[aishah]

something i wrote on tumblr recently...

for the last year i have been exploring a lot of stuff around my relationship with my body, my disabilities/illnesses, trauma, and dissociation. i have some ideas floating around in my head that i want to write about on my blog…especially about the trauma i went through in the medical industrial complex as a child and how that affected my experiences of sexual violence and my relationship w/my body. and just generally going through life. the allied media conference this year was the first time i really verbalized a lot of that in one sitting, out loud, to other people. i haven’t put all the words together in ways that make sense yet.

the dissociation issues i have…are really hard to deal with sometimes. it runs the gamut from not recognizing myself in the mirror to not really feeling it or being present in my body when people touch me to…not understanding that i have/am a self/body. sometimes it is a blessing, though, especially as a sex worker. until i started doing sex work, i always saw it as a negative thing, but now i think without it i probably wouldn’t survive working. i can get through long days of work using dissociation as a coping mechanism. at the same time - lately, i am really depressed and anxious and have a lot of other mental health issues going on in my life, plus work is extremely slow and stressful - and this thing that usually is a positive coping mechanism seems to lately be exacerbating the other things. or it’s the other way around - generally overall my dissociation is worse lately and that scares me when i rely on it too much to get through work. it makes it really difficult to shift in and out of the work headspace that i have.

maybe it’s just that i hate compartmentalizing and i’m terrible at it. maybe when work gets better, or my mental health situation gets better, the other things will improve, too. i’ve never really worked on the dissociation specifically in therapy, and i’m hoping to start therapy again soon (fuck yeah sliding scale training clinics), so…we’ll see.

& something i wrote after leaving amc (for our church blog)...

I spent the weekend at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, and every time I leave Detroit, I come home energized by the brilliance of our communities and the power of our ability to collectively imagine our future.

Often it feels that in the day to day grind of life, work, church, and social justice, our attention is so deeply held in the immediate – a sense of anxiety about how we’re going to deal with the next crisis, the next workday, the next meal, the next legislative issue. There is immense value in focusing on the present moment, but the “tyranny of the urgent” can also strangle our ability to envision our future together.

Our imaginations are powerful and dangerous. Storytelling, which is a creative and imaginative process, is how we dream our world into being. The stories that are told to us shape our beliefs in many ways – the stories handed down from our parents, the stories we read in the Bible, and so on. The stories that are told about us shape our experiences and sometimes can even harm us – for example, the story that is common in U.S. political circles that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and homosexuality is antithetical to those principles. The stories we take in shape our identities and our reality. But our ability to tell our own stories, use our imagination, and amplify the stories of others is what gives us the power to create change.

Storytelling, like time, is often thought of in linear terms. Two thousand years ago a man lived and his name was Jesus. His teachings were passed down and preserved and people created institutions around these teachings. Today, we use these teachings as texts to inform our processes of building community and creating change.

But what would happen if we imagined engaging with religious texts and other sources of inspiration as a creative process? One way of engaging with scripture and storytelling creatively is through the practice of Lectio Divina, which Josh preached on a few weeks ago. Through Lectio Divina, we read scripture meditatively and open ourselves up to the possibility that God is communicating with us through scripture. This can involve the traditional interpretations of the passage we are reading, but also goes beyond that. Lectio Divina, along with other creative and imaginative ways of using scripture, flips the idea of linear time on its head. The concept that many of the teachings in the Bible are relevant for all people in all time periods creates a situation where not only does the past inform our present/future, but our present/future can inform the past.

We can also look to other sources for inspiration when we think about envisioning our faith, our social justice work, and our future in new ways. This weekend we practiced using science fiction as a tool to imagine a future without prisons or police. For myself and many activists I know, science fiction – particularly the work of Octavia Butler – is a source of religious and activist inspiration. The practice of using popular media as a tool in this way is on one level a purely imaginative process – right now in our society it’s extremely difficult to understand how we would get from where we are to that future vision. On another level, though, this informs present work that people are doing to create community alternatives to dealing with conflict and violence. It is not just a pie in the sky vision of what the future could be like…it is also a deeply practical way of furthering current on-the-ground work.

This practice also has the potential to strengthen our faith and our relationship with God. Often faith is looked at as something that is handed down to us, not necessarily as a process in which we participate creatively. Approaching scripture and our faith with a creative mindset gives us agency in our faith and a sense of ownership over/engagement with what we believe. We can use different sources of inspiration that speak to us directly, from or along with the Bible and other traditional sources of scripture. Throughout history, there are numerous examples of people engaging with scripture and other sources of inspiration creatively. One example is that of feminist writers who took brief references to women in the Bible and expanded them to imagine what women’s lives could have been like in Biblical times, and what their experiences mean for women now and in the future.

When we say “God is still speaking,” what does that mean? For me, it means that we have the ability to imagine a future together that is affirming for all of us. And it means that using our imagination to play with traditional and non-traditional sources of religious inspiration, using them for our liberation, is a powerful act of faith. In what ways does God still speak to you?