worth the weight

a luminescent shift in perspective

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” —The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara

i used to think of becoming or being whole as existing in a state of weightlessness; that once unburdened by the impacts of various traumas or the baggage of other life experiences, the heaviness i felt within my body & psyche would be replaced by the opposite; buoyancy, lightness, ease, an airiness, or perhaps nothing at all, just a sense of no longer having an albatross slung around my neck & shoulders, bowing my spine. and there are times when that is what i indeed experience at this stage of my life, even in the midst of trying circumstances or when seized by the discomfort that arises from making contact with the roughness of growth’s more abrasive edges. the stones in my belly decalcify, the knots in my psyche slowly, delicately untangle themselves and reform new connections one synapse at a time.

but what i’ve also come to recognize, and one of many things Toni Cade Bambara taught me through The Salt Eaters is that there is a weight of responsibility i feel in regards to living on the other side of survival with my whole self intact…to nourishing, protecting, and holding my own wholeness. i recognize part of bearing the weight of it somatically, expressing it, and living it out loud, is for me but also my children, my family, my lineage.

it is both the weightlessness of the free fall and the density and mass of the catch.

yet it’s a responsibility that doesn’t feel burdensome to tend to—not for my own mother, or the grandmothers i’ve known only in name and spiritual presence, nor for the other women, neurodivergents, & queers in my lineage who perhaps were not afforded the ability or longevity to do so while in their own corporeal forms.

it’s an experience that is indeed well worth its weight.