holding space for thirty years of rage

march 28, 2025

i keep seeing posts across my timeline and feed about how important it is to avoid? ignore? romantic relationships and focus on passions, hobbies and careers. whatever suits your fancy outside of romantic love, some even suggest bypassing platonic love.

every post i see makes me want to scream. scream with thirty years of rage. scream in being an only child, scream in being an only child to two black parents who didn’t show up emotionally for me. scream in finding my own way, scream in how i’ve spent my entire life searching for people who will love me and see me in the way i desire and need. these posts (and i’m open to being wrong) keep pushing the individualistic life that feeds too many societal systems that i thought we’d all agreed we didn’t need? that were unhelpful? destructive? pushing an individual lifestyle like we’re not biologically wired to need each other and need each other in such a way that the loneliness, to go without an us, will kill us.

it starts small, the poke and prick against this wound. one of the oldest wounds i have, all my senior wounds have club meetings in a dark room in my heart playing poker. dim light, smoke in the air. it starts small, it starts with arriving at a pick up for a door dash order. standing at the counter and waiting. waiting for someone behind the counter to see me, to ask “how can i help.” and they don’t. i stand there a minute, sometimes two, most often too long watching people behind the counter looking at me and passing me by. making eye contact and ignoring me. so simple, is all it takes to find me sitting in my car crying, reminded of how my mother looked at me, and kept moving. didn’t look at me and carried on.

change is coming, the change isn’t coming, the change is here. the change is a baby crowning in the middle of labor. beautiful, a miracle, painful. against all odds, in a field, in the dark, no hand to hold the change is here.

after seven years of therapy i know where all my bodies are buried. every hurt, every frustration, i know where it started and how i ended up with that particular emotional scar. once you know that all your relationships are a mirror to the ones you have with your parents, it's like looking in the back of the book for the answers. knowing where to find the answers makes all the difference.

my relationships are changing, they’re starting to feel like an old mother wound. like my old but still kickin’ mother wound. there are people in my life who have perfectly good reasons for not- (and i remind myself that there are nazis in charge and planes falling out of the sky and we’re all feeling it in ways we’re conscious of and more importantly in ways we’re not conscious of yet…)having the time, the energy, the bandwidth, the the the and it’s my mother all over again who with her own wounds couldn’t be there for me and i’m bleeding. all over the floor all over again, hemorrhaging, have been all this time…really. but this time, this standing here in the middle of a burger king with no one making eye contact and my requests going ignored, i find it. more importantly i feel it, the thing that has been bleeding inside me my whole life. filling up with agony i find the bleeder.

and i’m angry, angry for who i was, the little me who resides inside me. angry for who i am now and how it manifests in my relationships in the present. and so of course i ask first how i’m supposed to fix it. how do i sew this wound back up, how do i stop bleeding please.

according to my previous therapist i’m just supposed to sit with it. keep it company, offer the sadness a cup of tea, a hug and a blankie.

my mother wound. where she tells me my whole life “i can’t help you makhela” but i don’t actually hear those words and understand them until a year ago

i can’t help you makhela

i can’t help you makhela

i can’t help you makhela

it’s rejection and neglect every single time. i feel it on the floor of my heart it reverberates and echos and sticks to the walls of who i am and every day i approach those walls with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge and scrub and while i scrub i sing softly and say all the things i wish my mother had said to me.

i love you, i choose you, i see you, i was wrong.

and the work i do, the healing i offer myself, the care and attention i mine for and i make it enough. my whole life i’ve been huffing on the fumes that are an individualistic life and let me tell you. it is not enough. not near enough. with no community and being without…i show up and i make it enough and i tell myself to hold on, that everything is temporary, this must be felt too, that this too shall pass.

m.