Audre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is an act of political resistance,” and although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder. We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men. We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.
We don’t learn to love in a linear path, from self to family to friends to spouse, as we might have been taught. We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships.
And right now we need to be in rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we’ve been loving them.
Who have we been loving?
- the people who cross our physical or virtual paths, spark the flame of our interest, earn our devotion and respect and protection.
- our own family, because blood.
- people we are committed to, but don’t like anymore.
How have we been loving?
- defining love by obligation,
- celebrating love on externally marked holidays
- keeping the realities of love behind closed doors,
- framing love up as a fairy tale on social media,
- as a product we give each other,
- as a limited resource that gets swallowed and used up, tied in plastic when we’re done and piled up out of sight,
- prioritizing romantic love over self, comrade and friend love
This kind of love is not sufficient, even if it is the greatest love(s) of our lives. The kind of love that we will be forced to celebrate or escape on Valentine’s Day is too small.
We’re all going to die if we keep loving this way, die from isolation, loneliness, depression, abandoning each other to oppression, from lack of touch, from forgetting we are precious. We can no longer love as a secret, or a presentation, as something we prioritize, hoard for the people we know. Prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy, is survival.
From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and a juicer. You need an income to love. If something doesn’t work out with your love, you pay a lot of money to divide your lives, generally not telling people much unless it’s a soap opera dramatic ending. This way of approaching love strangles all the good out of it.
What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life.
No big deal.
One of my favorite reframes on romantic love is relationship anarchy from Andie Nordgren:
Love is abundant, and every relationship is unique
Love and respect instead of entitlement
Find your core set of relationship values
Heterosexism is rampant and out there, but don’t let fear lead you
Build for the lovely unexpected
Fake it til’ you make it
Trust is better
Change through communication
Customize your commitments
To help make this a true day of love, here is brief radical love manifesto:
Radical Honesty
We begin learning to lie in intimate relationships at a very early age. Lie about the food your mother made, to avoid punishment, as you swallow your tears, about loving this Valentine’s Day gift, about the love you want and how you feel. Most of this is taught as hetero-patriarchy 101: men love one way, women another, and we have to lie to impress and catch each other. Women are still taught too often to be submissive, diminutive, obedient, and later, nagging and caregiving—not peers, not emotionally complex powerhouses, not loving other women and trans bodies. These mistruths in gender norms are self perpetuating, affirmed by magazines and movies, girded up at family dinner tables.
We also learn that love is a limited resource and the love we want and need is too much, that we are too much. We learn to shrink, to lie about the whole love we need, settling with not-quite-good-enough in order to not be alone.
We have to engage in an intentional practice of honesty to counter this socialization. We need radical honesty—learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others’ needs. To say—I need to hear that you miss me. When you’re high all the time it’s hard for me to feel your presence. I lied. The way you talked to that man made me feel unseen. Your jealousy makes me feel like an object and not a partner. The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and, ultimately, a society that is built around true need, real people, not fake news and bullshit norms.
Healing
Trauma is the common experience of most humans on this planet. Love too often perpetuates trauma, repeating the patterns of intimacy and pain so many of us experienced growing up in racist and/or hetero-patriarchal environments. Shame might be the only thing more prevalent, which leads to trauma being hidden, silenced, or relegated to a certain body of people. If we can’t carry our trauma and act normal, if we have a breakdown or lose our jobs/homes/children, there is something wrong with us. What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say—I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other—I know a healer for you. I’ll hold your hand in the dark. Let’s begin a meditation practice. Perhaps talk therapy is not enough. We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be—I know we are all in need of healing—so how are we doing our healing work?
Learn How You Change
Most of us resist changes we didn’t spark. We feel victimized and so we try to hold tight to whatever we figure out as a way to survive. We spend too much time watching change happen with our jaws dropped, writing what the fuck over and over. It is time to learn Octavia Butler’s lessons—both that “the only lasting truth is change,” and that we can, and must, “shape change.” So we need to observe how we respond to change—does it excite us so much that we struggle with stability? Or do we ignore changes until it’s too late? Or fight changes that are bigger than us? It takes time and assistance to feel into and find the most strategic adaptation.
Build Communities of Care
Shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation. Be in community with healers in our lives. Healers, we must make sure our gifts are available and accessible to those growing and changing our communities. Be in family with each other—offer the love and care we can, receive the love and care we need. Share your car or meals with a healer in exchange for reiki sessions. Facilitate a healing group in exchange for massages. Clean a healer’s home as a barter for a ritual to move through grief. Pay healing forward—buy sessions for friends. Let our lives be a practice ground where we’re learning to generate the abundance of love and care we, as a species, are longing for.
This Valentine’s Day, commit to developing an unflappable devotion to yourself as part of an abundant, loving whole. Make a commitment to five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all.
5 Comments Have Been Posted
So excellent. Thank you.
Meinemo replied on
So excellent. Thank you.
That's the community I want.
M'kali-Hashiki replied on
There's so much juiciness in this piece, Sis I barely know where to begin. As a healer, I desperately want to live in community where my healing gifts are traded for things I need: shelter, food, art, healing, etc.
I don't ask for $ for my services cuz I want $, I ask for $ for my services to pay for the things I need to live the life I want. If I had a rad community of folx that wanted to create an intentional way of doing that sort of loving exchange with each other...
Yes, we must reframe love, we must love ourselves & each other differently. The way we love so often is in contradiction to the politics we espouse. Not because of hypocrisy, but because bucking the lies we've been taught about "the way love works" is HARD. Because figuring out how to love wholly & freely through the trauma of living in multiply marginalized bodies is HARD. Because remembering we are all infinite pieces of The Divine & treating each other accordingly is HARD when we have so little societal backup.
Thank you for being you.
The limits of inclusion
SAChoirgirl replied on
I love this piece and agree wholeheartedly with it, but I'm also deeply challenged by it.
I'm very committed to the idea of radical inclusion and compassionate community, but I'm also grappling with limits and boundaries. Someobe I loved fiercely, and who is politically and socially very similar to me (and hence should really be an ally in this struggle) has proven herself unable to stop doing really damaging and destructive things. Her cruelty some of the time is incomprehensible alongside her kindness and compassion most of the time. I finally made the decision to cut communication with her, as I couldn't trust her to take responsibility for her actions, and I was out of resources to be supportive. But I feel terrible about it, because I know that this exclusion increases her suffering. So my struggle is with this: how can we prioritize love and compassion and community and self-care all at once? What do we do about all those left behind because they fail to adequately care for themselves or don't seem able to act in accordance with community standards? What about the people with the fewest resources and greatest need, who are destructive in their desperation to get their own needs met or protect themselves. I recognize myself in this description, though it is so much harder to put that recognition out there.
We all fail sometimes to meet community standards. Is it possible for us as a community to be inclusive enough that we can help one another behave in loving ways consistently? And where do we draw the line about who we exclude?
I needed this
Kristen westergaard replied on
It's easy to get stuck needing and wanting love and forget about the many forms it can take and the many ways to approach it.
Love as Political Resistance
Yvette Caslin replied on
Very good read and thoughtful assessment.
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