by Navila Rashid
“When it is difficult to grasp how to “power through” or to be identified as resilient, who are you calling to for strength, to put one foot in front of the other?”
CW/TW: Assault, Survivorship
I remember spending a whole night tossing and turning in my bed, drowning in my own sweat. I was enveloped by fear and frustration, trying to rid my mind of a memory, an assault. That’s how it works sometimes; years later, randomly in the middle of the night, the body sometimes just remembers and re-lives the pain. I probably spent hours sobbing and wanting to scream into the abyss from anger. Anger that I couldn’t find a way out of the grasps of my trauma. I felt as though I was working so hard to be resilient, feel resilient, to become one with resiliency, and it all went down the drain with just one nightmare. What feels like days and sometimes years, ended up being a few hours.
But on this particular morning, I experienced an almost out of body experience. Something a little bit different. I remember that after I was finally able to wake up, I woke up to the smells of fresh banana leaves, flowing lake water, and fragrances of the soil of my birth country. I couldn’t explain it, but it felt like a rebirth. That morning I was both angry and excited. I was angry that I continued to feel the pain of survivorship, but I was strangely excited to think that healing could mean connecting to my ancestral country. A country I hadn’t been to in over 20 years.
This is probably my first interaction with how I was pulled to my ancestors to help guide me to think about how I come from a lineage of survivors who found resiliency from one another. The reality is, to this day, I struggle with my own survivorship. I struggle with how to do this work and not think about how some mornings I don’t want to get out of bed. How some days I can’t get myself to shower or eat. How some days I’ll stare at the computer screen, frozen because I can’t focus. It’s hard and although there are voices in my head that are screaming: “POWER THROUGH GODDAMNIT!” my heart oftentimes pulls me back and whispers words of compassion: “Today is just not the day to feel or show strength, and it’s okay”.
When I think of resilience and community, I remind myself to call on the calmness of my grandmother and imagine the way she coos at the birds outside on the porch. I think about how my mom softly folds the dough into creases when she’s making samosas. I think about the joy I feel when I’m sharing my favorite meal with some of my closest friends or cooking a meal for my partner. The power of community never fails me. It reminds me that we don’t have to always look to the self to power through. That oftentimes, the “answers” are in the mundaneness of how your chosen community shows up for themselves, modeling that when we are at our worst, we always wake up the next morning and gather a strength fueled by hope, gratitude, kindness, and love.
To my ancestors that have come before me. You are my guiding light. You are my north star. You continue to remind me that I co-exist with the past, present, and future versions of myself, and that it’s going to be okay.
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