All Hail Jenifer Lewis, The Cost Of Compromise, The Queering Of The Musical Canon, & The Aliveness Of Sin
This Is What I Know To Be For Me True Right Now (a journal of my real life—and all that I love). 02.01.23
i. /
In so many moments in this life, we must ask ourselves a series of questions:
What compromise is necessary here, what will it cost me, & am I willing to make it?
The courage it takes to ask these questions (no small thing), and the willingness to face an honest answer (and make no mistake, this is one holy hell of an ask), are, for me, crucial to staying on a path of integrity with myself.
ii./
This video with the inimitable Jenifer Lewis lead me down a rabbit hole of interview after interview. I lost an entire morning last week, and I am not mad about it.
I would be more than satisfied if I could hold a room with the level of presence this woman has in the tip of her pinky finger. Seriously.
Favorite quote:
”Love yourself so love will not be a stranger when it comes. And it will come.”
If you need a dose of moxie and audacity and the sort of diction most of us would kill for, just go google “Jenifer Lewis interviews’ and get inspired.
iii./
How do we learn to recognize healthy love when we have not yet experienced it ourselves, or have not lived it for so very long, or only experienced it in all too brief flashes and glimpses?
I think she is right. It is not that I believe all those internet memes are true. I do not think we have to love ourselves fully to deserve or accept the love of another. I do not believe that we must heal in solitude in order to deserve a healthy partnership.
But do I believe that the very best way we can know what we want, need, and deserve is to begin by giving it to ourselves, tenaciously, stubbornly, in every way that we can?
Yes.
Love yourself so very well, so that the kind of holy-good-god-damn loving you’ve been longing for will not be a stranger when it comes.
It’s got to begin there.
iv./
I once asked, “Has anyone ever tried to convince you that fashion was frivolous?”
It’s no secret that fashion, for me, is integral to self-expression, as much a part of me as my writing or my photography, or the way that I love.
As I explained today “It’s like … dressing like myself is a big part of feeling like myself which is a big part of existing as myself in the world.”
It’s about taking up space and calling attention and naming myself worthy of both.
And the further I feel that essential part of me slip-sliding, when I am tired or anxious or uncertain of where I belong, the more resolved I am about the practice of dressing in a way that feels wholly me. It is, in fact, a part of the way that I love myself, and I am devoted to it, entirely.
So no, fashion is not frivolous. Anything but.
v./
Yesterday
asked me:what hurts?
what feels good?
what matters right now?
what is magic?
I answered quickly this morning, the first responses that came to body and mind. But now the questions live in me, touchstones of a sort, & more swirls about in me in response, not yet ready to land in the world.
And so I take these questions into my journal and let them live and breathe there for a bit before I return to seek a deeper answer.
vi./
We can’t always grasp the fullness of the real answer right away. But what I have come to know is true is that somewhere, maybe way down deep, most of the answers live in us, waiting to be discovered. And sometimes, if we trust, the questions themselves are the entire point.
vii./
The most heartbreaking moment of any ending isn’t really the ending, I don’t think. It’s not the abject grief of the early days or the grasping denial that follows. It comes months later. When life has found new equilibrium and you’ve adjusted to what now is, and even made a tenuous sort of peace—a rational understanding—of the hows and whys and what’s of the necessity of this ending.
And then, that moment comes—and it always does—when you realize that this human, the one you knew inside and out. The one on whose skin you could have mapped every tattoo and freckle and scar. The one whose taste your mouth had memorized, whose heartbeat had synced with yours in the deep of so many 3 am dreamscapes. The one with whom you fell hard and laughed harder and cried and grappled and fought and lost.
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