deciding to work even harder to show people her brand of political magic when she returned to humanity. I viewed that portion of the movie as Disney’s way of saying that trying to elevate Tiana to its idea of magic and wonder would be a waste of time because the black audience would pick it apart and say to do better. Disney only let Tiana return to the human world — her world — after completely killing her dream of independently creating her own fairytales.

But seriously, as black women, what else can we do? We are agents of our desires, whether we like to admit it or not. When we want wonder and magic, we pour it into work or dance or family or song or church or store coffers or beauty shops. We pour our desire for magic into our surroundings, with the expectation whatever we receive can be gold-washed into proving ourselves right about having a full-bodied place in a world that enjoys making our existences as thin and flat and simplistic as lines on a sheet of paper.

Disney spent the whole movie telling Tiana that her world is not good enough for her or for a Disney-bred audience. Tiana would have to seek a solution with a prince so she could be a princess, even if that prince could promise her nothing beyond his identity as a prince. Tiana would have to understand that the magic of Disney’s world goes beyond the magic of her mind. Its story confronted her instead of enticed her; it fully imprisoned her instead of letting her escape for a while to see if she’d go back. Disney’s political magic was you take what we give you or you take nothing at all. She took what they gave even though it completely transformed her wishes, and Disney gave her back her world back plus what she thought she lost forever in the political realm.

And well, that’s just not fair to black women. We have enough portrayals about how we can’t relax, how we let our dreams get in the way of relationships, how we should settle for whatever we’re given wherever we happen to be. Did Disney really need to add to that list? Disney didn’t spend time stereotyping black women. It spent its time stereotyping the worlds black women occupy so we had no way out but through.

We saw Tiana’s foil in Charlotte, a white woman who drank fairy tales like water and surrounded herself with a collage of myths and fanciful stories in a world where everything else was simply given to her. But the one thing she was not was a bona fide princess, and she’d kiss one million frogs if she could achieve royalty. She, unlike Tiana, realized that marrying a prince signified a promotion in political and fairy tale world. And with that awareness, Disney decided to let Charlotte try to be Tiana and Prince Naveen’s benefactor. Fortunately, Disney did not let that come to fruition; that kind of twist would be a politically-charged tragedy. But significantly, it also did not allow Charlotte to be transformed into a frog along with Tiana and Prince Naveen.

So to conclude, the problem with the movie was not the absence of magic. Disney put its magic to whisking away overt racism and the stereotypes of being mystical and soulful in the capital of mysticism and soul: 1920′s New Orleans. The problem was that Disney refused to center a black woman’s magic and spirit in a story crafted specifically for her and in a place that would permit that magic to thrive. Disney slapped us down and told us to remember the impossibility of black princesses in the first place, so we’d appreciate it when they figured out a way magically to make the enterprise work politically. We were robbed, y’all. We were robbed.