052. Releasing the Burden of Being Complicit In Our Own Suffering

For The Worldbuilders

I too, have put more value in the things that hurt because suffering is familiar. I know her. I know suffering. And I have plenty of evidence that the shelter of suffering has kept me safe, kept me “out the way”. But at what cost? There is rent for living underneath the shelter of suffering. As with everything, there is a sacrifice. The cost was often my inner child who needed me to tend to her wounds but I couldn’t bear her pain so I just kept looking away. The cost was often my body which needed my attention, my care, my tenderness, my grace but was often treated as a liability instead. The cost was often my dreams that needed my power, my protection, my faith but seemed too wild to be safe, too pleasurable to count on, too gooooood to be true.

I just want us to consider, if only for this moment, how exhausting it is to be in perpetual disbelief of our power.

• Download Syllabus or Register for Workshop (Syllabus Included) Here: https://www.seedaschool.com/treehouse
• This Week’s Newsletter: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance
• Sojourner Truth artifact: "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” (1864)
• Karen M. Rose’s post on the Cancer New Moon
• Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
• “Creative life of refusal” is language borrowed from Alexis Pauline Gumb’s essay “The God of Everyday”
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• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠@seedaschool
• Cover Art: Augusta Savage with her sculpture Realization in 1938. Collection of The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center. Photo: Courtesy of CCS Bard. I came across this photo after/at a talk given by the curator Nana Adusei-Poku presenting her research on “Black Melancholia”. “Black Melancholia pushes beyond the iconography of melancholia as an art historical subject and psychoanalytical concept to subvert highly racialized discourses in which notions of longing, despair, sadness, and loss were not only pathologized, but also reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. The exhibition aims to create a generative space for inspiration, solace, and refuge through a presentation that blends new and recent works with pieces from the late 19th to mid-20th century by artists whose careers never reached full recognition or potential during their lifetimes due to systemic erasure.” — CCS Bard