March 2023: “What if my swimming unseen sacrifices the wisdom that would waken within you if you saw?” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
March 2023: “What if my swimming unseen sacrifices the wisdom that would waken within you if you saw?” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
disability and oversharing (?); recognition; quietude; moon syntax
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
//// Reminder \\
My mama and I are adding a humorous advice column to our newsletter! Called You Should Definitely Always Never Follow This Advice, we will respond in writing and audio to the reader’s questions. Our first issue is out in late-April post-Ramadan! If you’d like to ask a question, send it here!
Are y’all tired of me yet? I know there have been a lot of newsletters these two weeks alone.
This is a quick one.
Edit: This was a quick one. Never trust me when I say I will be “quick.” I do not know anything about brevity. I am long-form. I sprawl. I go on many tangents. I’ve been this way since I could talk, and it was over when I got a handle on sentence formation.
I am wearing more colors these days:
This missive is brought to you by an overstimulating day running errands and one of the first home-cooked meals in weeks.
For me, sensory overload and overstimulation feel like buzzing.
Like a cord of energy from head to toe. I am finding that sitting to write brings the buzzing down to a frequency that allows me to stabilize my acrobatic thoughts into sentences.
Today, I was running many errands and suddenly felt that I had overshared about OCD and ADHD, or what I am now calling having a “kinetic brain.” These labels — OCD and ADHD— are one side of my prism, but these labels are not the prism. My kinetic brain can do special things, and while she can be unruly at times, she keeps my days lively.
Part of the anxiety about oversharing came from a sense that there are things you should never share. But I am not ashamed of having OCD or ADHD; I am only annoyed that it was overlooked for so long 😂. I did not know intellectually, but I had somatic awareness that something was happening. I remember picking up Asiya Wadud’s collection No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body for the title alone. I have waited a whole four whole months to crack it open and read it because I have been stuck on the title alone. This title reminds me that knowledge does not only come from an academic encounter but that we learn through somatic encounters as well. I have not read this collection and will do so on my long train ride tomorrow, but Asiya’s title has been a place of deep meditation. To trust my somatic experiences. To lean into the body as a base for collecting signals, an antenna? A reminder to tune in to ourselves. Tune in. I wrote this sometime last year, and now I know why. The poem finally caught up to my awareness.
Swallow the channel.
I began tweeting about this oversharing conflict today. It was a conflict I started with myself 😂😂😂. Then, I squashed the beef with myself, too 😂😂😂.
This prompted me to return to The Believer interview with the two of us. Please take a read ☺️
Alexis tells me (but really, all of us):
My** invitation (after Alexis Pauline Gumbs):
For a period of 6 months document a change, any change. Try to create a measurement system for assessing change.
** or, what felt the text invites or summons me to do.
Of course, I began dancing between texts and was pulled to, invited to reread, a specific section of Kevin Quaishie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture.
I have been thinking about the moon a lot in the past few weeks because Ramadan is quickly approaching. I am interested in the moon as this cheeky character who shows off, but only as Quaishie writes, “offering slivers of its potent, tide-shifting self.”
The moon offers us a
score or a
rhythm or a
syntax or a
algorithm for
self-revelation.
I still consider myself to be quiet even in the midst of my more recent sharing of things happening in my life. My fears about oversharing were overshot because no amount of my sharing would get at my full interiority. That is not to say that my sharing is false or performative vulnerability; it is more that, as Kevin Quaishie says, a quiet as:
I share.
I share because I witnessed Alexis’ words on a page: What if my swimming unseen sacrifices the wisdom that would waken within you if you saw?
I share what I have access to.*********
What I can access depends on how deeply I lean into my awareness practice.
Even as I lean fully into my awareness practice, there are parts of me that I do not yet have language for and thus cannot share in writing. Kevin Quaishie says this a bit better - “Quiet is related to the names you call yourself, the ones that cannot be spelled or fully pronounced.”:
My** invitation (after Kevin Quaishie):
Be in awe of yourself in such a way that you lose count of your names that “cannot be spelled or fully pronounced”!
** or, what felt the text invites or summons me to do.
*********There is still a sieve: All I can access isn’t always what I share. There are countless reasons. I love porosity, but I also need a separation membrane. I need something just for me. You should pick up the brilliant Steffani Jemison’s new book A Rock, A River, A Street. I am only through the first few pages, but I am buzzing. Even the book description: “Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between your self and others?” And the back cover makes me even buzzier:
The back cover text reads:
The gist of the story was this: what we now think of as a person is actually only partial.
Or, put another way, every person had previously been plural. If you unfolded us, we might be live paper dolls. attached at the hand and foot. But the gods didn’t treat us so gently. We were cleaved apart, our insides sucked and sealed at the navel.
If I closed my eyes, I could imagine it. I could be connected at the navel or the hip, or maybe to the nubby tips of my fingers, to an-other. Maybe to the neighborhood association lady, or to all the teachers I’d ever had. To my mother and her mother. To Antwaun, to Antwaun’s lover.”
Steffani invites us to consider something more than an ecosystemic approach to living. There is something else about being unnaturally cleaved from others such that there is no longer the connective tissue that makes us kindred. As I read, I picture being “connected at the navel or the hip” to my neighbor. The proximity is terrifying, but the terror of such a shared bodily surface changes both what is at stake in my decision-making as well as my sense of myself as a coherent and singular self. Is this state of having “previously been plural” akin to the lineage Alexis Pauline Gumbs mentions?
My** invitation (after Steffani Jemison):
Create path(s) back(?) to that state of having “had previously been plural.”
** or, what felt the text invites or summons me to do.
//// Reminder \\
My mama and I are adding a humorous advice column to our newsletter! Called You Should Definitely Always Never Follow This Advice, we will respond in writing and audio to the reader’s questions. Our first issue is out in late-April post-Ramadan! If you’d like to ask a question, send it here!
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URLThank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽