I Wasn’t Born Queer, Pagan and Black, I Was Called To Be Queer, Pagan and Black
By: Deneishia Jacobpito
Tags: Human Rights, Self, BlackLivesMatter, Spirituality, Social Justice

I Wasn’t Born Queer, Pagan and Black, I Was Called To Be Queer, Pagan and Black Deneishia Jacobpito Follow Jul 26 · 7 min read

My life is not a series of unfortunate events, it is a ministry.

Photo by Jeff Kingma on Unsplash

I had written a series of articles comparing the relationship between Americans and our system of government to an abusive relationship. I researched, edited, marketed, and promoted the series and sat in fear, staring at the work I had created. I was overcome with sadness over the circumstances I had experienced during my four short decades of life. In these articles, I had revealed my personal experiences with abuse. I counseled and cared for my spirit through the pain of typing every word. I prepared my mental landscape to accept the fact that people would read some of my traumatic experiences for the first time and that level of exposure may be difficult for my friends and family to read. It was emotional turmoil to transfer the experiences from my memory, through my body, to my fingers, and finally to the page. Reliving each and every experience. Taking the time to allow the sounds of the abusers’ voices to once again echo in the cavern of my mind. Allowing the smells of the abusers’ colognes, offices, and the scents on the wind that enveloped us during each encounter to once again assault my senses. Forcing my body to once again feel the weight of the abusers’ body on mine. Forcing my spirit to sort through the contents and to reclaim her role as the overburdened pack mule forced to carry the baggage of my experiences. I was prepared to have conversations with friends and family. I expected those conversations to include the phrases, “I had no idea”, or, “why didn’t you tell me”.

I kept typing, I kept working, driven by a belief that somehow, telling my story, revealing the parallels that I see between our racial, political, and emotional landscape in the United States and the physical, spiritual, and emotional landscape of a trauma survivor would benefit myself and others. That going through the pain of reliving and revealing my personal wounds as well as our shared pains as a nation could be my contribution to the fight for human rights. I prepared for the trolls in the comments, knowing that each article would invite some unsavory internet commentary from opposing opinions and differing experiences. However, I did not prepare for the disgusting display of inhumanity that would overflow through direct message and email. This backlash was a situation I did not believe I needed to prepare for because my DMs and email are a safe space only accessible to those who know me, people I’ve allowed to have access to me at various levels of intimacy. The backlash was not from strangers in the comments. The danger was not coming from outside of my village, the threat was sitting around my campfire and offering me a s’more.

Frozen in shock, I stopped everything I was doing and did not move forward with anything I had planned. I was the proverbial deer caught in the headlights and the semi-truck of betrayal was speeding toward me. My inbox was not full of, “why didn’t you tell me” conversations. Instead, it was brimming with, “why are you using race as an excuse for your failures” conversations. It was filled to capacity with, “Why are you people trying to delete my ancestors brave contribution to history?” It was overflowing with, “You are sensationalizing your self inflicted drama” conversations. My DMs were inundated with, “you are just another liberal whiner libtard using the education my tax money bought you to manipulate your bleeding heart cronies to take away my voice and I’m disappointed in you” conversations.

In the last few months, I have watched my White friends and family lose lifelong friends and family members over Black Lives Matter. I have counseled, consoled, listened, empathized, and mourned their losses as my own. I sat in my own sadness and I walked in their experiences hoping to provide some slight comfort. I believed that the ranks in my battalion of allies had already been thinned during the divisive elections of 2016.

I reverted to old avoidance coping mechanisms. I hid in my head and did not speak about the experience until it was too heavy to carry alone. I did not speak about the reality and details of the experience when I did finally reach out to others. I only revealed that I was sad, worried, and depressed. I didn’t want to make others worry and I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I mostly stayed silent.

During my avoidance, overeating, self-doubt, and berating moments telling myself that I was weak for allowing so many things to derail me and affect my mood and ability to function. Telling myself how I will never live up to my potential because I am not capable. I verbally abused myself pointing out that stronger people or more aware humans would have not allowed people like that into their inner circles and that was proof that my experiences were my own fault and truly I’m just a burden and waste of skin.

With a mouth full of banana bread, I scrolled through social media looking for fuel to feed my avoidance mechanism self-abuse bonfire. This time, the algorithm of my social media feed worked against me. Instead of continuing down a rabbit hole of cute animals, the autoplay function brought me Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gracefully addressing verbally abusive language. I listened to our youngest representative remind me why our stories matter. She reminded me that abuse only continues when we don’t speak. She was going to go home after the incident with Representative Yoho because this was not a unique experience for her. I realized how many times I had not spoken up, how many times I took for granted that my treatment was normal and how accustomed I had become to expecting abuse from myself and others because “that’s just the way people are.”

Martin Luther King Jr said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I have spent a lot of time, money, and insurance claims on my physical and mental health through many modalities of healing including counseling. I have gained perspective and tools to help me function. Sometimes, I stumble, fall back on trauma behavior and fall into despair. I recognize now that those moments are great for reflection and I could re-frame them as a respite from the work it takes to grow and heal every minute of every day. I allowed Ocasio-Cortez telling her story to call me out of my conditioned response. I am also the daughter of my ancestors and I was not raised to accept abuse from myself or others.

Martin Luther King Jr said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

My spiritual practice reminds me that everything from a pebble of sand to humans (both alive and dead) are connected in a very intimate and eternal way. I believe that I am but one piece of a larger whole. All of my experiences, either joy or suffering, have a ripple effect in the pool of humanity.

Dan Brule has been credited as saying, “Being a slave to the conditioned mind causes us to keep cycling through periods of pain and pleasure, joy and suffering, love and hate.” This directly correlates to my belief system so beautifully summarized by Martin Luther King, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”. I have been conditioned that the abuses are normal and therefore permanent, predictable, and just a part of being human. I have been a slave to that conditioning and allowed myself to continue to cycle through that pain. Being a slave to that conditioned way of thinking has damned humanity to an eternity of suffering and I will no longer contribute to that suffering. I am the emancipated daughter of my ancestors, I will not be enslaved.

Every time I am faced with pain, pessimism creeps in. I fall into the conditioned mindset that my circumstances are unchangeable and that difficulty and death will always follow me and those around me. I keep a James Baldwin quote printed and posted in several places in my home. In the conversation, he speaks about White people needing to decide why they invented the nigger and why they need that mythology. However, I rarely look at the beginning of the quote which states, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist.”

Telling my story, sharing how I see myself and the world, revealing my experiences no matter how painful; that is the highest spiritual calling. My life experience is unique because I am the only “me” there is. Telling the story of “me” brings information back to the whole of humanity giving us the knowledge we need to correct our behaviors. I will no longer participate in the violence of silence. I will no longer allow pessimism and despair to rule the day. I am called to tell my story, I am forced to be an optimist because my life is more than my circumstances.

My circumstances and my experiences are my testimony. A testimony is used in the court of law as well as any physical evidence acquired at a crime scene used to inform the jury. A testimony is used in churches as evidence to inform the congregation how lives have been changed through their religious experiences. My life is a testimony, evidence in support of growth, change, rebirth, and optimism. My life experiences are intertwined with labels that were given to me and the myths created around those labels. James Baldwin asked why you need those labels because “The future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question.” I will release the articles and I will not be the cannon fodder in the internal war you wage after reading them.