By Zhailon Levingston
I am a professional artist. My vocation is in the exploration of my imagination and its forming of new worlds—usually out of the grime, grit and rubble of the one we are currently in. As a Black queer person, the work is similar. Every second of every day is a revolutionary experiment of creative political will, resisting and pushing back against the oppressive destructive nature of those with lesser imaginations. This work is fueled by the ability to embrace, manipulate, and transform my emotion.
Ever since my adulthood (21 if you ask me, or 12 if you ask America) I have been operating on a binary of limited emotions: varying degrees of joy and rage. I am tired of these two feelings being the fuel to my creative efforts. There’s always a requirement of output that comes with surviving marginalization.
Sometimes the voices in my head say, “If you can find joy in the midst of suffering you can use that joy to change your circumstance.” Other times the voices sound like James Baldwin telling me, “To be black in America and even a little conscious is to be in a state of constant rage.” But I’m tired of all the output and production it takes to survive that way. I’m starting to see the ways in which my performance of joy and rage sometimes prevents me from telling the truth about myself and this world.
The truth is, more often than not, I’m sad. Rather, I think I’m sad. I don’t really know the feeling well enough to be certain. I don’t know how to healthily engage with soft emotions because they aren’t yelling at me to change the world! Sadness doesn’t say, “Go be stronger than your oppressor. Go break out of those boxes! Use that Black Boy Joy! Use that righteous anger! Go! Go! GO!” What validating adjectives are prescribed to sadness?
My sadness doesn’t require any labor from me or my imagination. It just whispers ever so softly, “You see that? That breaks your heart doesn’t it.” It doesn’t require anything from me but to bear witness to my pain. I’m antagonistic towards emotions that don’t beg me to go change the world or liberate the masses.
I feel that being Black and queer in America and choosing joy is a spiritual responsibility to the imaginations of our ancestors and our Gods (no matter how ambiguous either may be). I also feel to be Black and queer in America and choose rage is a political responsibility to the most marginalized amongst us. It is what I’ve thought to be the most imaginative way to respond to what whiteness has made of this land. But to be Black and queer in America and choose sadness, hovers outside of the political playground in which I’m most comfortable playing in.
I have made joy and rage creative fuel that I owe to other people and other things. But I’m starting to feel like it allows me to not have to deal with myself, and maybe that’s not the healthiest way to experience those emotions. While sadness just leaves me with myself, and if left there too long, I’ll start to feel that ancient Black urge to do something with that sadness. That “something” almost always includes creating spaces that bring like hearted people together to be in solidarity with each other. Historically that’s what Black people do in America. This is evident in the beginnings of the Black church all the way to the start of Hip-Hop.
But for me, someone who contributes in the imagining of these new forms and spaces, as an organizer, advocate, and artist, I often stand on the outside of these experiences. I tend to look on like a proud parent—smiling at what I have helped to create. All the while shaming myself on the walk home for the melancholy that still latches onto one of my pant legs like a child I have somehow forgotten to feed. I hesitate to think it but I must entertain the question, “What if I’m just performing joy and rage as a way of hiding from my sadness?” But sadness is too selfish! Whose chains does it break? Without a validating reason to justify snuggling up on the couch with my sadness I’m left with only one option: punishment.
Every time I get a waft of sadness, I punish myself. The inability to embrace it makes me overeat. That overeating triggers my anxiety. That anxiety manifest in not being able to walk anywhere without sucking my stomach in and not being able to sit anywhere without folding my arms. When I get tired of poking and picking at my body, I get another waft of sadness. This one leads me out of my apartment, sometimes at 2 am, to that person’s one bedroom who probably doesn’t care at all about my sadness—and I prefer it that way. And it makes for the sex I’m too tired to have all the more numbing, but stabilizing.
The next morning, I walk home and pretend like all the over eating and over fucking is justified because Jimmy said, “our crowns had been paid for and all we had to do is wear it.” That must apply to the freedom to live recklessly right? Right? Right! Now I can go be in that meeting and talk in circles about changing the world. But if I am so free, why am I not free to embrace my sadness? Why must I pay for it in lies I tell myself? Is it because in America Black folks really can’t experience any emotions freely? Must it all come at a cost? Either Righteous Rage or Black Boy Joy? So much production and output! So much standing in front of the little Debbie zebra cakes, and too many late night text starting with “WYD?” I want to stop that. But I don’t want to turn my sadness into anything revolutionary either!
Even now I must stop my working hands from turning my words into something that can be hopeful or happy or angry or constructive. I want to just be free to be sad for more than a nanosecond. I want to keep in that sadness for a little too long. I want it to drag me right to the present. To the sad reality of life—specifically American life. A life that awards the children of slave owners but punishes the children of slaves. A life with very few material consequences for the fact that this will be the only sentence that has the words “Indigenous people” in it.
What if I sit in that sadness. I do not fully know the price I may pay by doing this but it won’t be cheap. But what if being present with my soft sadness is the emotional melatonin I need to actually get some rest? What if letting tears fall was actually some kind of reverse hydration for the soul? What if Black heartbreak isn’t as wasteful as white guilt? What if joy and rage start at an embrace of sadness and without a healthy relationship to that pain, everything else is just costumes and make believe? Then despite the cost, it will be worth it.
I think I’m sad but I don’t really know the feeling well enough to be certain.
I’d like to be free to find out.
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