Reflecting on the Past 4 Years- A Freewrite

When I started my freelancing career in 2016, I felt moved to do so for many reasons. First and foremost, I was grieving the recent loss of my dad, losing him took me out of my body for years and at a young age, still having to navigate the world that I now saw as full of loss and desolation, was no easy task. It forced me back into crying, something that I had tried to shut off after being raped and feeling powerless and crazy. To fully understand how 2016 came to be, you have to understand that before he died, I was already in a mental space of letting go, letting go of familial expectations, my education, my religion, my health, and my need for stability. Everything I thought I knew and understood, as a child and adolescent, got completely subverted and I was forced to walk through the gates of early adulthood with new eyes, and senses that penetrated beyond the surface.

I could no longer afford to pay the price of doubting myself, my intuition, my understanding of situations. I, like many of my ethnicity and lineage, came from a people who inadvertently inherited trauma, and did what they needed to do in order to survive in a world where their land was being stolen, their houses being grabbed through “eminent domain”, their communities destroyed generation after generation due to the greed and insatiable appetites of those in power. As a result, there have been ways that I didn’t trust myself, I didn’t trust my natural mind, that the things I saw and experienced were, in fact, real. Going back to school and being told that I was not intelligent enough for certain classes, “why don’t you take something easier, hun?'“, being micro-managed at my job and dealing with passive-aggressiveness, working and going to school and still not being able to afford the rising rent prices, in a southern city no less, and on top of it all, doubting my own plan to, essentially, share my story through the gift that made me feel grounded the most in this world. With all that I’d lost, there was no way I could stand on the shaky land of low self-esteem because that was a gift I could give myself, over and over again, to keep believing that life didn’t have to be terrible, that some of these so-called lessons, I did not have to keep learning them…I could move the fuck on. So, I did, and like any real human, I stumbled along the way yet I decided that if nothing else, I could create a place for my existence to not only make sense, but to flourish and be one of the many other men and women that decided the same thing, just manifested as differently as we come.

So what have these 4 years taught me? That as hard as life is, she is also gentle and you are never alone, that true friendship will show up and show out if you let it, that family doesn’t have to and literally cannot dictate your path (remember, they have their own paths to walk and no one can be the expert on your path, as it’s constantly unfolding), that nature and experiences are still the best professors, bar none, and that making art has more to do with your daily creations (regardless of occupation), than with a paintbrush…but a paintbrush never hurt nobody either;)