Pain as portal. Crip care. Interdependence.
I am experimenting with a different kind of birthday wish this year.
I have been sick a long while and I have been hiding it like a champ. I love being a champ and I thought being a champ would make you love me. Now I'm redefining champ– to coming out and opening up and allowing my needs to be here- and inviting community to support me. I am done stuffing my pain and my needs and my dreams.
One of the gifts that my Sickness has brought me is needs. I don’t think I would have found my needs or been able to honor them if it hadn’t been forced. In this process, I have learned that I can do a lot of things, but few things all by myself. I have been accepting that I need help with basic needs. And in this acceptance, I have found that creativity is a basic need for me. This year, I am holding this question: What if I nurtured my creative process like I nurture my other basic needs?
I feel a dream that feels like my ancestors' dreams that feels like the unborn ones living through me. It is a dream of making art and telling my story that is our story and finding myself (and our collective selves) in the process. Of liberating my story and other stories that have been bound up in hiding.
I am trying to name what I am dreaming into, because I know there is value in imagining it. It feels scary to name cause I want to allow the work to shape me as much as I am shaping it. To allow each of you to shape me as much as you shape the work. To allow for the collaborations and possibilities to emerge while following the threads that are tugging now.
I am envisioning a book, a performance, courses, speeches and grief ceremonies. Conversations and murals and threads of stories and art from so many of us that somehow weave together into a tapestry.
Love to you and thank you for being part of my web,
Xander
P.S. You can also find me on Instagram by clicking this button below.
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