Offline

It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon).  It wasn't when a former babysitter typed, "Hey, black people" I suppose to get my attention and the attention of my black people friends as she explained our experience to us.  It wasn't when one after another, black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police or sketchy white neighbors or strangers and were shown no justice, but I saw only posts about home renos and favorite cupcakes.  It wasn't Colin Kaepernick and all he inspired on one knee getting character slandered and pummeled.  It wasn't the endless reaction and outrage to every post begging the larger community to recognize that Black Lives Matter did not take anything away from them but that All Lives Matter spit in the faces of folks they called "friends." It wasn't that.

It wasn't when Brock Turner got away with a rape that everyone knew he'd committed or my revisited trauma when listening to the comments made about "the kinds of girls and women who are sexually assaulted" and the acknowledgment that a black girl or woman in such a predicament may as well keep that shit to herself since no one even gives a fuck about the white girl behind the dumpster.  It wasn't one more post about the "gay agenda" and how proud some families feel about "kicking that no good kid out on his ass" because he was somehow born this way but-not-in-my-house-dammit.

It wasn't even watching the unfathomable rise of a straight up racist, misogynist, rotten to the core blowhard in the run up to a presidential election, or seeing friends with friends who support this horse's ass telling me there was nothing they could do about their friend's or family member's opinion and  go on about their lives.  The build up of racism, misogyny, rape culture, misogynoir, misguided, uneducated and under-educated thoughts and theories that were breaking my spirit.  As one childhood friend or acquaintance after another showed themselves to be completely ignorant and unable to use any amount of reason, compassion, or empathy to the plight of peoples other than those that occupied their tiny American, suburban lives, I became discouraged, heartbroken, and wrecked.

I was keeping up with and reading too many articles that painted a bleak picture of our immediate future and I was internalizing the anguish of our collective souls. I was seeing my friends in pain, confusion, despair.  Every single day.  I'd always come here to find connection I didn't have off line and now on line was threatening my sense of peace, already tenuous, and sending me to the panicked dystopian hell where everyone who looked like me, loved like me, and felt like me would be on the run.  Not even the hedgehogs and kitties and other cute things could save me.

When we got to Barbados my offline life was so unbearable that the retreat into the internets saved my life.  I didn't want to admit that I was startlingly unhappy, suffering from postpartum depression, and realizing I actually knew very little about how to love and be loved and wasn't going to get it from my husband or distant family.  My husband who'd seemed like a charm in New York was distant, unavailable, and overwhelmed in Barbados.  He left me to the care and handling of the home and the children and retreated deeper into his own pathos.  I did not know how to ask for care and comfort in all the ways it might have taken to get it, but I did know how to surround myself in a virtual world with people who would empathize with me, would root for me, pray for me, and wait for me to arrive every day to share.  I needed that love and fought like hell for it no matter its imperfection and its empty promise.   

Life off line is messy and beautiful, hysterical, passionate, and tormented.  There are hours, days, weeks of high energy, high impact, live on stage business that exhaust, rip apart, and tear at the seams of everything.  Whether I am dealing with my daily grind, my midlife struggles, or empathically feeling the torment of human existence, off line I often find myself gasping for air and trying to catch my breath as I see compassion and empathy exit the building.  I've tried to share that on line--my hurts, my hopes, my fears, my anger even, but it often feels too tempered.  I don't fight.  I choose my words carefully.  I listen and acquiesce.  I am imploring, conveying, hoping, and posting about things I love.  My children, fashion, decor, music, art, and all people and especially black people because I love us in our struggles, in our hopes, in our relentless pursuit in the face of unending trauma.  I swear I hope I am convincing, showing, revealing who I am, who we are in every mundane, daily moment, but I don't know. I don't know anymore if I am succeeding in either space.

My life on line is beautiful, I'm not fronting.  We are a photogenic family who take lots of photos of the major and minor adventures in our lives.  There is witty banter and dry, in-the-know wit and humor.  I have always been good with a comeback and can put together good images.  In the face of the funk I can plant flowers and hope.  I love a cute animal doing an insanely cute thing and am extremely passionate about the people, places, and things that I love.  I am a well edited and curated catalog of incidents, moments, and images.  But it is all edited.   An artist edits her work, her writing, her paintings, her collection, her life to tell a more cohesive story.  An unedited showing would be all over the place, full of contradictions, promises and lies and love and fear and darkness and light.  

I hopped off line because I wanted to be in a private space to mourn and I didn't know what to say.  I was hardly able to speak in real life and didn't want to flinch and wince and lie or rant and scream and plead in the place I'd come to seek like minds of the ether, people I know, I've met, and still have to meet.  I ducked out when I wondered what more I had to give or contribute. When I thought I'd nothing else to share or say and that, as I have since I was a young girl begging my parents to see me, shouted myself to hoarseness to no avail.  I bowed out and eventually watched from the sidelines.  I am lonely sometimes.  So lonely.  I am scared and hurt and frustrated that we are not seeing or hearing each other.  That people who have not lived outside of a world of privilege are still leading the conversation about whether or not our lives are even relevant, let alone how to heal all that separates and divides us.  On line or off, I had to admit that I am still watching so much happen on the outside, feeling all of it, and screaming, screaming, screaming my head off in the most polite way.  And I am not sure who can even hear me or gives a damn.



(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.