Letters to Veronica

You are complete
Yu are powerful
You are kind

You are love and lovable
You are cracks and wonders
You are beauty as you are

You are passion and insight
You are dreams and sweat
You are possibilities

You are pain and darkness
turned light

Tu eres las mujeres que vinieron antes de ti
y las que vendrán

Tu eres los hilos de las historias
Of your story

You are the strength of the threads in tension
and the relief of the next page
You are the brief moments of love
in a lifetime of fighting and pain


You are the welder that outgrows brief moments into days
hours, and years of light

You may not believe it now
But I promise you

I am living proof of that

You are not the reflection coming at you from the mirrors of this world
You are the bright lights that you meet when you close your eyes

You are the full, shinny moon above you and the soil caress your feet
You are the loving gaze of the souls around you and within you

You are
You are

You are the tears dried up in your cheeks as I write this poem
You are my loving gaze telling you not to worry
The pain will go away
You will push it away
You will
You did

You are

Endings and Beginings

Flashback 2005
Fastforward 2016

So much has happened 
So much heartache and tribulations

Navigating a world structural designed to push you away

Having to fight back over and over, and... over
Not out of choice really

But then the non-choice becomes a choice
You turn it into a choice 
Ploughed my way through it all 

Of course my plans were nebulous. I had no plans in fact. All I knew, all I had was a strong internal voice telling me that I needed to detach from that place of belonging, that I needed to leave my 'safety', and that in this way I would somehow build a version of myself that I would be comfortable with. 

In many ways, being a woman outside the box of the cultural expectations meant a confinement that I could only escape by leaving.

My escaping enterprises

And the power of hand sight and one day after the next

Because time writes in itself many more stories (not scripts) that we can even dare to imagine 

But I am not trapped anymore in the 'here and now'

I am past, present and future all at once. Nurturing, circular, inventing and re-inventing

Redemption. Possibilities 

Intertwined stories

De cuando solíamos pensar que 'me hizo mujer'

Vulnerabilidad. Miedo al rechazo, a no ser amada. 
I am not good enough
Por ello destino es igual al hombre que, finalmente, me haga mujer. 

Bull shit

Tal es la fuerza del patriarcado internalizado que, aun a estas alturas de nuestras vidas (note to self: never forget life is a circle), siguen llegando hombres a nuestra vida que pretenden 'hacer mujeres' sin parirlas. Sólo acostándose con ellas.  

Las madres de la vida, de la tierra ...giving up their power (que no es un poder the avasallar sino de tejer)

Y todo porque? por un poco de atención. Autoafirmacion desde afuera no es autoafirmacion. Es abandono del derecho a la identidad. Del derecho a ser. Full stop. 

Siempre nos viene desde fuera (eso parece, eso nos enseñan) la idea de nosotras mismas. 

Someone should have told us that beauty is NOT in the eye of the beholder. And so I write to exzorcise the voice deep down that still believes that. 

Someone should have known better

But that's the past. And its ok. Now. Perdonar es una pagina que ya pase. Pero el olvido es diferente. El olvido es el indice al que siempre debo volver. Para no olvidar. Because only through the past I can join the dots, that will lead me to my future

Tiempo circular

#Hope

I am afraid that if if forget 

That if I don't remember my story

If I don't make the effort, the brave effort to remember my story

Something is going to be lost 

Forever

Introspection

I don't remember love in my childhood

Yes, no childhood shit

But I really don't 

I kid you not

I am afraid but I am also brave

Because I am finding the way to remembering 

Because remembering is redemption 

Painful redemption

Like Kelly says. I thought my My life was empty but it is not

Which doesn't mean fulfilment is effortless 

And I am learning to accept and to thank the universe for that

Because of you my heart was never whole

But I am filling that whole

With my grace 

Yes I've never strain far from the sidewalk

But I am creating the habit to resist the temptation to stay small

Because I-am-NOT

Small

I sill haven't quite understood how to let someone in

But I trust that I will learn

In time

what do I care about?

Many things.
which probably boils down to: nothing at all.

Once upon a time I used to entertain the idea of me as an 'activist' (whatever that means), who is really o-u-t there doing 'important' stuff

And while I don't deny everything that I gained from those days (as it turns out - full time activism brings more to the activist than to the world that one is set out to 'change').. after various turns of destiny I realised that I could not really try to find o-u-t there what was really missing underneath

This is not an existential crisis - is pretty much an empirical observation, actually.
There is no hope beyond the realms of our own thoughts.

There isn't really any other winnable battle, we can only realistically hope to nurture and unlock our minds
To change powerful 'structures'. To make 'revolutions'. To change what is.
Those are nothing but false illusions.
Nothing at all

I guess, then, that a better way of framing that is by asking, instead: what I am afraid of loosing?

My desire to unlearn, to challenge the patterns, the scripts that I was jailed into believing as my own

No childhood shit. We can't expect to grow up - to really grow up, if we don't grow out of ourselves and our ego.. that which narcissistically fools us into believing that 'we can change the world' while sneakingly prompts us to n-o-t check ourselves.

Another world is possible? probably not.

But another way of thinking the world is not only possible, but all around us.
Around you and me. If we dare to look at each other in the eye, as well as within

The self

Me, the people I've spoken to. Those I have loved. Those I have not. Those I live with. Dream about. Those who brought me to this world. A personal history crafted through the years.

In pain, love, joy, friendship and betrayal

The punishment, the guilt, the masks I get to wear, those that I don't even dare to show.

Those that I have no option but to show because they are imprinted in my body

Fussy memories of unexplained scars and growing pains so deep that words to describe it are hard to find

Powerlessness

Unattainable change

The self?

Me, the people I've spoken to. Those I have loved. Those I have not.

My escaping enterprises

Those I have cared about along that path. Even too much. Insanely so. 

The ‘soulmates’ that were not soulmates.

But only a naive desire to have absolute soulmates.

And the power of hand sight and one day after the next

Because time writes in itself many more stories (not scripts) that we can even dare to imagine

Trapped in the here and now.

Yet one must be very careful of not turning these stories into scripts.

Many of those scripts are dead old, so ingrained in our psyche.

We overlook their existence, we take them for granted.

We cling on them in a dogmatic, paranoid search for purity

A road to nowhere.

Paralysing action.

Removing violently any sign of difference and dissent.

There is no discourse anymore. Only empty monologues carefully crafted to look like tolerance.

We really are not willing to listen.

Why? We dangerously take the script for the reality.

We trap ourselves in it by feeding those scripts of romanticised past glories...

Or fast forward revolutions...

Or the comforting cradle of our present.

Without reflecting in our own actions, our histories… the individual and the collective…

Cradles, cages..

Our 'feel of the game' that scapegoats into others our own miseries

Without reflecting in our own actions

Without even bothering to look across, let alone within.

We actually write those scripts yet we afford them the power of master categories. Masters of us, willing slaves.

Powerless people longing to grasp from outside what only comes from within

But we don’t believe in our ability to break off from that. We deify our own miseries, condemning ourselves to keep forever repeating the past, while we think we are building the future over empty arguments and poignant crucifixions 

Impossible redemption?

We trap ourselves into a hell of our own making, perpetuating unquestionably that elusive thing we call reality

"As if reality is a picture we take in one moment in time and is only to be seen from one particular angle"

So much arrogance! Naive or not, but arrogance nonetheless

Questioning that, of course, has a price

Firstly self hate, then we mirror that hate into others.

If we dare to look across we only get to see our reflection in the lake.

We don't really 'see' the other. We just have eyes to punish ourselves, in ourselves and in others.

We then hide behind tantrums and 'territorial' demarcations, separating out what is supposedly pure perfect and incorruptible (the reflection in the lake) from what is not

Dangerously exclusionary 

No one is exempt

We all have been through it

We all have seen our reflection in the lake and mistaken it for god. Unchecked privilege

And then those gods, by virtue of the power we bestow upon them

Are turned into the gatekeepers of change

Disembodied change

Unattainable change

Nothing guaranties we won't keep doing that. We will.

But at least we can hope

To embrace, with time, enough strength to break ourselves from those subservient images 

But is it really that bitter?...the lack of reflection.. And the consequences of it? Because it may well be (and it probably is) very sweet and pleasant 

Depending of course  on 'which side you are on'

The (righteous) collective or the self

Promoting sameness  or embracing difference

Sameness brings comfort 

Familiarity

The reproduction of life... of the known world

Difference brings in questions 

It means making an effort 

To reconcile

To reach out the other

Is this dichotomic thinking even valid?

Is it always either / or?

Probably not. But because we believe in a cartesian world, we create and recreate it like that

Over and over again

There is no questioning of the structures

Of our own thinking

or our behaviours

And so we become trapped into habits

That reproduce the script for the reality

Self-perpetrating our own powerlesness 

Me, the people I've spoken to. Those I have loved. Those I have not.

Our collective history crafted through centuries of pillage, pillagers and their friends

But the conquest was successful

Oh so successful thar we admire them, we love them. Even now. Especially now.

So much so that we colonise and re-colonise each other

When become perpetrators of our own kind, and any kind.

Of ourselves, and others.

When we are turned into scapegoats. And we accept it

Because we will also, eventually, find our own scapegoats

When?

The minute that we give in to the narcotic pleasure of our own ego

The minute we can cling to a little parcel of power 

The minute we forget who we are and where we come from

And we victimise our sisters and brothers

Betrayal, deception, pain

This is our reality as colonised people's: all our systems of belief are founded upon the collective execution of scapegoats

Malinche, 'Maria Lionza'

The mythology surrounding the foundations of who we are

Myths charged with self hate, guilt 

Myths that condemn our people into inaction, powerlessness

Myths that reinforce the 'truth' that we deserved to be punished, raped, pillaged

And that change only comes from without

How convenient that those scapegoats are always at the ‘crossroads’

Neither here, not there. Insiders and outsiders.

We can blame them for all our sorrows

We cyclically satanise and idealise those scapegoats

Revolving, revolting, rebellious

But we only sabotage our own liberation

Always reproducing the script for the reality

Nullifying difference. Nullifying the self

Invisible, non- existing stories

Stories that we kill before we even let them start

There is no vision, there is no change

The whip only reaches our own back

So

Is there a better self?

Is it possible to stitch together the scattered pieces of our wounded selves?

Is there a self that is caring and loving

that fights its own miseries 

That re-composes the in- between?

I do not know the answer. I reject answers

I reject the white rational lie and all its answers

I just want to *believe* in our better *selves*

And in the loving task of igniting the fire of that, our better nature 

Because believing can also be an answer

Our better self/selves 

Together

In a place where we don't have to give up ourselves

To merge into others

In a place where we can truly be equal and different

Equal but different

Never the same

But unafraid

Si no miras de frente tu propia historia esta condenado a repetirla

Si no miras de frente tu Historia estas condenado a que te la arrebaten

Me, the people I've spoken to. Those I have loved. Those I have not.

The intertwined stories 

Is there a place for stories?

Not the dramas, not the scripts 

The stories

The self

Redemption

Mutual oppressions re informing each other

We don't know our history
Or if we know some of it, We know a version that negates our intimate possibilities of redemption

Self flagelating into a way of thinking and feeling that not only keeps us oppressed, but sabotage any attempt to reverse that tide

Such is the logic of violence and violated bodies: to keep forever inflicting in ourselves the guilt of a past of absolute powerlesness. A past that keeps perversely embroided in our skin

But how to reach redemption? Is it simply a matter of choice?

That would be nice wouldn't it. If it was a choice surely we would do it
Right?

Choices, opportunities.. agency what does that *really* mean?
The liberal/middle class 'progressive' would have us believing that no matter the condition, a 'decision' is always possible.

The decision to leave your violent partner, the decision to better yourself and learn english, to 'integrate' or at least learn few words so they can't fuck you over *that* much

Yes that is a nice thought
But what do we have behind underneath and within individual's 'decisions'?

We have stories. Stories of love, deception and sacrifice. Material and subjective ties, sometimes chains, enslaving, condemning, sealing fates as determinations

Mutual oppressions re-inforcing each other

What way for redemption?
Is there one?