Mourning Without Shame
ft. a Chris Bell cover song with creative guest Glitter Macabre
It's that time in August in New York City when the humidity and heat index are too intense for my body. My autonomic system has been struggling to function properly since the second year of the pandemic, and my body does not regulate its temperature adequately in the hot months. I’ve been feeling a strong pull to socialize, but I’m thinking I'd rather stay home and lick my wounds in front of an audience than melt out there and catch covid. Right now, I should be writing a worry list so that I can train my brain to worry when I want him to and not whenever he feels like it, but instead, I came to share a reflection on dwelling since that's what I have to think about later during worry time anyway.
Why mourning without shame?
I borrowed the title from Charlotte Shane's piece, Can We Be Kind, in which she talks about the way American culture treats grief like a second-class emotion with no real purpose. [G]rief [being] insubordinate is probably the best way I could describe my way of life. I am today the person that you’re witnessing because of what grief has done to me. It makes me angry when I perceive I must refrain from sharing my uncomfortable feelings about loss. I want to be okay with being a vibe killer when it comes to grief. When was the last time people felt anything so strongly that it transformed them into a new person? I want to yell that I've been hurting for months and that the last handful of weeks almost crushed me. I want to scream that I have been stuck in my own mental fly trap, made of intrusive and repetitive thoughts. I want others to imagine it as I describe a stalactite that grows with fear and becomes longer and heavier with time, bending down my chest. (It's a bit of chest dysphoria as well, but it's mostly old, calcified grief). I’m not uncomfortable sharing this because I'm very well acquainted with these emotional formations. I like to turn some of them into drawings or songs, and after they acquire a new meaning, generating new memories for myself and others, all there's left of them is beautiful, dry skin. Everyone loves to consume the gold that artists make, but very few want to smell the shit that it once was. Interest in the process is for the dedicated only.
Recently, in therapy, as I tried explaining my most recent heart entanglement, exploring my way through a sturdy piece of grief lasagna, my therapist reminded me that pain is transient. Pain is transient. I hear the words, and I can feel the ogre contrarian in me waking up, and very bothered to be summoned. So here's the thing, I push back: pain can also be cyclical. I don't say out loud that only someone not chronically unwell would forget that, but I want to. I find no relief in knowing that pain goes away eventually, I continued. I am too old to be in denial about the fact that pain will come back, and not just once, but over and over and over again. I have lived in a physical and mental state that has forced me to think of my mortality consistently for about three decades. I am envious of people who can zone out of pain more easily. I often feel defined by pain because pain is like a sibling who pushes tough love on me. I have to learn to be patient, have limits, allow myself to be angry, and center myself. I have formed my personality in relationship to pain. It holds a mirror and forces me to reckon with who I want to become every time. It’s ugly, and I often don't want to be nice about it.
When pain is emotional, it's no different. A few nights ago, while having dinner with my friend Ula, we discussed the topic of uncomfortable emotions. We shared feelings of shame about bitterness, the need to make ourselves big, and other mechanisms. I have always felt like there is one emotional plumbing system everyone talks about in self-help books and social media channels. We are all supposed to have the same pipes inside. Apparently, moving on fast and getting over shit quickly is not rocket science. Or so it’s the idea we’re sold. Nobody talks about how untrue that is and how apparent the lie becomes in our history books. I have been mortified about feeling too much and for too long most of my life. Then, my friend reminded me that I’m an artist. Ok, yeah. Artists operate from a place of intimacy with emotions, especially grief, in a way others can’t. It's like our DNA is written to give access to more than just "sitting with feelings" but also to identify with them. We practically bring them into our lives like a new lover, and then we have children together.
Well-intentioned folks have told me I must learn to let go of what causes me pain. I'm offended they even suggest that. It's not that I don't want to feel better, it's that grief is the bitter chemical flowing through the story I must give sound to. I may even enjoy dwelling in the swamp, while it's also my calling to do so. Where do they think all the shit I do comes from? I wasn't perfectly manufactured into everything I've been told I'm admired for like a Sanrio product would. Being an artist is really not for the faint of heart. To be one, you must commit to enduring the condition of your own emotional plumbing and work with it. Besides, cycles of emotional pain are what I imagine swimming in an emergency is like. Every breath out of the water is a chance to stay alive, and it's also necessary to keep paddling forward. Rest in between pain feels like a chance to keep living, but I never forget it's also part of a cycle. I’m unsure which one is the egg and which is the chicken, but that’s unimportant to me. I’m looking for purpose in grief. Purpose doesn't make pain any more palatable, only promising. I need purpose when nothing makes sense; it anchors my heart again through its own desatino, cyclically. [WordReference translates desatino as nonsense or blunder, but my family uses desatino in the context of feeling aimless, like when you wake up groggy after a nap.]
Art is mitigation. I devoted July to spending time with my pain by knitting a sound dress for my spiral of sadness. I didn't really think about it thoroughly. I just needed an excuse to pick up a guitar. The guitar felt wonderful in my hands. The song, however, many times felt like torture, but I learned to enjoy it. Other times, the agony would take the flavor out of it, and so I bawled instead. I wanted this proof of heartbreak to have its own life, to live outside of my storage of shame by sharing it with others, like a plant cutting. This was when I invited my friend Hex, known as Glitter Macabre, to collaborate as a singer.
Odd, ghostly, dissonance, rotten, attic, blood dripping, and experiments were some of the words invoked in preparation for working together. Collaboration is my favorite approach to creative work. I’m learning from Hex that documentation of processes is just as fun as final products, so I wanted to share a bit of that with you all.
Being sad can be delightful at times. I secretly want to be a songwriter like Chris Bell and be unapologetically cringe about my feelings. Cringe is free, after all. It’s not lost on me that I was born into one of the most dramatic cultures in the world: the Mexican. We mourn because it makes us feel, and we’re obsessed with feeling. We must be heard in our time of weakness. Feeling strongly and wanting to be strong are not contradictory. We’re strong when we’re vulnerable, and we show it off. We dwell because we know that pain brings the feeling of being alive.
Let me mourn without shame; it's my heritage.
You and Your Sister, track in progress will most likely be released in 2025 with a music video. Stay tuned.
Until next time,
Ángel.
ps. If you enjoy my work, consider donating or sharing my current GoFundMe campaign. I'm without full-time work, and the NY Department of Labor is an empty building in a dystopian novel. I'm having surgery at the end of August, and I would be eternally grateful for peace of mind while I recover.