Call it survivor’s guilt or a deep ancestral wound but thinking about feeling good while the world is on fire Just. Seems. Wrong.
Genocide, literal plagues, floods, a godless climate, (genocide!), and a new government that scares me deeply as a queer woman of colour makes me question what even is pleasure in a time of pain?
In my early 20s, after my first surgery for severe endometriosis I couldn't climax for months. I remember feeling such a distance from my body as though she suddenly held some other unwanted narrative, a body on-pause diametric to on-heat.
Time lengthened out and yes I recovered the goddess-given ability to orgasm but in post-operative emotional limbo I found myself further and further from that first iteration of self, the one that counted back from a hundred and woke up eight hours later in searing pain.
When pieces of you are cut free from your anatomy you are changed. I think the change in me overflowed everything from mahi to family to art to self-esteem and onwards in an endless march. Instead of feeling liberated from the pain that had traumatised me since childhood it worsened into daily chronic episodes.
Coming from a line of extremely stoic Sāmoan women (i.e. my mother did not have pain relief and or scream or cry when giving birth to me, which made her mother very proud as pain relief 'isn't our way') my entire life has felt like some frivolous fancy in comparison to the warriors before me.
A life of ideas, even one mixed in with horrific pain is still a pleasure.
The thing is, pleasure to me no longer equates to what it once was: being a reliable woman in an unreliable creative economy sought out weekly if not daily for the shimmer elixir strained through the lens of my heavily minoritied existence. Pay no mind to the mining process that emptied out my source, my essence, constantly.
I coveted traversing spaces geographical and philosophical to seek out representation as healing. The hurt I endured on the path to healing was immense but I think the wisdom was worth it. The wisdom to not override my own pain at any cost.
I used to say ‘the pleasure is all mine’ at the end of delivering projects. As though I could erase the reality of just how unbearably difficult it actually is to create in a body made for salt water and talanoa, not endless ngā mihi requests from people who just want something from you not for you.
That’s the difficult thing about being a writer in a wave of constant unresolved stories within a craft that seeks resolution, that burns for an answer, an ending, a learning. Writers willingly or not, edit collective pain into tidy lines. So saying yes to requests that didn’t serve me one bit gave me an almost cult-like pride that being so brown and so professional-brilliant-punctual-x-y-z-successful simultaneously could ward off generations of painfully racist narratives in one foul swoop.
Imagine the open wounds that followed when people turned out to just be terrible anyway and more often than not from within my own community not beyond it. Going through life like a cashmere scarf getting caught on basically everything has character upsides (high-ceilinged personality), and practical downsides (more stops than starts).
I am not the leader today that I thought I would be. I value connections, true and rare, as the greatest gifts. My bullshit radar is as sensitive as my ridiculous heart. I have lost all interest in glossy deformed power structures that used to mark my inner-night like stars above some holy land. My stars hang wherever my children lie their heads. Bombs are not falling down on our brown bodies but in other realms within this one that is the hideous and constant norm.
Even after all the challenges of living with chronic pain through severe endometriosis and the emotional and mental toll that comes with it, and never leaves it, leadership roles that have required every part of me, and a beautiful brand new family I still feel so undeserving to call my own. Even now, maybe especially now, I still believe in the world – even if it is in flames.
