Tsuyugodiha (Honesty)

My ongoing story of learning how to nurture different kinds of relationships contains a lot of conflict. Without awareness, I was a living, beathing trauma, expressing itself in all of my interactions with life. Policies, structures and agreements made to ensure fairness in work, volunteer, and collaborative spaces were incapable of all the heavy lifting my wounds brought to the table.

Friends, colleagues, and bosses alike maintained what I considered to be a fiction: that good communication skills can prevent and transform conflict. Hence, because believing is seeing (and not the other way around), communications training failed me over and over. In real world situations, I simply did not have the presence of mind nor the willingness to apply my skills.

Now, I understand that conflict served a purpose in my life, and not the healthy kind. Instead of using conflict to help me reflect on my behavior or explore my wounds, insecurities, and false assumptions, I distracted myself from exploring the unhealed injuries that had been triggered over and over -- by life.

Instead of making me curious to find a path to mutually satisfying relationships, being embroiled in conflict kept me focused on proving my “enemy” wrong so I could be right, winning allies, exacting retribution for imagined slights, and destroying reputations.

In my ego-driven mind, recognition that workplaces and collaborative projects were not immune from unjust social power dynamics gave me license to blame and shame others for their racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, or whatever form of oppression made me the victim and them the oppressors. It made little difference to me whether these words were accurately applied. I don’t deny that the “isms” were real to varying degrees but I also cannot deny my reactions failed to honour my ancestors and the struggles they invested their life force into.  

Sometimes my reactions were, justified, sometimes I was supplementing facts with feeling, and most of the time I was in that grey area most marginalized folks know, where there’s no conclusive proof but the evidence could be interpreted in favour of my version of events.

In any case, my errors mostly lay in not being motivated to transform conflicts, take responsibility for my ill-inspired behaviours, or heal my wounds.

I have spent too many years of my life riding the inter-locking wheels of victim-becomes-perpetrator, victim-becomes-saviour, and creating victims by perpetrating and saving. I am done shaming the Ancestors with my fear of excavating within.

When I finally turned my attention to healing, I broke the trauma wheel I was riding and freed myself to look for wheels going in other directions. And contrary to my belief at the time, it was effortless. Having peeled back many layers of onion using a variety of methods, including Arrivals, my new mantra is HEALING IS EFFORTLESS.

I feel your incredulity. At the risk of defusing its potency, let me extend the mantra: Healing is effortless AND painful AND worth it. Still not convinced of that effortless piece? Allow me to make my case in the next seed.

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Nokware is the Adinkra symbol of Truth