Despair is needed

Despair is not a tool of empire. Denying it is.

Despair is not a tool of empire.

To say so actually reeks of ableism.

I write this as a person with chronic depression and suicidality, and pushing off despair has always been my downfall. Suicide was my escape hatch from despair that began with some of my first memories: when things were bad with my mom, when I was being bullied in school or by my cousins, there was the relief of a man dressed like Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy who I would imagine coming in and shooting me. The bliss of of feeling control, the bliss of cutting off the sorrow I was feeling to experience instead the torment of wanting to die.

That is easier than despair.

I do not know a world outside of empire but I will not believe that mentally ill people don’t exist in the utopia we imagine. To believe we had a role pre colonialism is a sneaky tenant of capitalism.

What is it to drool, to fail, to wail, to mutter, to hurt yourself, to die? To be these things, to be unfit for work— that is the greatest threat to empire.

When I see artists and activists I admire put down despair, I feel shame. Much of my own sickness is a result of shame and feeling it was wrong to be so tormented.

Let’s go back to the years just after the black plague in Europe. When the drop in population lead European peasants to revolt because they knew their labor was worth something. Let’s consider how those in power turned to the slave trade in response. Public human dissections were instrumental in transforming the body from a sacred autonomous space to one viewed as a machine. Sickness meant failure, death meant failure.

This image is taken from Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. The public dissections of the body were meant to dispel the body as a magical reseptical to one of labor.

A tool of empire is not despair but pushing away ANY particular feeling. A tool of empire is leaping from desire to desire.

During a time of crisis I made the decision to stop talking to my family— my siblings briefly, but my mother forever. The crisis that precipitated this had me so suicidal that I couldn’t be left alone. The Poet watched me closely, even worried when I went out on a walk. I couldn’t do my teaching artist work and I was at my sickest with lyme disease. A friend got me a job writing straight erotica so I could be at home. To not be in touch with my siblings was a horror to me even if it was my decision. I wailed to my therapist “I never imagined this could happen.”

This somatic therapist directed me to my despair.

“You can feel it,” they said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll never get out of it.” I laid on the body work table, shaking with fear.

“Emotions need to move.”

Not speaking to my mom brought incredible relief. Hurting my siblings by not talking to them and then abandoning them as they had to care for my mom is a sadness I will always carry.

But at this moment, it was profound because everything needed to stop. To be this sick, both with viruses throughout my body and a tormented mind, helped me feel what Virginia Wolf wrote about being a leaf on a river.

My siblings and I reconnected and reconciled. My mental health became more stable. Meds helped. But to even think of my mom, to hear of her, would send everything flooding again. There was a despair I still couldn’t touch. My siblings showed me the most profound love by keeping her and stories of her from me.

Then at the beginning of August 2023 she was dying. My siblings didn’t want me to feel pressured but they were honest: my mom kept asking to see me. “It’s her dying wish.”

I didn’t think I would ever let myself see her again. I didn’t think I could survive it. But I went.

There were tumors on either side of her throat. This is what would kill her before the cancer spreading would. She faced being strangled to death at any moment. She was sitting up in her chair, she was skinnier than I’d ever seen her.

“I feel like my soul is back,” she said.

“No, mom,” I got to say. “You have your own soul.”

“I want you there at the end,” she said. I shivered.

But I went and I learned for the first time what it meant for a body to die. A friend who had watched many people die had warned me: “death is gruesome”, but there was no way for me to be prepared. It took so long for her to die. My siblings and I slept piled on furniture in her tiny apartment for days. Since she insisted on staying in her own bed it was very difficult to rotate her. I looked at the bodiness of her body. I watched as nurses sprayed soap foam between her legs and under her breasts to make her smell better. The shock of all her pubic hair; her body was young.

This person who hurt all of us so much was just a body. She was dying in a cruel way. She had to have male nurses look at her naked body, which she hated. My brother tried to keep the wisps of her hair combed because she was so particular about how she was seen.

When my sister and I took her earrings out after death, because the funeral home requested it, we kept apologizing to her.

She hates this.

I’m sorry, mom.

I’m sorry, mom.

This was the mother I got and the fact that I couldn’t be alive and be in touch with her is one of the despairs of my life. My mantra through much of my life had been either she dies or I die.

But then she died and this didn’t mean that I had to live. I was struck instead with the certainty: if she can die then I can die.

This is what eliminated my suicidality. In its place my fear of death was revealed.

To be afraid of death is a tool of empire.

This is what scared me: to be seen as rotting, as useless, to smell, and shit yourself, to have no control over what your body looked like in death.

“It’s gruesome,” my sister said a year later, “but it’s natural.”

My whole life I’d longed to die but I understood, all at once, that I didn’t want to die. I wanted control. If I could always feel an exit, I could easily avoid my negative emotions: my sadness, my failures, all the horrors of the world I can’t stop.

A new therapist said “You’re not just grieving your mom. You’re grieving the control you used to feel with death.”

I am going to die. I’m not going to be in to it. I am going to be in extreme pain again. I am going to cause strain to those around me. I am going to reek. I’m going to be useless. I am going to be forgotten. Before this I will watch everything I love be taken from me. I am witnessing suffering. I will watch my loved ones in pain and their death will be a strain on me. But I will not put the sheet over their head after death, just as my sister and I cried out when the nurse tried to after my mom’s pulse stopped. I decorated her with shells. I will decorate you in death.

How dare we watch this genocide and not feel despair?

My friends, to feel despair is to embrace the tragic, to embrace what is unfair for the sake of itself. Perhaps this will make our joy more profound, but I don’t do it for that. Despair is profound. Death is profound. Your failure, my god, is profound. Feel it, feel it all. This precious gift of pain.