My Why: Figuring Shit Out All On My Own
Fuck I’m bad at that question.
So, I started this business to try to support people in my communities and people who want to support people in my communities. All the time, especially when talking about business type shit (like marketing and “content pillers” or whatever) people talk about “what is your why”.
I sometimes have a hard time nailing down just one why. It’s not something easily wrapped up into a cute little saying. Very few things about my life as a multiply marginalized person can be wrapped up into a cute little saying and as this business is in a lot of ways focused on finding the nuance it’s just never going to get narrow like that.
Something that I often struggle with in general about figuring out my why is that, like a lot of Black folks (as well as Brown and Asian folks), I want to orient and be connected to my ancestors. I think there is a power in knowing where you came from in both ways you want to continue and ways you want to interrupt.
Many Black folks are at least somewhat disconnected from their ancestry due of course to colonization and enslavement. There’s also a disproportionate amount of Black children in the foster system and being adopted away from their roots.
As a Black adoptee, an transracial adoptee at that, I don’t even know where I could start. It’s really isolating. As connected as I feel to Black US American culture and some diasporatic spaces, my direct line is deeply and seemingly irrevocably severed. I have actually connected with my maternal biological family which has been really nice and matters to me. But my bio mom was my white parent and I’m just as lost as to my Black cultural background as I ever have been.
Sabrina, take a DNA ancestry test!
Yeah, I mean if I were willing to give the US government my genetic material I might consider this. I don’t know that it would make me feel more connected though. I think it’s too ingrained in me that I just have to blaze my own trail. It' doesn’t help that my adoptive family didn’t really have strong cultural ties or spiritual affiliation. In some ways I’m grateful for that and in others it leaves me feeling…adrift? Especially now that I’m estranged it really does feel like I’m standing alone, Aang losing access to all the past avatars.
I have to be honest, I have barley even begun to examine the personal, spiritual, or overarching effect of this disconnection on me and my life.
I know it has an effect on how hard I try to value the traditions I do feel even remotely close to. This is what I talked about around Christmas in The Grief of Loving Knife People. I strive to do all the traditional things that are more common domain and feel very disregulated when things don’t go just to plan.
I wonder if that would be the same if I had connection, embodied and soul deep, to my own set of traditions. Things that transcended time and space to reach me.
Instead I tend to waver between really traditional US traditions (which is likely actively in opposition to my actual ancestry) and desperately seeking anything that feels more aligned with my values, with the earth, with me. I think in a lot of ways I always felt like an outsider.
A Recent Shift
As a lot of you know I’ve been doing a lot of teen focused things recently which of course brings up reflection on my teen years. My teen self never thought I would make it this far, as unfortunately so many of our teen selves didn’t.
But I’ve been trying to think of her, what she needed and didn’t get, what she couldn’t even dare to want.
And some of that is leading me into my “why” as it were. She’s my why. I’m my why. Who I will be is my why. What I will leave behind is my why.
And that means I have to keep trying to make my own path, to connect to what I can. Figuring out what means.
What’s hard about it is really there’s nothing clear. I have to do things and then reflect: how did that feel, how did it affect those around me, what have been positive and painful outcomes, etc.
I know that spiritual connection has been important to me for a long time and I think could strengthen my why. I’ve tried a bunch of shit honestly, and I have picked some things up. I do still have a ways to go, some parts of me are not ready to build something stable spiritually due to the disconnection. The parts of me that are have figured some shit out.
The natural cycles are an important guide and worth understanding. Even without full understanding you’ll feel their pull so you might as well get knowledgeable.
Connecting inwardly can connect you outwardly (this one I still struggle with, thanks trauma)
If it feels meaningful to you, it’s meaningful. Full stop.
It doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. This one really stops me in my tracks but it’s true!
It’s the intention that matters.
I know for sure I have a lot to learn. I have to figure out a lot of things before I’ll really feel fully confident, but I can just keep waking up each day and starting. And keeping. And doing. And while it’ll look mess to lot’s of people and feel messy most of the time, that is my why.