(And don’t even get me started on what stripping did to my relationship with alcohol LMFAO)
Hello internet friends! It’s been a hot second.
Introductions
I want better for us than this. My cycles have become undeniable and untenable to me. (1) Carve out the work. (2) Bite off way more than I can chew. (3) Chew anyways. (4) Choke. (5) Burn the hell out. (6) Become overwhelmed with guilt and force myself into overdrive to make up for the burnout. (6 again, or 7, or 1) Carve out the work. Ad infinitum.
This May, I set the work out in front of me: spend the next four or so weeks talking about Mutual Aid and its importance to our collective movements. I knew it was too much ground to cover in four weeks. I knew that. But the alliteration! Mutual Aid May! ahhhh so cute I simply could not resist. And truthfully, I do so love impossible challenges. I love impressing myself. The only relationship I know with grinding and productivity is to move and push and soar until I crash-land. …Why…? am I only proud of myself when I’ve exhausted every facet of me? Why can’t I just… idk… work a normal…? amount? What even is that? Why don’t I know?
Anyways. Cute plans, lovely plans. Beautiful gowns. And then May happened and I had some family members in the hospital.
And then my cat needed emergency surgery too. Ha.
I was knocked on my fuckin ass to the point of necessary, steady, clarifying reflection. A come to Jesus moment on a deep breath in: Ismatu, you cannot work like you used to. You cannot. So. What now?
I’ve just moved to New York City in the first week of June. I thought I would pick everything right back up again after I was able to settle a bit. I landed at 7am on a Sunday and was greeted with a block party on day one, a police chase and arrest outside my door on day two, and apocalyptic smoke blanketing the city, rendering Outside unbreathable on day three. The way I said, “Ohhh! Okay!!” And sat my ass back down. With a swiftness.
I am learning to live in this body that no longer finds urgency a compelling reason to work. And that’s new. I am living in a body that is compelled by love (which germinates and blooms at a pace entirely uncontrollable). The work begins to be loving again because I really do love myself in the work(s); because my work(s) and the way I’ve gone about them have cost me so much of my sleep, and my time, and my sanity; because I… don’t actually know that all this needs to be so costly. This era in time presents the first opportunities of my life where I can set my own pace and output… and still I choose to work until I drop. I fall asleep sitting upright at my desk. Why? How do I engage in something slower and deeper-rooted? Something that suits this body?
Alright. With that being said.
an essay that was originally called, “learning to love myself without abuse.”
I am writing this on a Tuesday in June, and I won’t tell you the date because I am certain the time of posting is weeks after the fact. I already know these words will need a short season to soak in these pages. Hello. I’m happy to be here, drinking tea on the Brooklyn version of my Chicago porch. I am finding, as I settle into my adult body, this sense of unnegotiable slowness. Fully embodied. Sweetly unbothered. I breathe like it is a full-time job. This new body relates a lot more to my cat, by way of stretching and melting out on my good sheets, sleep-blinking at my timelines and my schedules. “Ah,” this body says. “Ah! It’s so refreshing, your earnestness. Order me around some more! It’s so fun!”She then giggles at me to my face, as if she can’t be bothered to spare the full laugh. I brew another cup of tea [today it’s pistachio with cayenne, honey, and cream] and I reach for a pen— the only work I like these days is written by hand and has time to settle well in ink. This body likes processes which requires me to slow the hell down and sound it all out. This new body shifts awake in waves, rolls out like molasses on a hot day: expansive and enjoying the process of seeing things stick to me. Absolutely nothing rushes this body. This adult body. I have never felt so young before.
I’ve written before on my relationships to my body and how abusive that relationship became working through graduate school. This is not new, quite honestly. Many eras of upbringing saw me putting myself through absolute peril— from the stressors of poverty to my own passive (or active) suicidalilty. Even the rigid gender performance that came with stripping felt physically painful once my time was up. This last era of corporal endurance was… pretty banana nuts looking back. Whole stretches of time where I had to move and go and not slow down: class to clients, clients to club, club to come home so I could spend all this frantic, creative energy making videos and watch my face be everywhere. Repeat. Sometimes I would be up for twenty-four hours straight. Thirty hours straight. Forty. Tits out, no sleep, skating through graduate school on cocaine and lip gloss and margaritas in class hidden in my Starbucks tumblr (allegedly) and still bag a 3.8 GPA. I would be proud of myself if it wasn’t for all the deaths I died while doing that.1 While this is extreme, it’s (like I said) not actually all that unusual for me. I have had the endurance necessary to navigate school + money work + creative work ever since I was driving home from closing shifts at Jamba Juice at 1am as a sixteen year old that had school at 7am and still wrote poetry before bed every night. This is just… what it took to survive well. This body stays surprising me in her unending will to survive, despite the world’s (and my own) best attempts. I have never actually known what it feels like to move slowly.
I guess, until now.
This current era, this one where I am sleepy as fuck in perpetuity and not grind grind grinding, is my body loudly snatching herself back from the wills of my mind. A body that I appraised in dollars and influence with calculated ease. A body that I pumped with substances— caffeine, alcohol, TikTok notifications, cocaine, sugar, weed, etc.— because they were the vices and negotiations necessary to excel in my day to day. She wants nothing to do with that shit. I am present in every day and languishing in what it feels like to be disappearing and inconsistent and mediocre.
Enter: the intensely sexual relationship I have with my own standards. I know that that sounds weird. “I kinda wanna fuck excellence ahah” I know it’s weird. I wrote about it here, in what is most definitely one of my favorite essays to date. Rereading it in this era of life where I cannot move as fast as I previously could highlights this obvious reality I have happily ignored: work is a vice for me too. All this sweat and discipline is just sex and desire and addiction by another name. I am (still) a workaholic. I use work to abuse myself and I call it good. I get so much praise for treating myself so poorly behind the scenes. I have trouble putting it* down.
*it being screens, drugs, champagne, the pen in my hand, right? Like. You get the picture. I am the same yesterday, today and forever: addiction to the performance of a job well done, addiction to the slow burn and release of collapse. Addicted, not all the time but often enough, to something that is killing me at a rate where everyone applauds. A candle burning herself out and everyone else enjoying the light and warmth. Oh, God. Was I always like this or did sex work and the Christian church fully turn me into a glutton for pain? That’s an entirely different essay. I digress.
The point is: I no longer have totalitarian control over this body that has such an endless will to endure. She has snatched herself back from the jurisdiction and the various addictions of my mind. I cannot assume punishing working conditions anymore because I will wake up from a mid-day nap having not even realized I fell asleep. This new adult body! She really not playing with me! New body. Slow body. Body that has completely lost a sense of time and space. Every day I plan for work and attempt to get myself to move move move! Grind grind grind! Every day she looks at me with a giggle-not-laugh and puts me to sleep in such sneaky ways that I don’t even realize I was knocked until after I’ve woken up.
In no particular order, here is what I am finding about learning to love myself with my work, sans abuse.
I am not motivated by money, I am motivated by community.
I am not motivated by money! AT alllllll at all at all. Do you know what I did with all my stripper money? Tip hundreds of dollars every time I went out to eat, which was multiple times a week. Stripping money was for balling out at the farmer’s market and for handing lump sums of indiscriminate bills wrapped in ones out to homeless folk and tbh ya it was a good ass life. But even so— if it wasn’t the monstrosity of capitalism outside my window every day forcing me into the club, do you think I would conflate sex and pleasure with productivity like this? Do you?? Good work would be what happens in my gardens, internally and literally. The kissing and blooming of trees and roots and flowers and fruits. We need to hurry up and read Zora Neale Hurston together as a group. “So this is a marriage!” type shit. Like that. Even here, with these paper rectangle things solidified by the white man’s imaginary determining shit like clean water and safe sleep, I cannot bring myself to do shit for the money. I am doing it for my family, so my elders can sit down, and so I can ice cream money for the little ones, and so that people that read me and write to me and hear these words, all of you that see and see and see me might feel less alone in this world. I need to be well enough to make art that keeps me alive. That is good work.
Find balance in honesty. This especially includes honest self-inventory.
Self-inventory, not appraisal. Instead of the question, “What is this worth?” One asks, “what am I made of? To whom to I belong?” Thinking of inventory, we mentally conjure things: a storehouse to be counted and accounted for. Largely intuitive when we think of inventory— an assessment of what’s present so we can begin to conceive of what happens next. That follow up question, not just what am I made of? What is here? but also to whom do I belong? may be less obvious to any newer readers. Hello, my name is Ismatu and I am an amalgamation of the people that build me. I cannot assess who or what or when I am, or even how I am, on a solely individual basis because I am not a storehouse I am a person. I must always consider my places of belonging and whether those are homes that suit me. I cannot work well and sustainability if I do not know intimately what I am working with, and for, and because of.
Learn slowly.
I truly do not say anything on the internet that does not apply to me personally. Ismatu you have to SLOW DOWN! I have the same educational traumas as the rest of us. I have desires to read all the things all at once and spew out information and be immediate and viral and effective… and none of that accomplishes anything I actually seek. Community. Steadfast kindness. A saving kind of love. Sufficiency sustainably and with ease. All those things require infrastructure, which means all those things happen slowly. I wrote this in my work journal and I’m compelled to share it with you all.
Do not create urgency.
Urgency is a lie of capitalism and honest self inventory mandates you tell the fuckin truth, even when said truth is inconvenient. Said differently: what I got to lie for? Nothing I do online is urgent. I could disappear tomorrow and the world still turns. I do this, I invite you into my intimate thinking spaces, my living room, my journals, because I like to and I have a love for the people who want something better. Love is not compelled by urgency necessarily, but by a will to act in the highest good of someone else. Sometimes, that is urgent. Most days, for you and me, we learn slow like the trees (and that is a good thing). And if we are to learn slow like trees, we have to be prepared to allow some space and time for ideas to root and germinate inside of us. The process of becoming unyielding and bending and in network takes many lifetimes. Urgency can be paralyzing rather than catalyzing. I don’t want to create senses of immediacy surrounding my work; I want to remind myself that there’s love on the other end of this screen.
Let love compelleth thy work.
I keep saying it, but maybe it will hit better if I cosplay as King James. I am grateful to be connected to a love for humanity that cuts me and steers me and blows the tears off my eyes and cheeks. I am grateful for love that is willing to kill me before letting me turn around. A love that compels me to the highest good of my children(’s children’s children), who may never know my name but may still may feel oddly compelled towards late-lunch cigars and honey with cream in strong, dark tea. Work means nothing to me without a blooming thing on the other side. My good enough bar without the love of the team is just empty performance.
Submit your mind to your body, Ismatu.
For ME in particular. I have had it backwards for so many years. I work like a bulll. When I set my sights on a task, a goal, a reality, I am insatiable. I am delirious and often delusional and nearly tireless. That is to say, my mind can be… quite unrelenting in my pursuit of whatever it is. My mind has an unsettling ability to turn into an overseer and exploit how much my body loves the work. I replicate the same abuses of work I have learned into my own private garden spaces and enact betrayals of the highest order. The same sort of harder, better, faster I engage with everywhere else. MY mind is alive as well and he will beat me but never kill me. My mind is not nearly as good at the business of loving as my body (who breathes for me, despite it all) and my politic (who will absolutely split my scalp clean in two).
[selah: a pause to consider the heights and depths of a passage]
Have we read Snorton’s Black On Both Sides in this group? That’s what I mean by body-snatching. This body that was designed by and for the work has snatched herself back to autonomy and laid her ass to wild-grown rest. She is truly, and freely, no longer convinced by his (my mind’s) bullshit. Accolades this. Metrics that. She warms a croissant in the toaster oven. I love this for her. I love this body.2
My elongating, softening self reminds me to use her as a conduit of the love for the works. My works are where I am most able to exercise the beauty of creation. To create something where there was once nothing is an extension of the divine. Creation is the greatest gift I think God ever gave us. Primordial thoughts into an essay, loose and tangled thread made poetry— ah. The glory of creation. Work is blessed. She [my body who breathes] reminds me to use her as a conduit of the love it takes to compel good works. My body requests to be used as a conduit of working love and a conduit of loving works. No abuse or overseer required. Or allowed. My mind bends now to the breaths of my body, not the other way around. I have an elder cousin + we were on the phone. She just reminded me of a Krio phrase which means, you’re thinking with your head too much. “E pikin, bodi balans. Body balance.” Balance the weight of your body with the weight of your mind— and you have so much more body than mind.
I have to allow the work(s) to bloom outside of me.
Another kind of submission— that which allows people to take pieces of me and run with what they need. I have spent my life terrified (!!!) of the internet because I was (am) afraid of perceptions that I can’tshape. It requires a certain level of trust to give yourself like this and trust that people will find you generative and lovely and not use your words or your ideas or likeness to be vile and poisonous. And the latter still happens; there’s nothing I can do about that. Most especially, I am afraid of being made into things I am not in the minds of folks I will never know. It’s why I avoid social media my whole life (up until 23, when I had a friend run an Instagram account for me). And all my fears… essentially came true! In truth, it’s better this way. I needed an ego death.
Allowing my work to be taken as needed rather than as I want it to happen has forced me to decouple love from understanding. Whatever plant blooms within you, internet friend, from all these seeds I scatter into the noise— good. Now there are bits of me that belong to you entirely and that’s that. It does not need to make sense to me; I am not the point. The work was always meant to bloom however the work pleases. I am finally coming to accept that all of this is bigger than me and the work is a blessing because of the public, not in spite of it.
Conclusions
I am only as able as this body and mind allow me to be and I do not want the see the expansion of myself as financial opportunity. I am so done with the constant process of appraisal. I want to look at myself one day, mind and body and all tenses and stages of me associated, and not thing about being marketable, or consumable, or understood. I don’t know that I will live to see that day but I do know that I can take myself off the auction block of self-appraisal now, as I write to you.
And also, I bring these commitments and revelations to you not just because I hope it is helpful, but because I hope it acts as a better, more robust form of consent. We’ve entered into expectations with another with this work: I produce blooms and you take what you will. I want to reach a place of consistency that is comfortable and sustainable and not costing me so much— which means I also need to be kind to myself in the work and communicative with you all about what that means for me. I treat my online spaces as an extension of my journaling. I am unfolding and languishing, learning and leaping and flying in real time. I do not wish to hide from we who care for me, however parasocially. Some think, when I say things like this, that I must lack strong boundaries. Despite how much I share, I assure you: my boundaries are alive and solid. Promise you. I do think that I have a unique ability to be expansive in authenticity— I can let many folks, most I will never meet, in to see and touch these soft places on me and we are all made better. If I am for the people, that means I, in part, belong to the people. I must also be touched and changed by the people. You all touch me and leave a mark and I am left with deeper and wider tastes of the world. This process of sharing and of being changed— it makes me better.
And so: thank you for reading. And hearing and seeing me, what have you. Engaging with this space, this work, compels the love I have to expand. It drives me towards the divinity of creation. And for those of you that have pledges dollars to this work— thank you for allowing me to buy back my time such that I can find myself on the tip of my pen. And it also allows me to provide free + reduced cost counseling services to those that request it. Thank you. Bless you.
There was a version one (I call it the Taylor’s version of this same essay lol) that is available on the close friends tier of Threadings. So if you have a few doubloons to spare a month, you can read it <3
I will be kind to myself in the work of today and I hope you will be too. I bless your hands and feet. As I, as always, hope that the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.
Ismatu G.
[a post script from the essay reading: I always am filled with so much peace after I finish these. Sometimes it can feel difficult to convince myself that I’m on the right tack and that there are people that listen to this and think that it matters. But right now I feel in the moment that I feel like it matters. Thank you.]
Sorry i didn’t remember to record the jazz songs of this essay :( this is an incomplete list:
Hour of Parting x Sun Ra
Send In The Clowns x Pat Martino
Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs
Cicada Season x Fuubutsushi
Why, Buzzardman, Why? X Alabaster Plume
Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis
The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Turpentine x Alabaster Plume
Tenkou Why Feel Sorry x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
and I will never be proud of Starbucks merchandise, fuck those mangy ass union-busty crusty elbows c-suite executives.
If you do not typically listen to the essays, i am beggingggggg you to do so here. The way I read this sent me into a fit of giggles when I listened to it back. Timestamp 22:19
a former stripper, current workaholic finds balance.