What is love? A question that has plagued my existence since I was a child.
I was told “I do it because I love you” then proceeded to get lied to, yelled at, beat and yelled at some more. All of which derived from this creature love.
Mother did her best with the dingy platter of a childhood she was handed. Pure silver, never shined, and started with a gun to the head and ended with a day at the park. Hampton trips and drug fueled weekends. I’m certain “I do it because I love you” was the unspoken understanding to the trauma of her youth. Generational trauma. I’m the physical form of it.
I’m the walking, talking testimony of brokenness that gets swept under the rug of forgiveness. Never cleaned. It all starts with my lack of understanding within the confines of love. Women, drugs, men, lies and, for the very first time in my life, unspoken truths are ways I tried to navigate this blurry experience of love.
Honesty is hard to come by nowadays. It’s easier to pretend the world is not crumbling around you brick by brick, or body by body, from viruses to natural disasters spanning throughout the world. We are fighting against the current of mother nature and I feel it’s because we never loved her enough in the first place. We took advantage of her beauty and never considered what she wanted.
We are all reflections of this love we sometimes do not have the capacity of providing because like me, we are told experiencing pain is what love is. I’m not quite sure where this somewhat universal perception of what we must endure to know love is real came from but over the last few months I found my way of breaking it apart. Those that have experienced generational trauma and want a change are tasked with breaking it apart. The generations before us didn’t treat our world kindly enough for it to recover from destruction but I hope this generation will fight until their last breath to give us a little more time. This is juxtaposed to generational trauma and love because if we are taught how to be better than we can do better, it’s taken many years for me to understand this and has shaped me in unimaginable ways.
Unspoken truths are the stepping stones to disrupting the status quo of it all. When we are honest with each other, about our feelings, intentions and experiences we take an unmeasured risk, but without that risk there bares no potential for reward. To break apart the generational trauma I hold, a risk is exactly what I took. I spent many years as a child not speaking up. I can hear my aunt in my ears saying “close mouths don’t get fed” constantly, because I failed to express my deepest troubles and would have rather faced punishment than be truthful. How could you possibly explain pain some may not have endured and you could not understand yourself? Instead of speaking up, drug-fueled weekends, weekdays, any day felt better than feeling too deeply or speaking my truth. With drugs came sex at a young age because I felt that was all I could give anyone. I felt my words, my voice, did not matter. If I wanted to say no, it would stay stuck in my throat. I would cry in the shower, in my closet, anywhere that I could not be heard completely. I attached my mind to the idea that if true love existed then maybe when I’m old it’ll happen, but I felt less than worthy and in turn placed my brokenness in innocent people. They became the casualties to my own self-hatred. This is not all a sad story though. If it were not for this, or my mom telling me her truths, I would not have been able to dig myself out.
With truth comes the greatest responsibility to convey it in a way that could be universally understood. I see it this way: If the person who oversaw our country was truthful, proactive and cared about the state of our world, then some things could have been avoided. We could have potentially prevented what feels like the millionth surge of COVID. Climate change would have been a priority and pandering to capitalism would be on the back burner. Truths could have broken this indoctrination that we must endure the worst of it to know what the sun feels like. Although this happened for me, I could have avoided many obstacles if when someone asked me what’s wrong, I would have said “everything” and allowed dialogue in my sadness and troubles. I, as the world, did not hold enough love for my mind, heart, body and soul, where I was housed 24/7, and therefore I did not have the tools to avoid the heartache or destruction.
I found love in my reflection. Love is the way I nurture my body, mind, soul and spirit. Love is not giving anyone but myself the power to disrupt my peace. Love is crying when I need to and remembering who I am when my tears have dried. Love is letting go of what hurt you and looking at yourself as the world and the world as yourself, doing your best to disrupt the generational trauma of this land and your blood. Love is a journey, it’s not a race, it’s not even a marathon. Love is knowing there is no end, simply beginning again and as much as you need to. Love is knowing you are worthy of the sun, no matter what. Love is conversations with the moon and holding no expectations of the tides.
