Home

July 2017

Home is the place where the light first leaves one's eyes. It is the place where one's authenticity inevitably clashes with deeply entrenched customs and beliefs. And so, it is a place where healing can occur only after leaving to find that the world is broader and returning to find home too limited for expansion.

Eight months ago, I decided to pack all the belongings that I could fit in my car and return home. I thought I would be here for three to five months at the most, working and saving money to venture off to my next destination. I returned with stale eyes and fresh feelings, seeing nothing but traditions and customs ripe for judgment, reasons why one might become enmeshed in chaos. I problematized every person, place, and encounter, as I had been doing since my first few visits home from college.

However, this time was different; it required a certain determination and mental distance since I wasn't just coming home for a few days, briefly encountering my old self and returning to Charleston to remember who I had become, all the progress I had made in the journey to being whole. I had to bring my person with me this time because there would no longer be a Charleston where I could leave her and return to shed the child who grew up in Greenville.

In the days right before leaving, I read a message on the Spirit Library:

When you hold the child in yourself and the wounding it has suffered, clearly in your vision once again, you can hold it close, in your own control . . . you can bring the lost child home. See if you can find the child in you that is lost and that needs you: your heart, your inner knowing, and your firm roots . . . come home to yourself; embrace your shadow parts, for the shadow is not real . . . but it is now time to wake up so the light may flow again.

The thought of encountering the child and her shadow parts came with fear and anxiety, generously sprinkled with curiosity and excitement. It is the feeling one might get at the thought of waking sleeping ghosts, knowing that their mere presence is just as terrifying as the possibility of interacting with them, but acknowledging that interaction could turn out to be quite interesting and maybe even fun. Whether I wanted to acknowledge the child and her shadows or not, she appeared, illuminating every bit of insecurity and toxicity that I thought I could positively think away. Return to toxic environments and toxicity greets you with open arms, a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye, an old familiar friend.

The things that I left were the things that I thought I could outrun. Instead, I carried them with me and had to face old demons and new. I spent a lot of nights crying, grieving for lost friends and lost lovers, parts of my identity that were no longer within reach, and books and faces that I could no longer read. I cried for sleeping on couches, being broke and eating groceries I didn't buy, and for believing that artists create lives where their souls can flourish while practical adults went about chanting "Work. Bills. Job. Work. Bills. Job. Work. Bills. REAL job" in endless monotony. I mourned for every misunderstood word I uttered, every syllable I swallowed back down, every feeling and inner truth that seemed to be invalidated at every turn. Am I talking about Charleston or Greenville?

I got back to Greenville and I was bitter, sad, and gaining weight. As if my pants and dresses getting tighter wasn't enough of an indicator, it seemed like everyone felt they should remind me that home is the place where your hips spread from years of your own baggage and generations of everyone else's. They told me that I looked like my "old self" again, which I found devastating, because who wants to look like their "old self" after years of inner changes? So, I mourned for the body I lost and for the body that reappeared. Healing journeys will always remind us that our physical bodies are mere containers for our souls. They respond to the changes, too.

Shortly after returning to Greenville, I went to the strip club. It was the night before New Year's Eve, and I think it was there that reality set in. "Miya, you are really back home." As I walked to the door, someone yelled my name out of their car window and reminded me who they were by telling me they used to cheat off my papers in middle school. The person checking bodies and bags at the door was someone from high school. One of the dancers was a girl I knew in middle school.

Another dancer told my cousin she was the "wokest" person in the place simply because she had natural hair. Men stood two feet away from the stage and didn't throw a single dollar because "these girls are old news." I know the reason because I asked, effectively annoying the shit out of the man obviously enjoying the show but unwilling to compensate the dancers for sharing their talents.

I think the drunken tears that I cried at 5 am over my uneaten All-Star Breakfast were an appropriate response to the realization that I felt like I had returned to a garbage bin. Trash. It was all trash. If I were back here again, that made me trash too. And what does Miya do when Miya is drunken trash? Miya calls the men who will listen. There were three in particular that night, but only one really mattered, the one I left in Charleston, the one I thought I could forget by creating physical distance.

I always say that my reason for coming home was to save money, and I always know that I'm telling a half-truth and a whole lie, which is probably why I've been here for eight months and have saved no money. The real reason I had to leave Charleston is that the relationships I had built there had failed me and I them. I came home because home is always where I come when I'm hurt about failed relationships. It's probably more accurate to say that I had outgrown those connections, but when one thinks that they have found forever, even a day less feels like a failure.

The one who mattered answered the phone and conversed with me. He didn't send me to voicemail. He didn't pick up just to tell me he was going back to sleep. He answered; he talked and listened; he let me air all my grievances about our partnership, the same things that I had told him over and over again, reasons why I felt hurt, reasons why I found forgiveness impossible, reasons why resentment sat on my heart like vultures perched and waiting, ready to swoop in and feed on dead flesh.

He reminded me that I was back in the place where the monsters in my head come to life, and if I hoped to defeat them, if I hoped to avoid being destroyed by them, I would have to acknowledge that I couldn't do so with tequila and IPAs. I'm pretty sure that I was drinking straight Hennessy that night. It's funny that he would be the one to remind me of my monsters, because some of the monsters still look just like him. However, on this particular night, not even he could be as terrifying as the prospect of being consumed by the monsters that inhabit home.

As the new year gradually settled in, so did I; I got as comfortable as one can possibly get in a space that is too tight and with several planets in retrograde at one time. I explored a short-lived job that allowed me to travel on the weekends; of course, it meant sacrificing sleep and a decent diet. I continued doing my freelance writing job, thoughtfully crafting essays for people who can afford to pay others to do their schoolwork. I developed my skills at my real job as a case manager.

Between those three jobs, I managed to keep my mind occupied during the daytime. Demons had no time to come out and play until it was time to rest. When one desires a quiet mind and a restful sleep, ghosts chatter noisily. I have often found myself awake at 4 and 5 am, and sometimes so late that the sun is creeping through my window as the birds begin to chirp, contemplating all the failed relationships and all the ways that I could extricate myself from my undesirable situation, namely being home when I wished to be elsewhere. Ask me where I want to go and I always give some ready-made answer to make it sound like I have a plan. The truth is, I don't know where I want to be. The truth is, anywhere that shadows cannot lurk.

I mourn the failed relationships because they remind me of the most troubled relationship of all: the one between myself and me; Black and woman; scholar and artist; human and spirit; Miya Shaquan. Periods of growth and ascension involve shedding layer after layer of our identities, and as I've gone between home and Charleston, Charleston and home, I have shed and shed and shed, only to find that ghosts do not care who you have become, only who they have known. Shadows do not shed like humans do; shadows BUILD layer upon layer. How else are we supposed to remember how far we've come on our journeys?

When I first arrived in Charleston, I looked to replicate parts of home. I found dancers and musicians to replace the artists of my adolescence. I found lovers and friends to help me forget the ones I had left. I found mother figures to soothe the longing I felt for the women at home. I found spiritual guides to take the place of religious leaders.

I also found some things that were new, things I did not have and could not find at home. I found the space to cultivate my love of Blackness, African and American and African American; I discovered the joy of not being the only person with natural, nappy hair in the room. My professors introduced me to Feminism, and then to Black Feminism and Womanism where Feminism was too exclusive. I committed myself to social justice advocacy and explored the joy and struggle of helping organize an after-school program for girls and queer youth. I wrote reflection after reflection on all that I had learned and all the ways that I was growing. I found ways to acknowledge and cope with depression and anxiety, and I re-discovered how delicious bacon and cheeseburgers are after seven years of abstaining from pork and beef. I was learning to live and to love on my own terms.

As the adult in me ascended and discovered her light, the child emerged from time to time, reminding me of wounds where no light had yet entered. And while the time I spent in Charleston came with a lot of growth, I experienced a lot of darkness there too, mostly having to do with baggage I carried from my youth. Every visit home came with the realization that there was still so much healing to do, for myself, for my family, for my ancestors, for the world itself. Every visit home reminded me that the shadow was adding layers, that the ghosts would have to be awakened at some point.

As an adult, I have been able to confirm a lot of things that the child had already discerned but did not have the language to speak. The child perceived issues with a "Christianity" that was judgmental and oppressive, but it wasn't until leaving and visiting home that I developed the courage and the resolve to distance myself from a religiosity powered by my shame and a belief in an angry, jealous god who I should fear. That could not pave my path to the divine.

It is difficult for me to imagine a god that requires me to deny any parts of myself. In fact, I began to question all organized religion; I meet any and all dogmatism skeptically because it seems illogical to me that the journey to God could be anything but individual and unique for each of us. Family members quickly misconstrued my beliefs as atheism. One person even told me that she was wary of me and kept her distance because she didn't know what I meant by using the term "Universe;" it alarmed me that she would consider God and the Universe separate entities.

The child perceived that curses trickle down generation by generation, perpetuating cycles of oppression and silence. The worst kind of oppression is internalized, and the most effective kind of silence is self-imposed. As a child, I became a master at silencing myself. While there might have been some wisdom in learning when and when not to speak, that old, oppressive adage "children should be seen and not heard" became ingrained in my psyche. I got tired of being reprimanded for sharing my observations of "adult" conversations; and the few times that I shared my feelings on situations having to do directly with me, my feelings were invalidated, dismissed as ridiculous or wrong in some way.

So I carried silence with me. I learned to swallow my words so that they form tension in my shoulders, pain in my chest, and lumps in my stomach. I can attribute the demise of many of the relationships I left in Charleston, in part, to my silence. I've been reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and I relate on a profound level to Alexey Alexandrovitch's agonizing contemplation over confronting his wife for her indiscretion in her blossoming love affair with Vronsky. While Alexey Alexandrovitch is motivated by other people's perceptions rather than his own inner knowing, which is not entirely different from me, I understand being stuck in the cycle of preparing the confrontation speech, admitting that the other person has done "nothing," and acknowledging that jealousy or any feeling that connotes negativity is insulting to oneself and the other person or people involved.

What Alexey Alexandrovitch and I have in common is reducing "nothing explicit" to "nothing." That kind of reduction requires a lack of respect and love for oneself, a reluctance to make the case for why one's feelings on a subject matter. Implicit disrespect is, nonetheless, disrespect, and so my silence in situations of disrespect and injustice, situations that have made me physically ill, that have caused me to abandon friends, family, or activities that I might have otherwise enjoyed, says more about my relationship with myself than my relationship with others.

In a 1972 convocation speech published in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker reminded me that ". . . no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended." I have come home to find that the shadow of silence still has a home here too. Whether it is for the sake of being non-confrontational or choosing my battles wisely, it's a problem because it is ultimately a denial of my authentic self.

Imagine sitting at the dinner table and hearing your family discuss how someone's son will "turn out" gay because he would rather draw pictures or play video games than run around outside or play sports. Or listening to someone constantly refer to a trans person as "he/she" rather than respecting and using their proper pronouns. Or being reminded that "you're eating something" in response to you choosing not to eat meat. Or hearing men and women sitting around discussing, with disgust and ridicule, a woman who chooses not to shave. Or getting on social media and seeing nothing but the policing of Black masculinity and questioning the sexual orientation of men who have made certain fashion choices. Or being told that you "should" wear a bra and you're being disrespectful if you don't.

I don't believe in reprimanding people for where they are on their journeys, but I do ask that people respect where I am on mine. Where I am on mine has such a profound influence on every decision I make for and about myself that it would be so much work to explain how and why I have come to said decisions. Having to choose silence as a better alternative than explaining why things that are perceived as "normal" are, in fact, indicative of deeply entrenched systems of oppression is to deny myself the right to be perceived as fully blossomed. What does it mean to come home and to find that I myself am not my friend?

It means that home is where my shadow thrives. Home is where I can always come to find that the shadow has added layers. It is where I can be reminded that the child is powerful, and she has always been powerful, so much that she and her shadow continue to aid me on my journey. So, here's to the child and her shadow and to being home. Here's to acknowledging that home is where I find light only by way of the shadow. Ase.