Practicing Presence
I choose life now.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means I must everlastingly seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and contempt that surrounds and permeates my identity, as a woman, and as a Black human being, in the particular world of ours. It means that the achievement of self-love and self-respect will require inordinate, hourly vigilance, and that I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most certainly transform the experience of all the peoples of the earth, as no other movement can, in fact, hope to claim: because the movement into self-love, self-respect, and self-determination is the movement now galvanizing the true, the unarguable majority of human beings everywhere…. In short, if the acquirement of my self-determination is part of a worldwide, an inevitable, and a righteous movement, then I should be willing and able to embrace more and more of the whole world, without fear, and also without self-sacrifice. — June Jordan, Where is the Love?
I used to wish my life away.
One of the very first moments I remember lying at the altar crying to the God-I-knew to rescue my family from homelessness. The pain of facing eviction again strung three chords in the pit of my stomach that rang out as teenage-pitched guttural cries. A kind praying woman rubbed my hair and said everything will be okay. God’s going to fix it. A few days later, as I rubbed a Dollar Tree knockoff of Japanese Cherry Blossom lotion underneath my arms (as a substitute for deodorant and a shower), I wondered when the “fixed” future would come. The present involved sleeping on some kind praying woman’s floor wearing her child’s old clothes. Required figuring out how to explain why I came to school in those clothes again, smelling like this again, staying after school again to do my homework. (And the answer is easy: there was other work to be done at “home”). My life in the present necessitated that I practice waiting for the God-fixed future in which all of His plans would come to pass, or else I would not survive.
When my family eventually settled into the house where we would live during my high school years, the longest stretch we stayed in one residence, I still found reasons to wish away the present. My hair was too short, too unkempt. I still wore hand-me-down clothing. I could not do the things my friends could do. I had too much body that needed to be shamed and concealed. Pinballing between church, school, and home, I perfected the practice of wishful waiting. My prayers revolved around the one day the good things promised to me would come to pass: prayer and promise were brief antidotes to the deep pain and trauma I experienced.
I practiced waiting in every aspect of my life, fixating on a future in which everything would be better. My relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners would be characterized by my patience. I always had a knack for seeing people for who they could be, as opposed to who they were in the present. At the time, I called it “walking in love,” an exercise in seeing how far my mind could take the present pain and transform it into God’s will for my life. My prayer was to love unconditionally like the God-I-knew, made real through suffering, hardship, service, and sacrifice. I figured that giving what I could(n’t), when I could(n’t) would bring that promised future closer to the present. This way of thinking invited abuse and mistreatment into my life, as I abandoned myself in search of future-fixed love.
Even after college, as I released my faith in the God-I-knew, my waiting discipline remained strong. Encouraged by what this world tells Black women they deserve, my work and my relationships (to others and to myself) reinforced my need to wait for fulfillment. Everything and everybody else almost always came first. My ability to dissociate from my own needs and emotions–and then deny them–felt so innate that I could not even touch joy without someone else’s permission.
Because I had never really been attuned to the right here and right now, I was not in a place where I could recognize in the recesses of my mind and in the memory of my body when I was no longer suffering. My body and mind had been programmed through trauma to maintain a hypervigilance that transformed into anxiety over what I could not control. Though my adult life was becoming much more stable, I could not accept that. My hyperfixation on the future–a toxic hope that things would have to get better–numbed me to the pain (and promise) of the present.
By the end of summer 2021, I had lost a student to suicide and my father to cancer. I ended a romantic relationship that brought a deeper understanding of my queerness and a friendship that I cherished. I grieved my relationship with my mother. The foundation of who I believed myself to be was shaken and broken apart. The ways I had learned to survive– to be independent, to be “totally” self-sufficient, to meet every one of my own needs, to be the one others depend on, ask for nothing but give everything, work work work to prove that I am acceptable–did not help heal my grief. Forced to sit with my pain, I considered how my wishful waiting denied me the ability to accept others as they are. My relationships, my work, and my body all being “good enough” was relegated to a time I could never reach, though I was surrounded by all the love and resources I needed.
How much love, care, and joy did I deny my loved ones because I could not be present with them? How much of my exhaustion and frustration with them was caused by my own inability to be present? The nights that I cried myself to sleep, those days burdened by a deep depression, how much of that was because I put the gift and responsibility of loving me onto people and institutions who only had the capacity to care in my imagination? In other words: How can I love you, right here and right now, when I can only see what you could be? How can I love me, right here and right now, if I can only see what I could be?
Forced to rest in the here and now, I reckoned with all the ways I had denied myself love, safety, and joy by shrinking to fit others’ expectations. I denied myself the space to expand and live in my fullness because my discipline of wishful waiting required that I resist the truth: if a relationship, a friendship, a person, or a job can only be good to me in an imagined future, that must mean it is harming me now. I don’t have to accept love that only feels and looks good in my imagination. I no longer choose to suffer for love or for the promise of a faraway Heaven. I no longer rest my hopes, my life, and my being into a future that would never come.
How can I create a life that I don’t need to escape from? How can I choose that life right here and right now?
I start by practicing presence, embracing that I am lovable as I am, right here and right now, even when others’ actions do not align with that truth. When others do not choose to do right by me, I can choose me and divest from the person, place, or thing that causes me harm. I can reject the centuries-long conditioning that my ability to endure suffering somehow corresponds to my worthiness. Practicing presence requires me to acknowledge how I am feeling and to make space for my needs, wants, and desires. I reclaim my life and my love from spaces that require self-sacrifice. I can no longer deny when I harm someone else by not seeing them as they are, even when I am well-intentioned. I no longer believe that love is so scarce that I must push others outside of their capacity to love me.
Living under the anti-black capitalist imperialist ableist cisheteropatriarchies that structure our current world is only possible through the discipline of wishful waiting. We ignore present suffering as we pursue the promise of a blissful capitalist future. Surviving in this system requires that we abandon ourselves and each other while waiting for some person or governmental entity to save us. How would we change ourselves and our world if we embraced the present? How might practicing presence allow us to see the world we desire is not coming soon, like some Messiah, but here, realized in the way we treat ourselves and each other? How would our lives change if we made more room for ourselves, right here and right now?
Practicing presence allows me to make more room for myself in the midst of a world that has determined that I only have space underneath some man’s foot or at the receiving end of someone’s gratuitous violence. In the present, I find peace and joy and pain and excitement. My life no longer becomes a thing to be hoped away but a place where I find myself loved and whole.
There’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here and right now. Or in the paraphrased words of beloved Luther Vandross: “Here and now, I promise to love [myself] faithfully.”
Note: Thank you, dkéama, for your illuminating writing on discipline vs. diligence that has informed my thinking. You can subscribe to their newsletter, returning to the source, here.
