25 | archival as a declaration of love

this is the next essay in the study of self series. listen to the previous episode here. Content warning for: mentions of suicidal thought and intent, allusions towards self-harm. Nothing graphic, but it is a recurrent theme of the piece.

The first time I got recognized from TikTok, I was at a porn convention.

[insert the really cute but compromising picture of me at said porn convention here. I most definitely cannot post this photo so just imagine xoxo <3]

I need you to be right here with me in this moment. You are at a work event, crop topped and busty, see-through bedazzled mini skirt stretched over a bright pink thong, standing sure on seven-inch chrome Pleasers and an iconic bright pink mini afro (to match the thong, obviously). And you are freezing. Like, yes, it is cold in the convention center when you’re wearing this little clothing, but I mean deer in the headlights, this cannot be be happening freezing while knocking back your third (work-sanctioned) shot of the evening. Maaaaaaybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re just intoxicated! Maybe you totally did not just hear someone gasp and say “Oh my gosh, are you on TikTok?” to the back of your head. To you, the stripper.

I’m not being a very helpful narrator— you and I both know that’s all just wishful thinking. LMAO you definitely did just hear that this shit is wild.

Now what? You’ve been on TikTok for like… a month. No one prepared you for this eventuality so soon. Being recognized is for famous people!! What the fuck!!!! Do you think of a lie? You cannot just stand there omg think! Think of a lie!! You’re draining the shot awkwardly and now you’re… swishing that casamigos around on your tongue? oh my word now you’re grimacing. Do something.

Okay. You’re breathing out. That’s good!! You’re swallowing the shot. Great momentum. You are turning around on some newly found liquid courage and move to open your brilliant mouth and then this voice in the back of your head comes forward, all bright and toothy: Everyone can see you. Already. How did you manage to imagine this social media thing would never really affect your life? You can officially never go backwards.

Hi. My name is Ismatu. I have for you an essay that used to be called, “on being surprised I bloomed sunflowers.” It comes to you in three acts, with the following thesis:

One of the best ways, the kindest ways, the most lasting ways I can love myself is through archival. It’s through constant self-perseveration— not only “self-preservation” as in survival, but in my record of life. And because I love myself as a stitch in a quilt, a part of a whole, some of my archival belongs to the people that see me.

Let’s begin.

Act I: Germination

My first era of life was spent in the lovingkindness of anonymity.

Such is life in the mountains— one thing they will do is shelter you. Earth that’s stacked toward heaven like that is hard to get to know. She slow to like and she longer to love. Mountains and the love you find there press on you in ways that renegotiate time. They impress upon you timelessness. I appreciate moving slow from being brought up there. Mountains make you get to know your neighbors because you need each other to survive them. And the mountains I was raised in (the Colorado Rockies) were kind to me in their various reminders: that I was teeny and always will be. That clean, good air is a blessing. That I am lucky to be so small and yet held so gingerly by mighty Mama Earth. “We ourselves are only her fingertips, her eyelashes,” they chorus. “How big she is; how gentle all the same for choosing to hold your hand every day.”

Mountains also remind you of how little you’ll ever know and it makes you breathe a sigh of relief. This world exudes stress in its constant quest to become larger than life; I was always content as a finite little being because of the mountains that made me. For me, life was about as long and thick as a tree— and I wasn’t dealt an easy life necessarily, but it had the character of ease, if that makes sense— there is only so much you allow yourself to be rushed when you can hear trees and what they say to you. They talk so low and so slow.

It was a childhood where I felt the rise and fall of every day. I never, never woke up and thought, my goodness I can’t wait to be an adult.

Colorado was my first love, which I first defined without realizing as how much I’d been given or how much I was willing to give without asking. I had a family with love in it, I had friends; my child body did not feel love and name it until I watched the winter sky bruise periwinkle with planets and stars that hung glittering over the peaks, like a lover loathe to leave. Until the sun set in the west at 10pm while I had my first honeysuckle. The breeze is sweet and I say, “Oh. This is love.”

I learned to journal in the cradle of the trees, actually. All my important conversations with myself and with God Creator happened at least twenty feet off the ground (as a security measure). The trees kept all my secrets, and I kept theirs. It was this one day in a garden when I was thirteen that they revealed to me I had their roots inside my chest cavity. That paper could keep me and my secrets just like they do. That I could belong to myself just as much as I belonged to everyone else— even more than that. That I was someone worth belonging to in the first place.

I had my own self dangling from the end of my pen and tasted love for the second time. I didn’t know I’d been hiding from myself until I called my own name and heard an answer within me. Thirteen and dreaming of what selfhood feels like when the only person that owns me is me. Thirteen and looking at raspberries bend their whole plant because they’ve grown up to be thick and ripe and on display. Thirteen and thinking of what it could be like to be all ripe and ready like that. I named my notebook Thesilina and began to germinate.

This is the blessing of anonymity: no one talks to a little Black girl up in a tree. No one asks you any probing questions. No one is interested in the minute of your day, not even your parents. Most days, no one even sees you— not many people think to look up when they walk outside. By the time I picked a pen and found myself, I had the freedom of zero follow-up questions and a 10pm curfew. Blessed, sweet privacy. No one in my family ever attempted to read what I wrote down— I truly don’t think my parents even thought about it. Invaluably, I was alone with myself feeling through my own desire for my body and my time and my own sovereignty. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted anything worse than I wanted myself in my own entirety.

Raspberries tasted just like me. I opened up pages and gobbled myself down.

Act II: Stolen Blooms

My love affair with myself began cataclysmic and I knew it even then. For one matter, I was dying. I told you: it was a life with ease of character, not ease of circumstances. My circumstances were, point blank, going to kill me (or I was going to put myself out of my own misery). The reasons why are for another essay, but for the purposes of this one: Death breathed and heaved over me like July stormclouds, just thick and delicious and promising to come cool and all at once. Dying young seemed like a neutral fact of life, like falling to sleep on Christmas Eve even while you try and fight it. Death was a matter of when, not if.

I was also wrong to think in terms of ownership, and I knew it then too. A relationship with myself that could last (like, truly last) could only ever thrive in balance, with true agency reciprocity, where I choose myself and my body chooses me back and my mind oversees the union, and we move together like that. A daily choice, hesitantly made— long to love and slow to like. I knew I was rushing into things with someone I had quite literally just met, but I was teeny— when you are young like I was (and like I am), the world has a way of convincing you that everything you’ll ever be is right in front of your eyes. Plus, there was that whole matter of “I’m pretty sure I’m not going to live to see sixteen.” I generally felt like I was moving on borrowed time so… might as well do it hot and fast, right? In the meeting and the keeping myself, I, Juliet, was my own Romeo.

I will tell you this because I am endeavoring to be honest with you all: I did not fucking care. I knew I was being selfish and I could feel myself bottling up all this hot ash and I promise you I did not care. And I tried! It’s not like I wanted to leave someone the trauma of finding me stilled and cooled and at peace. It just… it felt so good to luxuriate and decay in places no one else could see. I reached inside myself and found the earth and I said mine. And I began to bury me. This disposition intoxicated me, the thought that I could account for myself, and keep all of me, and not spill or share one singular drop. That I was mine and mine alone. It was good like when you’re doing drugs with no intent to come down. I assumed I’d be dead before I’d ever need to sober up.

And then (there it is, the predictable and then), Words began to find their way out of me.

It happened in public, which is the most embarrassing part! Somebody fucked up and handed me a mic. I could tell you who, in fact: it was my youth pastor (lame). I was a child and so I could not see that I was silly for thinking I could have my own secrets. I hand’t yet understood that other people saw things that I hadn’t developed the eyes for. I also have one of the loudest dispositions I have ever seen radiate off a person; my thoughts flash across my face with the strength and clarity of a gospel choir soprano. It was truly so unserious of me to think I could keep all my own secrets that young. Like. Imagine having a chest full of trees and deluding yourself into thinking that no one can see the branches but you.

I could not own my own soils any more than I could own the earth, and me and the mountains are the same thing. Slow to like, long to love, visible for miles and miles around. It’s just that at that time, the only example I had of love was one rooted in possession and ownership. I did not know how to exist in community with myself— I did not even know that was possible.

Even in speaking, in learning to navigate a mic and a stage and a spotlight, it wasn’t really for me. It was for “sharing my God-given talents with the world.” Read: it was for white adults who applauded me while I died in front of them, and I was so eager to please. Growing up in the white evangelical Christian church made me such a glutton for pain. White folks with money really do love to watch a Black Girl Bleed. Agony on display in my essays and in my poetry and they applaud. I am dying in front of you, I would rumble into the mic. And that declaration would always be followed up with a bigger mic, a larger stage, and more applause. This is the first time you ever hear that honest, toothy voice, bright in your mind voice from back to front: Hey. Hey. Everyone can see you. Are you certain you want to be seen like this?

I think, after all this, I became a recluse. I was too young to love the stage— I didn’t have the wherewithal to make that choice. When you start existing in that kind of emotional nudity at fourteen, and when you do so for survival, you don’t really have time to think about your relationship to performance. I didn’t love the stage; I didn’t like the stage; it just was a part of my week. The loose warmth of something familiar and not altogether unpleasant. As neutral as Death himself. I am dying, I wrote and was handed a scholarship. We are dying, I penned and was handed research money. More stages. More money. Bigger mics. Nothing to ever fix the problems.

Sometime in college, while I lost family to poverty and to stress, and while Ebola was still a case study in my Global Health courses, this stitch of time where I had to wade between this life and this death to find the cadence of every day— this was the time I realized I was owned. I saw how brilliant Pain is and why it’s so lucrative. How… ritualistic all of this was. How much my blood looks like diamonds. How much they (the audience, waiting bated-breath) is willing to pay for my blood. Diamonds. I want it in diamonds, since I am so sacred to the ritual of this world order. These people are going to pay for my blood in diamonds.

Once I realized the precarity of my place, that the love of institution was still just ownership by other names (like publication), I came to a screeching halt. I was a senior in college and I blamed it on burn out. It was so much more than just exhaustion. It was repulsion at coming to understand that I has sold my mind, my fertile earth, to the academy without even realizing. That this life of mine was built on turning my thoughts into some tangible, supple thing that Bleeds so I could tack it with some words— a butterfly pinned shiny on a cork board. Pieces of flesh stitched together with someone’s humanity and immortalized on the page. This university that paid for my health insurance and new laptops in exchange for my fertile earth. These were not the pages of the trees that once held regard for me. This was love in ownership, again. There is no freedom in the academy. I had pimped my mind out to a new age plantation and they wanted me to pretend like I liked it. Graduate school began to knock and I was celebrated. I received the prize for all my scholastic excellence: more hard work. I shut my mind off. She had seen enough. Nothing in my purse but lipgloss, a MacBook and a change of hell.

What was coming next was not safe for us; I didn’t know how to keep our secrets anymore. I didn’t even trust myself. I kissed my pen and put her in the pocket between one rib and another. I graduated college; I did not publish my thesis; I began my master’s program and I laid us all to rest with a two line refrain.

I have misplaced my seams.

My grief spills everywhere.

Act III: What I Owe to the Sun

I don’t have much to say in public about my time as a dancer, except that I appreciated it for its honesty. There was no delusion or pretense to the job— your body is on display and you are paid accordingly. Literally just like academia, except better paid and with far more agency over your day to day. The strip club is a place where you actually need to be honest with yourself, because there are some bits of you cannot come into work. There is no money at the club waiting for you if you are not capable of a precise, thorough self inventory. I shed what I need to when I take off my sweats. My brain gets put in a jar, and the jar in my locker. This process was very rinse and repeat with me. Beauty rituals require brutal self appraisal as a daily practice of sanctification. I never really surprise myself with the parts of me that make it out of the locker room— I have been performing my whole life.

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We flash forward a handful of years in a montage of black lights and white lingerie and morning-after alcohol. This is really why I don’t talk much about the club— it’s fr one part spite towards a nosy ass internet and three parts because I would run out of things to say five minutes into an essay. It is more or less uneventful. Sure, every now and again Something Happens, but most days, it’s just Tuesday. Every day is a Tuesday. My life tumbles forward. I renegotiate myself at the start of every day on what I am and what I would like to keep.

Except. Except. Here is our final and then. And then, after I’d been in the ring for a while, long enough to know better than what I was doing, I started swinging myself around on the pole. Just to try it. Just to see if I could. Because I was too fucked up to say, no, maybe it isn’t a stellar idea to try flips for the first time with an audience and a stomach full of cucumbers, hummus, and champagne. Because I was sick with envy that other girls were better dancers than me. Because I didn’t realize I still had this unrealized dream of dancing on the world’s stage, where everyone could see me. I am not pristine enough for the world’s stage, and I am too much of a perfectionist to embarrass myself, but this... this was most certainly not an audience of everyone. And I was so, so intoxicated. I flipped myself over and started flying. I don't think I've hit the ground yet.

The first night I ever pole-danced (as in, really fucking did that shit pole danced), I pulled an inversion I’ve only ever seen me do in my dreams. I was fucked up and in new heels because mine broke on me during my last stage set, and I wasn’t about to go home, I had my prettiest lingerie on. I remember hearing my first ever stage song play over me diamonds on my neck, di- diamonds on my wrists. And I remembered what these people owe to me. And I remember thinking to the chorus that lives in my head, this stage is going to be soaked by the time I’m done. And my body found its way into spinning, upside down, arms in front of me, grabbing my back leg, hanging there like a ballerina in a snow globe. And money rained down.

Here is that bright and toothy voice, who I now call Auntie Dae: It’s a shame everyone can’t see you do this. You are a star. You love the stage. You were born a dancer. Remember?

Oh. I… do. I love the stage. I think I missed the stage.

This was also a stage in life where I was passively dying. As much as the club low-key saved my life, I was only ever so attached— here enough to function and to drink and little more. Remember where we are in this season of life: gone past the mountains years ago, fooling folks into thinking I’m a true blue city bitch, hiding my brilliance from graduate school so the university cannot take myself from me again, hiding my real identities and signifiers at work for my own safety, hiding my work from my family, somehow never hiding from myself because I needed an honest self inventory to survive all this. A secret that radiated off me: I was not doing a great job at surviving all this. I felt the familiar cool, delicious storm clouds swirling above me and thought, not at all startled: those clouds are so low I can’t see my hands in front of me. I remembered the last time I couldn’t see anything past my current age. I was fifteen. That was the year I tried to kill myself and failed.

I was there at 23, watching me drink bottle after bottle of work-sponsored top shelf liquor and thinking somewhere distant, maybe I should save myself. Followed up with a revision, when that felt like too grand a task, maybe I should save bits of myself somewhere. Just in case I survive this, like I keep doing. I will want to know what happened to me. So I did two things. I kept one notebook over three years (a record low but it was better than nothing). And I picked up TikTok, at least in part, to have a means of documentation of myself in spite of my hiding. Maybe that’s just me making a story out of things— but never in my life had I really felt like I had things to say to the public until now, in this season of hibernation.

One last bit of crucial honesty before we get back to the plot: writing and keeping record of myself and my circumstances was crucial to my survival as a teenager. I am going to talk about this openly because I think a decent amount of teenagers follow me, and because I am a mental health professional, and because I would have loved it if more adults were honest with me about suicidality. There was a time after my suicide attempts (on and off from fifteen to twenty-three) where I did not have the will to live, I just lacked the will to die. Death is a commitment in a way the shuffle of every day life is not. Just because I did not actively want to be alive anymore does not mean I magically wanted to stay. I had incredibly important spiritual revelations after 15 about choice and destiny and being anchored to this world. My understanding had grown: I was meant to be on this earth still. I just had no idea why. It was a day to day that I characterize as the Chicago winter impressing itself on the skyline: every day is gray. Some days, the fog is lower than others.

We went on like this until my brain clicked into place at almost 24. [This sounds corny but I am so serious. You can trust me to be honest and so I am telling you: life really does get better when your brain is done growing. Please hang in there.] Anyways. I am there, breaths from my next stage of life that I do not know is coming yet, a couple years into the club, a couple years into graduate school, having made a full revolution (as in all the way back to start) around the ten year anniversary of me answering a notebook’s call and deeming myself worth writing down. I made a TikTok (just one video) because I was attempting to pretend it wasn’t that deep. And then I immediately went viral. THIS is our last and then, forget what I said earlier: you make your cute lil speaking video and then the first TikTok you ever make goes viral. Look at you, foolish! You called the Stage and she came running. What did you think would happen? And you look good on the stage. There’s the truth. You are supposed to be up here.

We’re at the end of the montage and you are easing yourself into the spotlight, just barely. You’re trying to pretend like it’s super normal to hit six figure follower counts in as many weeks. Life is still fractured, and that is okay. It gets glued together bit by bit and it’s good for you to learn patience. We are back here at this moment when this lady clocks you while you are *insert stripper name here* and startles you speechless. [Ha! You. Speechless. Anyways.]

You cannot think of a lie so you just smile and say yes, you are. And she’s cool. In fact, she says, “it makes you cooler, knowing that you do this. That you are like a really full person off screen.” Leaving you wondering what it would be like if everyone on the internet knew. If you family knew. If one day your life was not so dissected and pinned apart and you didn’t have to pretend like you were ashamed of yourself. Maybe the mess belongs on stage just as much as you do.

And this time, the stage is on more of my own terms. Not quite, not all the way. But certainly more than before, at the club. At church. At school. You have more freedom to expand and contract and so many kind people watching you. People are watching us. People are taking inspiration and joy from us when you yourself could not give myself those things. And instead of constant dying and constant public spectacle, we balance the hardness of things. I have always been one to wear my hardships on my wrists and now here I am having folks assume I had a rich kid life with healthy attachments to my parents. Befuddling. Amazing. Look how fast you found yourself, sharing us in moments, in morsels of time you found lovely. Then… just like that. Self-documenting. Archival.

I cannot help but love myself, even when I do not like myself. And what better love than the love of being kept, collected, considered?

a brief letter to me on my 23rd birthday entitled, “forgive me for spoiling the ending.”

At the time this picture was taken, you have only just begun to understand how vast you are and how pointless it is to try and underperform. You were raised up by the mountains and cemented in the sun. You, a Leo! You thought you could run and hide when you got scared. Imagine thinking you’d be raspberries your whole life. You are a grown-up now. You have made it to adulthood and you are surprised your flowers changed and bloomed. Welcome to your era of sunflowers.

I am an amalgamation of the people that built me and if I am honest, good and honest, I have been built in part by the public eye. I have been pieced together by and under the center spotlight. Fourteen was such a tender age to take the stage ; there are some ways I will never unsee my body as opportunity ; it was what it is. I can never go backwards, and me hiding wasn’t backwards, it was around again in the same orbit. All it did was delay the inevitable. When I speak, it feels like branches are shooting out of my chest. I am most rooted when I feel my voice carry on the sun rays. People from all over the world listen in on your lives, on your podcast, quite literally on your musings and solidifies what I already knew: the reason we prohibited social media in our life as a teenager is because we knew what would happen to me if the internet saw me speak. How hilarious it is that I thought I could run! I was always going to be up here. You were built by the sun; you owe those rays you soaked up a second chance at shining.

Well, beloved, you survive. You survive your next big heartbreak and your freakouts about graduate school and your wild ass landlords. You survive the pilgrimage home and back to yourself, night after night. Era after era. So much gumption! My stars, you amaze me. I will spoil this ending for you, which is just the middle of my own block. I am still here, making notes in the margins for us. I have new questions of love to consider; they are as follows.

How do I love myself best in public? What is self love when a part of me always belongs to the people?

I haven’t reread the notebook you kept loosely during this time but I cannot wait

love and love,

@ismatu.gwendolyn, one year in

Final thoughts: archival is not only a study of self. it is a declaration of love. I love myself and so I want to remember. I am enthralled with the smallest bits of this life seeding and sprouting years later, when I have the fertile earth to hold onto them. I surprise myself with what I grow, even still, after all this time. I expected to look back and see the wildflowers of my youth littered everywhere the wind blows. I am shocked, ten years later, to see what fourteen year old planted in their left hand as she wrote to me with her right: there, blooming up from the margins: stocky, bright, thick-stemmed flowers turning their face up to the sun. I keep myself and in doing so, I declare me worth keeping. And this time, I open up my garden heart to the people that see and see me, that have found ways to love me in sincerity with even the smallest glimpses of my life. I spare a seed where I am able. I know I am in a temporary space and I am flying all the same.

I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease. I hope you have something left over to say to your future self at the end of the day.

warmest regards,

ismatu g.

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