wait, u mean we have to talk about it?

on the violence of 'keeping the peace'

adrienne maree brown reminds me that oppression is temporary. she also teaches me about true insanity, how racism and misogyny are mental illnesses. when i saw that she was releasing her book loving corrections last summer, i held a large field of hope that people might finally be exposed to the power of harm repair, and skills for holding each other into the future.

part of the work that’s really important to me comes through my personal understanding that we can reach each other through micro-interactions. how care works in fields of woven interconnection.

my work is largely informed by my studies in philosophy, gender studies, within the prison yoga project, and a {continual} integration of abolitionist ideals, radical careworking, and somatic understandings of how bodies function under oppressive dynamics. i am interested in reminding people how to get free in their bodies so they can maintain their resistance against systems of oppression AND deepen their relationships with themselves and others.

in my personal practice as a careworker and somatic practitioner, i’ve taken a pretty solid stance on not engaging in cancel culture, or any practice that promotes alienating humans from networks of care. i’ve talked to a lot of people about this, especially because it’s a revolving conflict in my life. as a careworker, people expect me to conform to normative networks of care, which unfortunately involves a lot of hierarchies, carceral mindsets, and disposal culture.

at the same time, a lot of the work people come to me for is surrounding relational conflict in their worlds. and so, on a deeper level i can see that people really do value community. i see the way that feeling alienated, or not receiving closure, really has an effect on our bodies. i see that people really want to be heard and known, but haven’t been given the greatest tools for navigating conflict with each other.

we crave community, but we don’t actually know how to hold each other close. and it’s not our fault. most of us haven’t been taught how to sustain relationships. our therapists and healers, who have been trained within the carceral state, teach us to cut people off, to ‘protect our peace’—which we call “letting go”. yet, it still emerges in the stolen future of repeated patterns and a dis-membered memory in our bodies.

i find connection not only systemically and culturally important, but as a necessity of liberating ourselves from the Anthropocene. we can’t keep avoiding each other if we want to survive ourselves into the future.

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‘keeping the peace’ actually just creates more conflict.

honestly, anytime i hear someone say they’re just “protecting their peace” i wonder how often they use that phrase to justify avoiding being in deep conflict with someone. which, i get. i totally have people that i have exhausted every avenue of care and communication and i just can’t because conflict is also a movement in collaboration.

but often, when i hear that phrase it’s from the maintained construction of disposal culture and a combination of offhand toxic spiritual individualism. my curiosity is where exactly are we keeping this peace? and what is it keeping us from? my initial sense is that it safeguards our narratives that paint another as an unmoving, static, bad person.

if we zoom out from the micro webs of our own lives, we can see broader implications of the danger and violence of ‘keeping the peace’. those who wouldn’t pick a side between israel and palestine, who maintained that both caused harm and it was too ‘complex’ to choose.

ultimately, peacekeeping fails to address the root cause of conflict, it denies the possibility of true peace by glazing over the very felt and real embodied tension between.

—the thought that led me here; a couple of months ago my friend said to me ‘pax, if your name means peace why do you cause so much conflict in my life’, which was totally a friendly joke but i took very seriously in the moment and replied something like ‘because you can’t have peace without conflict.’

friends, we have to let go of the idea that conflict is bad. whenever we hear that a friend is in conflict with their lover/friend and we automatically take their side because we love them, we embrace and affirm that conflict is a bad thing by denying the other party their own complex human experience. or everytime we swallow the cultural (and monogamous) idea that whenever we have repeated conflicts with someone we’re dating that it means we aren’t compatible, or that things aren’t going to work out. they CAN work out, we just have to choose to root down and get to the bottom of our deep shared feelings/fears etc. we have to ask ourselves what we want, aside from what culture/friends tells us.

the reality is that conflict is the only way we can get closer to each other’s hearts. that tension we feel whenever things don’t quite feel smooth/flowy with another person doesn’t automatically mean things are bad. when we let go of the category of ‘bad’ and tune into the sensation more, it’s likely we will find that it feels really uncomfortable, or like we have words stuck in our bodies that want to be heard, whatever it may be.

as someone really invested in being in conflict and having vulnerable scary conversations as often as my body feels the call, i FEEL that tension is actually a cue that show’s us how to return back to our hearts. 100% of my experience with conflict is that when i let myself go deep, and keep listening and exploring the tension between me and another more, i will eventually end up back to an open hearted, trusting place. and maybe this is bold to say, but i really experience and believe that trust and love can be found again and again, and each time we venture through the void of unbecoming/tension we fall deeper and deeper into ourselves and each other.

so when i hear people tell me “i have to protect my peace”, i get really curious about what their really protecting. and are we really all that peaceful if we still have to protect ourselves? if the thought of someone we have unresolved conflict with sends us spiraling, angered, or untrusting of future connections? the more i question and get curious about their process, we often discover that they’re really scared of opening up to the possibility of getting hurt, or being betrayed. and while protecting our peace does protect us from getting hurt, it doesn’t protect our bodies from the stagnation that guarding our hearts creates. because, even if you are certain you don’t want to be deeply connected to someone anymore, chances are your body still wants to be heard and craves the release mechanism of surrendering to your expression & felt sense.

—this is just my moral imperative, you don’t have to do it. im invested in conflict because im invested in abolition. i really fucking mean it when i say that i want the prison walls to fall. that i dont want there to be cops. i believe that no being deserves social/cultural alienation. because i believe this, i have to imagine what life would be like without prisons/cops/military, and when i do it’s hard for me to imagine. because i've seen what we do to each other even in our most radicalized spaces. i have dreams of fire and war all the time, and i do believe we will win. ive seen it and i trust my visions. ive also seen both out in the future, and in the present, the ways we recycle these carceral systems into our lives. i worry about what would happen if the prison walls did fall, would we just create another kind of prison industrial complex? as of right now, i don’t think there’s many of us who would be there to hug our fellow humans and hold them as they re-adjust to a world beyond dehumanization. we certainly don’t do it now.

how could we expect ourselves to maintain this liberated future we imagine loving each other the way we do now? it makes me fully body ache how often people try to punish me for calling for love. im not a pacifist. i know there will be fire. but, as i asked in another piece, ‘what did us abolitionists mean when we agreed that the prison walls should fall but kept them up in our hearts?’. i can’t understand it. everytime we let spite/hatred/weird feelings towards another human grow in our hearts we willingly offer our sovereignty to these bunk systems. i’m not advocating that we deny or shun away these feelings because they are sacred teachers of our experience. instead, i’m advocating that we lean into them, see what the tension shows us and speak to it and feel through it.

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heart of the matter,

i am certain that open heartedness is the most natural language of the body. again, i want to reiterate that following tension is a doorway back into our hearts.
conflict is inevitable. the people we love are going to hurt us, and we’re going to hurt them too. part of being a good lover to the humans in my life is accepting that im going to fuck up, forgiving myself when i do, and moving into clarity through accountability. i am capable of causing harm just as much as i am capable of being harmed. i won’t always be able to communicate in the tender non-violent ways i’d prefer. neither will my friends. sometimes my desires and interests aren’t going to align with all my relations. i’m going to cross people’s boundaries, im not always going to communicate my own boundaries in totality. there will be times i won’t be aware of a boundary until it’s crossed, and then i’ll have to troubleshoot the care i need from there.

relationships are messy. that messiness is also a doorway into the awesomeness of intimacy building. because truly, i don’t want people in my life who don’t want me in all of my fullness. i don’t want to be around people who can’t look me in the eyes and tell me when i’ve fucked up, or people who don’t want that same energy from me. how can i trust someone whose scared to be honest about what they do and don’t like? i understand we all have our own people pleasing shit we’re sorting through, but if you can’t deconstruct or let me know you need support in being held accountable for it, i won’t want to tend to our connection.

it turns me on so much when someone can show me what they want/need. i’m especially into people that choose to feel into their vulnerability, name that theyre feeling scared, and still continue to share themselves despite the somatic risk their body is showing them. there’s so much beauty in the stumbling into our rawness, even if it requires a bit of time, shakiness, and self soothing to coax us out of our fears.

you can’t get good at being in conflict until you let yourself be in it. there is no right way to do it, or special formula that always equals resolution. no situation is going to be the exact same (though often i find that conflicts mirror). love/intimacy/conflict all require experimentation. and truly, experimentation and curiosity are how we break out of the ruts and patterns of our background programming/narratives.

in my small St. Louis queer community, there’s a lot of tense conflict, in-fighting, and complex politics. when conflict is brought up between two people there is such an automated response to pick sides. usually the prescription for anyone who has caused harm is to alienate them from community, care, and alienate anyone who doesn’t also alienate them. i’ve been on the receiving side of secondary alienation quite a lot because i’m unwilling to agree that anyone should be denied access to care. but if you’ve been reading my writing, you know i really believe in our ability to transcend harm. i have to believe it if i stand to see the future beyond this.

the thing that tears down leftists movements the most is infighting. we simply don’t know how to be together amidst conflict. and it will be the death of us. it’s why i keep saying that i dont have to like someone in order to be in community with them. in fact i dont like a lot of people lol. but i do know that when it comes down to it, we want this earth to be liberated from the global powers/imperialism/capitalism etc.

honestly i think a lot of people just agree to whatever everyone else is saying because they don’t want to be canceled themselves. we adopt violence as a form of social currency. which means, that we are not giving ourselves the space to critically think about harm—which ultimately leads to more harm. and this is what i mean when i say that we allow these systems to infiltrate even our sacred radical spaces. we let carceral punishment lead the way rather than dreaming together and inventing new ways to handle harm, to make community negotiations. i love the phrase ‘be hard on systems, not people’. it’s really that simple.

i’ve experienced a lot of harm and violence in the short span of my life. but nothing has been as liberating as understanding that the people who could hurt me like that are so deep in their own shit, and lost in systemic depravity themselves. just because i understand that doesn’t mean that i have to forgive them (though ultimately i do cuz i dont want to carry all that in my heart), it doesn’t mean that i have to talk to them, or engage with them, or even ever see them again if i don’t want to. but i do choose to hold the belief that they are deserving of care, and don’t deserve to be dehumanized or cast aside because of their capability of causing harm.

even when i can’t reach for understanding in myself (i have a lil list of people im pretty pissed off at right now), i know that alienation is harmful. punishing people doesn’t work. i’ve had upclose glances at what social alienation does to people somatically, what it does to their sense of self. i’ve worked with people who have been canceled (most of the time for messy break ups), and every single time i am so deeply saddened by the toll it takes on their bodies, their ability to take up space, and share their own stories.

i also find myself entangled in a lot of conflict because there are people who trust me to help get to the root of the hurts. and what’s at the root of conflict, the majority of the time, is people that felt like they couldn’t express their needs/hurts/wants to one another. again, conflict is cooperative. a lot of times when we feel like we can’t express what we want, we can internalize this feeling that the other person doesn’t care about our needs, or put forth an expectation for them to intuit what our needs our even if we don’t tell them. this is the deep work of conflict. it’s not just having our need to be heard met by another, but also, seeing where we forfeited our own power by not speaking to our hurts or the tension we feel.

we have to talk about it. and sometimes, its ganna take multiple conversations, and spirals of anger, and hope, and loss, and feeling like ‘fuck this im done’ and ‘wait actually im ganna miss u’. there is so much to be unveiled in conflict. i promise you, it will be one of the most powerful, heart opening teachers in your life if you let it. you will learn to love vulnerability, and caretaking your perception to hold others humanity in tact. there is more in this world than what we’ve been taught. there are more ways to hold each other. more ways to feel. more ways to be intimate, to experience closure, connection.

i keep coming back to the this thought about what is it that makes us liberationists so beautiful. and i really feel that it’s our capacity for deep feeling, worldbuilding, and contributing to the sustainable motion of love. everytime we shut our hearts off from each other we shade the world through the lens of our oppressors. i think even in us hurting the most we believe that people really do mean well. isn’t that what hurts the most? that someone we thought we good could cause us harm? when we invest in the idea of love and have our hearts broken? —and still we reach for love over and over again. we reach for connection. we imagine ourselves in deep friendships, and long to be held and deeply known. that’s some human shit, and baby, it’s all available through conflict.

friends! i’m holding a virtual breathwork space on 4/20 for exploring grief, and returning back to the body. it’s a part of a series i do called “grief praxis” and is titled “i think, i feel”. you can sign up here if you’d like to receive some somatic care. it’s sliding scale $0-20 ++ please input your email so i can send a link for the space day of <3 my practice is deeply trauma informed, queer and inner world explorational, expect to feel and go deep :)

also some piece similar to this one if you like reading about conflict that i wrote:

I forgive you, bitch!

the carceral bitch in me sees the carceral bitch in u

a lot of people suck at polyamory

what if closure isn’t an option?

what if i don’t have energy for the people i love?

thanks for reading, sending care.