Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay
It feels nerve-wracking to have finally found the courage to write again after neglecting my Substack for so long, which mainly happened because I had lost much confidence in expressing myself through writing after a really turbulent year in 2022. The rapid pace at which my life was changing left me with no time to sit… to think… to relish… and to process what was happening to me. I was no longer comfortable with the idea of writing on a blog that I had built around the idea of being emotionally vulnerable. I didn’t want anyone to see me for all the change I was going through.
2022 was a notable turning point for me. I visited the motherland, I got married, I lost my maternal grandmother (الله يرحمها), and I inherited some drastic “social” trauma that left me feeling betrayed and disillusioned with communal life.
Friendship breakups are painful, more so when it comes after a long period of a relationship being nonreciprocal and eventually borderline abusive. I was friends with someone who constantly brought me down, was never happy for me, never celebrated me, and rejoiced in my misfortune. My sense of confidence was gradually torn apart as I dove deeper into this relationship, bit by bit. Not only were my boundaries and feelings regularly violated, but at the end of our relationship, I was ghosted overnight and this person began to defame me to my colleagues and friends. My entire nervous system was not only disrupted but rewired after this friendship breakup. I was left shocked as I tried to comprehend how someone who could seem so genuine, could turn into a foe so quickly.
I didn’t understand the feelings of competition and envy that were often fostered in female friendships, and to be frank I still have trouble wrapping my head around it. The misconception that good fortune is a scarcity is an unhealthy one that unfortunately poisons many female friendships (and other relationships) —especially in today’s social media landscape where being a “hater” is celebrated rather than put to question. I hated how our culture pitted women against each-other, and that many of us often suffered time and time again at the hands of our girl peers due to the absence of female solidarity.
In their book “Between Women: Love, Envy, and Competition in Female Friendships”, Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach argue that women who feel envy towards their female counterparts often suffer from a lack of confidence and a sense of “entitlement” of the things they perceive their friend is receiving (ex. career success, attention, good grades, romantic success, etc). What they described in their book put into a psychological perspective what I was experiencing first-hand.
An excerpt from the book, pg. 80.
Many fall into the trap of using envy as a tool of expression rather than interrogating those negative feelings that arise. Envy, jealousy, and anger can be harvested for something better/more positive + to become a point for deeper intimacy through open and confrontational communication. At its core, envy can be boiled down to a desire which unfortunately, many succumb to…. instead of grappling with the impediments that they feel within themselves. When will we stop normalizing this irrational fear of confrontation? I genuinely believe hostility and friction in friendships are the most defining moments, where healthy and compassionate confrontation can lead to either 1) a stronger more fulfilling future in the friendship, or 2) a healthy departure.
I read Eichenbaum and Orbich’s book in my quest to find some literature that could explain the psychology of turbulence, betrayal, and envy that is too common in female camaraderie. I didn’t like that as a society we didn’t talk about the way friends hurt each other and instead focused more on the aftermath of failed romantic relationships rather than ones based in friendship. I also didn’t like that as women, we weren’t treating each other better. This wasn’t the first time this had happened to me and I was sick of living through cycles of abrasive and unreciprocated friendship. The whole experience of processing and then grieving what had happened left me wounded at heart and very stunted in a creative sense. I began to develop a sense of paranoia when it came to meeting new people, sharing my work/writing with others, trusting friends, and enjoying real and genuine gestures of kindness towards me (i.e. fight or flight and avoidance). It feels silly to write about one friendship that went awry but there isn’t much out there for those who seek to process and express the grief that comes with the pains of strained female friendships.
(Suggestion: Read Tahmina Begum’s recent post “On Friendships are Supposed to Feel Easy but Not Necessarily Convenient” from her newsletter The Aram).
I love women, and I will continue to seek compassion and care in the women I allow into my life. Friendship is healing, and I am eternally grateful for the women in my life, my mothers, my sisters, my female ancestors. They have held me in times of great joy and grief. These are the women I live and continue to persist for. We need to be kinder, softer, and more gentle to each other. This is not an option, rather it is a necessity for a better quality of life for all of us. At a time where the country (and by extension most of the Western world) is facing a loneliness epidemic, increased thoughtfulness, compassion, and care is imperative.
This experience has taught me a lot about myself more than anything. About the power of forgiving myself for the treatment, I have allowed. About trusting my gut more, about setting better boundaries. It has also taught me that those who hurt others sometimes know no better and are projecting their own despair onto those who are directly around them. I have learned to forgive, to open my heart again, and this keeps me hopeful about the days to come. Love is the only compass I have and will equip, it is all I need. My God reminds me that He will never truly let me down, that even if some days feel dark, there will always be better…. brighter moments that will follow — He says: “Do not lose heart or despair- if you are true believers you have the upper hand-” [Quran 3:139]. With Allah by your side, what can’t you overcome?
From the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Handbook
*****
When I take time to reflect on the previous year, I can’t help but be taken aback at how life has given me more than I could ask for, and taken away from me the things I thought I could never live without.
I moved away from the city I called home since birth, left my small nuclear family for the first time ever, married my absolute best friend, and lost my maternal grandmother — all in one year. The reality of coping with such drastic change has taken an unmeasurable toll on me in every possible way, physically, spiritually, emotionally, etc. The unfamiliarity I felt where I was … in terms of geography and culture were substantial and at times, scary. At my core, I felt incredibly lonely. It had taken me a lifetime to build the small community of chosen family and friends that I held dear to my heart in Atlanta, but starting all over again was too daunting.
As the eldest daughter in an immigrant family (yes I will reinforce this trope!!!), leaving my younger brother and parents to live with my now-husband in a different city and pursue a career in a predominantly white and male industry left me feeling uprooted. I felt guilty for not being there for my family, for missing core and passive memories with them (and for not appreciating the memories I did have with them), for being unavailable now more than ever. I missed my friends deeply. I also felt guilty for pursuing my dreams…. choosing my own satisfaction + prioritizing my own needs. Eldest daughter's guilt began to eat me alive slow by slow. I didn’t know how to operate in my new environment where I was free to be self-focused and self-serving. Self-sacrifice was my modus operandi for so long, I didn’t know how to function otherwise. Leaving my family felt like I lost a limb. I loved my new life, my husband, my new job, new friends, and the great joys our union was bringing into my life — though the grief of being torn away from my roots, my home, and my family, can sometimes come in large crashing waves.
Addressing these pangs of loneliness and the changes I was going through showed me that I was processing my emotions on a more challenging scale, and that due to events that occurred over the span of my adolescence, I did not have durable coping mechanisms to ensure my stability and long-term health. The way we cope with change and obstacles is incumbent on how resilient and healthy our minds, bodies, and souls will be. I did not have the emotional bandwidth to healthily process the rapid changes happening in my life — let alone those which I was suppressing for so long or were living in my genetic memory (generational trauma is reaaaaal). It made sense that I was suffering from IBS, a chronic gastrointestinal illness that disrupted my daily life and did not allow me to enjoy basic activities for so long. My suffering in terms of health led me to understand the mind-body connection, about how my chronic stress had wrecked my nervous system for years, about how I could not continue to divorce my physiology from my mind. This really has been the year of healing, no joke.
Dr. Gabor Maté argues that the longterm suppression of emotions has led to a large gender disparity in autoimmune diagnoses, where statistics show that women are 80% more likely to suffer than men are (are you surprised?). It started to make me think more about both my grandmothers who passed away in their mid to late 60s, the women in my community who have lost their lives to unexplainable diseases in their 40s, and all of my girlfriends who also suffer from chronic illnesses like myself.
I am asking myself the questions: How was the role that society has chosen for me led me to a lifestyle of emotional suppression? What are the sources of pain in my family origin? What painful and traumatic moments have I been the onlooker of during childhood? How much effort has it taken for me to suppress anger all of my life? How has the expression of my emotions put me at risk in the past? I continue to ponder on these questions and try to find the source of my suffering, and uproot them. I am making efforts to understand the messages my body is trying to send me. Dr. Maté says “When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.” It was clear that in my pursuit to conceal my pain, my body was screaming to be heard. What makes healing so unfathomable in our current society, is that there are so many factors contributing to the illness of the masses…. whether it be inequality, poverty, social isolation, patriarchy, colonialism, none of which are conducive to healing. So much of our trauma is multigenerational too, so much of it is because I saw my mother, and she saw her mother, and she saw her mother, and so forth. I am a firm believer that the mental wounds of our early-life remain with us, and that much of our pain is inherited, it is witnessed, and it is shared.
From “Enough” by Suzanne Buffam
I remember visiting a homeopathic doctor at the recommendation of family, and after telling the doctor about my symptoms and psychological history , she told me that I was “not equipped” with the tools and resilience needed to handle the day-to-day ups & downs of life. She said that my gastrointestinal issues and leaky gut were probably a result of trauma and stress that was clogged up inside of me and that was being stored in my body which needed to be released. She recommended I do the things I love more and spend more time with loved ones — to overdose on happy moments so that these memories could embed themselves in my nervous system, in hopes of counteracting the existing psychic wounds causing me to be unwell. I knew that I needed to begin the process of repairing my nervous system. After chronic periods of stress, an individuals nervous system is reprogrammed and becomes addicted to patterns of dysregulation. My nervous system was at war with itself for a very long time and acting as a sort of inner-surveillance system. The doctor was right. I have lived most of my life afraid of the repercussions that come with expression — but I am ready to change that. I am ready to to reparent myself, to self-soothe, to receive all of the love and care that I deserve.
I have started this journey by retracing memories from my adolescence in an attempt to reconnect with the moments where I felt the most child-like…. the most free and loved. I am basking in the sunlight more, spending more time in nature, taking an interest in cooking and gardening, painting, indulging in self-care rituals. I feel that this is important when you come from a culture where women are often neglecting their health or being exploited in the domestic scene. Another part of this journey is my commitment of being “seen” again, something that I clearly have been afraid of doing for the last year or so which has hindered my writing. I am accepting myself for where I am,w here I have been, and where I come from. By stepping out like this I hope to forge a path forward for myself. I am learning to be more in-tune with my nervous system, and am working to unravel/recognize the cycle of dysregulation that has been controlling my life for so long. I am holding my grief and allowing it to take me up and down, graciously. My grief is a guiding tool because it shows me where I feel loss and what parts of me I should tend to with the upmost gentleness. More importantly, I am embracing anger in a healthier way. It is the very act of suppressing anger that plunges so many into longterm illness, because suppressing your anger leads to a higher secretion of stress hormones which eventually trigger the immune system to mutiny against the body. In my quest to take care of myself I am starting to learn how my anger can serve me rather than my anger being turned against me. Anger is an intrinsically biological reaction to a natural violation of boundaries, we need to be angry because it helps us survive. I am channeling healthy anger to maintain my well-being.
I hope that as I move forward in this process, I am liberated from the traumatic experiences that I am holding within me. I will no longer be defined by my genetic memories that haunt me often, the long-term period of stress I have been through — these realities do not characterize my entire life. I am accepting that there is love and kindness in the world, and I will continue to seek it. I will allow myself to relish in this love. Love is the life force. Love is the purpose.
Florence and The Machine, from 100 Years
**** I plan on sharing some of my reflections with the readers of this newsletter as I embark on this journey, thank you for reading me in the past. If you are new here, stay tuned.
The title of this newsletter was inspired by one of my favorite Ethiopian oldies songs from the 70s, linked above. Ayalew Mesfin is a giant of classical Ethiopian music who thrived before the rise of the communist/genocidal regime that terrorized the country from the 70s to the 90s, which led him to flee the country and see his studio burned to the ground. Today, what we have of his music are a few collections of his singles that have survived.