🌕 In My Experience… Dispatches from the Depths
it's a full moon in libra 🌕
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
I hope you’re enjoying the change of season where you are — whether that’s to spring or autumn. Brooklyn has definitely sprung! I’ve been spending a lot of time walking (¡will never again🚶🏾♀️not be amazing!) in Prospect Park where the blue jays, robins, daffodils and magnolia blossoms are adamantly declaring the end of winter. I love them for it.
I've also been nursing a wicked fever. 10,000 joys & sorrows… This is the reason I did not create a recorded version of this, but I'll include a link to that on the New Moon.
Thank you for being a subscriber. There are almost 10,000 of you now. That may sounds like a lot or a little, but I can’t say it enough how truly honored I am that any single one of you shows up to hear about my life. Though it can feel awkward or performative, I know it's absolutely how I should be devoting my time. It does take time to write these. Partly because I’m ridiculously slow. Mostly because all I have are words (and some images), but I really do want to get it right. It being accurately describing my winding path to freedom — especially my ongoing (sometimes flailing) attempts to dissolve profound pain, illness, and loss into wondrous expressions of love, faith and joy.
There are always people everywhere going through countless challenging things and feeling freedom in the process. And, I am quite proud how, in my writing and other offerings, I seek to alchemize adversity into beauty: pain in the body? an essay on wellness, ending a relationship? a workshop on uncoupling, feeling alone? a session on self-love, exploring sacred creativity? collage with the cosmos, grief and mourning, etc, etc… tbd.
Yes, this IS a weird so-called job that I’ve created for myself: to trust the power of simply sharing from the depths of my life. Emphasis on deep.
I know some of you speak astrologese: Well, I have a watery chart with, most significantly, five planets (Sun, both benefics, Mercury, and Neptune) in Scorpio. In the 12th house. I know!! Translation: I AM BUILT TO DIVE DEEP WATERS. And resurface to tell tales of what the depths have taught me. 🧜🏾♀️🔮🧙🏾♀️
These watery dispatches speak of the darkness and pressure below (main lesson: don’t drown or explode!). Also, of the awe and wonder possible within the mysteries (the ocean is also the cosmos).
Thank you again for being here. This In My Experience… is in response to the dozens of questions I’ve received over the past year about pain, illness, and loss.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. The quote in the teaser is from this sublime ocean dispatch from the brilliant J Wortham. If you missed it: If you don't believe in god, say ocean.
In My Experience… is one year old. 🥳 For new folks, this is my take on an advice column where I don’t give advice per se, I simply explore readers’ anonymous questions from my experience. When I started this, I had noticed a rise in advice columns (a lot of them really great) just as I was consciously shifting my own teaching away from didacticism. Through decades of spiritual zigs and zags, I have come to accept there are innumerable maps to the joy and freedom we all seek. I no longer resonate to having specific routes or destinations (but I learn from others and am delighted to contribute my explorations and discoveries into the collective).
Thank you to everyone who has submitted a question this past year. It’s an honor. As I mentioned, I’ve received dozens of questions about how to navigate severe challenges including debilitating chronic pain, the death of children, abuse, the end of relationships, addiction, and (too many) cancer diagnoses. Each entry has touched me greatly and deserves an answer of its own. What I write here cannot do justice to all these beautiful queries. Instead of “answers,” I will share an early lesson about pain I learned from a decades-ago year I worked in refugee camps, and how I made meaning from what I witnessed. I don’t have some grand theory about trauma or war. As if. I am not a trauma (nor war) expert. [Though I am the expert of my own trauma which involves decades of proximity to war energy.]
I’m not going to have a neat little summary for you here today (maybe never?), AND, that period provided an intimate connection to a truth I am still comprehending. A recent, brief moment in Brooklyn sparked memories of that time…
Last week, at the stoplight at Franklin Avenue and Dean Street, I saw Sal, a former colleague from when I lived in Guinea. He worked in the main office at the N’Zerekore branch of the aid agency where I was a program manager. I was 32. A year and a half later (at 34), after I returned from West Africa, I was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. It came as a complete shock because of my young age and overall excellent health. I felt lost and unmoored in those early weeks and months of scans and biopsies, but it was hard not to reflect on my blessings given my year in the camps. Yet this wasn’t a “well, at least I don’t have it as bad as…” attitude. My gratitude came from the inspiration and empowerment I I received through intimately witnessing grace and power amidst unbelievable pain.
There were so many things I realized during that year in Guinea. A big one: that numerous layers of corruption and hypocrisy rule every rung of our world. I must have been pretty naive, because I did not anticipate the almost continual exploitation within these systems. I observed U.N. workers siphoning money, aid workers falsifying records for funding, and nepotism leading to the hiring of the wholly incompetent in top positions everywhere. I had western colleagues who constantly screamed at African staff with no repercussions. I became close to multiple people to later shockingly discover their involvement in sex-for-jobs schemes. I saw various addictions wreaking havoc, often at the expense of locals. When with my Scandinavian boyfriend, I was often mistaken for a prostitute and treated abominably (also, I took French classes with many truly lovely Guinean sex workers). I spent three months working with a brilliant UNHCR protection officer to dismantle an orphanage ring that was operating in one of the biggest camps only to realize that most of the parents were involved all along. I sat by as supervisors blatantly threatened government officials, I watched camps grow in size from 3,000 to 30,000 in a few weeks, and I came to recognize that most non-material programs (including mine) were barely impactful. I resigned myself to the ubiquity of apathy and laziness. I realized that my French was irrefutably lousy.
I was the only non-white foreign worker at my organization. Most of the local staff were refugees themselves — from Liberia and Sierra Leone (and a few from Cote d'Ivoire). Because I am Black, they placed me somewhere halfway between the other foreign staff and “one of them.” That means I learned all the good gossip about romances and affairs even if I was first to be put in the back of the truck if we were too many. Also, I heard their stories. I do not need to detail any of them here. Many were astonishingly horrific. Story after story led me to understand that everyone in those camps experienced, at the very least, war and displacement. However, pretty quickly I realized that there were remarkable differences in people’s responses to those experiences. I assumed that more violence would mean more trauma, but that just was not what I was encountering and this made me very curious.
I was raised by a mother who wielded the pain she experienced in life to justify her ongoing responses to it. I’ve written before about how learning to honor my emotions and express my pain is an ongoing process. Still, even as a young person, I knew there must be pathways to healing that don’t involve telling the same stories over and over for decades. By the time I got to Guinea, I’d been working in low income communities for over a decade where I encountered the results of structural racism and inequities at the heart of this country’s ongoing infliction of unnecessary suffering on its citizens. But for some reason, hearing these intimate stories and witnessing the beauty and purpose that many created in response, this was the first time it truly clicked that it’s not the event that determines the trauma. I saw this over and over again, but I was not wise or brave enough to inquire about why or how. I wish I had asked what helped them navigate atrocities, where did they go for care and comfort, what truly supports healing.
I am not judging people for having unhealed trauma because that would make me not people and a hypocrite. And, I too am wary of resilient-third-world tropes that make no space for ongoing injustices and vulnerabilities. I am sharing what I observed and how it impacted an understanding of life that I’ve been eagerly exploring since then. It goes something like this:
There seem to be no simple equations that lots of pain = lots of trauma. It can even be the inverse. Experiences do not appear to determine trauma. Is there choice or power or praxis at work here?
No big final summary or suggestion (wah wah). I’ve explored a lotta teachings and perspectives and practices that have helped me make sense of that long ago insight. All have been beneficial in some way - and why I share a multitude of references here. I will say, the only other time I had that loud of a “click” about pain/trauma is when I studied Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy for Complex Trauma (IFOT/AFOT). But I’ll save that for another time – there are some resources to come.
I will end with this: There were innumerable glorious things about living in Guinea. The people are generous, the land is gorgeous, and it was a privilege to live in a majority Muslim country and encounter magnificent aspects of Islam daily. Here’s what I remember most: wildly-melodic song birds, family compounds filled with children actually being raised by a village, majestic highlands, the call to prayer, spicy stews, tranquil rice fields, unflinching generosity to the poor, rolling hills, sweet encounters with indigenous people in the forest, bustling markets, smiles, tears, laughter, love.
I did not appreciate them enough back then.
May we all appreciate the beauty around us.
