To The Other Side of Dreaming

Doing Right By Each Other

Dear Stacey,

An insightful friend of mine once told me, “ mia, it’s not about you giving less, it’s about everyone else giving more.”  I am feeling that so deeply right now.  I feel very depleted these days with you, like I have given so much and am just waiting.  Waiting for you.

I am waiting for us to go through the accountability process together so that you can work to be accountable for your harmful impact, I can have intentional space for healing and so we can create collective resiliency practices together.  Waiting to try and do accountability between two women of color well, instead of all the destructive, unsuccessful ways I have seen it attempted in the past.  Waiting for you to reach out—anything—instead of hiding and running.  Waiting for you to risk, for you to stretch, for you to gamble on being present.  Waiting for you to be who you said you would be to me, to yourself, to us. 

I keep reciting, “I believe that transformation and healing are possible” over and over to myself like a mantra every day, every moment; taking deep breaths to remind myself of what I am committed to.  I keep moving from my commitment of staying in it when things are hard, my love for you and my trust that you want to do the work.  But damn, some days it is so hard. 

I know i am in the throws of it, of this thing called transformation (that will never be over).  I am steady and rooted in my commitment to you, but I also know that everyday you don’t show up for me (us), every time you aren’t present, every time you choose to hide over being forth-coming, every time you choose to align with whiteness and your white privilege, my heart breaks a little bit more.

I am trying to hold on.  I love you beyond words. And I am hurt, angry, sad and disappointed.  And I am not leaving.  I am not going anywhere.

I want us, two queer asian korean disabled women of color to be able to have these kinds of honest, transparent conversations here, on To the Other Side of Dreaming. I want this, not just for transparency and accountability, but also to leave evidence for other women of color about what our struggles have been and are, so that we can offer our learnings.  I really can’t think of public sharing from women of color—especially East Asian women of color—about accountability from each other, to each other; other than open letters between leaders who weren’t in everyday community with each other.  We gossip and we vent, we push people away from us or we leave, we isolate ourselves or each other, we break connection or demonize each other to the point where connection is no longer an option, we hide and stuff our feelings, instead of sharing them, or we rip each other to shreds in fights that destroy, not deepen connection.  And then we go out to the protests and fight against white and male supremacy, prisons, wars, police and gentrification tearing our communities and families apart.  But mostly, we hurt.

Do we ever really share the ins and outs of some of the hardest places between us as women of color?  As disabled people?  As queer disabled women of color?  It is rare and we have much to learn.  What are the victories?  The things we wish we had done better?  The times we weren’t the people we wanted to be or are committed to being?  How did you come back, how did you heal, find resiliency, rebuild trust?  The attempts at accountability that I have seen (actual accountability, not just a sweeping under the rug) have not gone well, caused even more harm, had no community/collective support because, let’s be honest the world we live in doesn’t have a commitment to women of color loving each other, let alone, ourselves.  Or they’ve never even happened.

We need to be able to have accountability around light skin privilege, white privilege, class, ability, heteronormativity and heterosexism, access to land and family and culture and language, transphobia and gender, sex work, abuse, education and citizenship privilege as women of color, as asian pacific islander women, as korean women.  And, more importantly, we need to have accountability for how we treat each other as women of color.  We need to treat each other better.  We need to love each other better.

This is part of our journey of creating home, learning how to love ourselves and each other.  Learning how to love the reflections of ourselves that we’d rather not see reflected back at us by one of our own.  Learning how to be accountable to each other and redeem ourselves for our mistakes.  Learning how to take responsibility when we hurt and harm each other (which we will do again and again), not just learn how to celebrate each other in all of our magnificence.  This is part of our work as women of color: to learn how to love each other and how to do right by each other. And to share it with each other.

In struggle and commitment,

mia

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