Part 2: The Grieving Process from a Dancer’s Perspective (On Anger)

(Part 1 can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1hs83ht/the_grieving_process_from_a_dancers_perspective/ )

Allow me to preface this with the knowledge that my grief is paltry compared to many other’s whose lives were lost or changed because of the terror attack. I know, again, I am one of the lucky ones, seeing horrors but remaining physically unharmed. I am not attempting to decenter anyone else’s experiences or emotions. This is only an offering, as was the last post was so well received. I hope value will be found in my words which may benefit anyone reading. 

I’m writing this now from hot water and salt as a thought-stream. Or rather, I am speaking because my finger tips will not move fast enough and my phone is not waterproof.  Grief is so messy. I wonder now if this bath is more epsom salt or tears. 

The anger didn’t arrive until Friday night. And I didn’t realize I was angry until I got into work.

Thursday night the clubs opened up again. As mentioned in my prior post, I chose to go back to work, specifically to dance at the club I was at NYE when the attack happened in front, as an act of reclamation. I felt… liberated. That first stage set going back on thursday night moved so much energy through it surprised even me. The crowd felt it too, which set up the evening: I was busy in private dances from the first moment I stepped off stage. It wasn’t until almost four hours later, I hit an emotional wall and realized I hadn’t eaten for almost 24 hours. I left and went home. I just couldn’t anymore. 

Still, my eyes remained dry. At least, until I was still lying awake at 9 in the morning, watching an overlay of fragmented memories run itself through in the darkness of my black-out curtained bedroom. It had been so difficult earlier at work not to still see echoes of the bodies on the street where they had been less than 48 hours prior; engaging with the swirling energies and constant sensory stimulation of the club kept those ghosts somewhat muted. Yet, so many hours later in the silence there was was nothing to take away the imagery superimposed on my field of vision.

Fun fact: since downloading it on Wednesday, I’m up to level 73 on the Tetris mobile app. When the flashbulb memories aren’t replaying themselves, my brain has started making up imaginary Tetris games, problem solving moves and where the pieces should go. This is useful sometimes, but not sustainable.

Still, whenever I breathe really deep, the ghosts and the pretend Tetris games disappear, and the tears come. I tasted salt then, as I do now, before finally falling asleep late in the morning.

Friday night, I chose to go dance at my other club. It’s further down the street and wasn’t in direct line of the horrific happenings Tuesday night. Still, many of the surrounding businesses were closed. Street performers had set up with blaring speakers out front, trying to work unwilling and uneasy crowds. It was cold, and many of them gave up relatively quickly.

I will not catalogue the revolting behavior of the few men I interacted with. I enjoyed interacting with only one human, and we spent perhaps a half an hour together in private dances. After that, the club was mostly empty apart from NPCs and utterly wasted humans. It took an hour of no new viable customers and playing Tetris before realizing I was totally dissociated and I needed to leave early. Again. So I did. 

Let us return to the initial intention of writing this post: Grief is messy, and I am angry.

Anger is such a deep part of grief, I always seem to forget what’s coming until it’s finally here. For a long time I read and believed that anger was a secondary emotion under which fear or sadness lay; it often feels safer/easier to be angry than to feel afraid or sadness. Anger is a fire which helps move one through the murky waters of grief. Anger, however, is a valuable emotion unto itself, as an end, not a means. When female bodied individuals in particular get in touch with their anger, it is a spiritually powerful experience. One beings to understand volcanoes.  Anger is the part of you that loves you, it is an aspect of self which says ‘I am a sacred space. My life and wellbeing are precious. These are my boundaries and if you do not respect them, heaven help you because I will protect myself. I will not cower.’

I am angry at the broken monster of a human who brought his own internal hell into the lives of those in his twisted path. I am angry at the systemic failures which have led to scarcity, violence, and the weaponization of terror. I am angry that I understand now why it is called a ‘terrorist’ attack; for some reason the words didn’t click in my brain until today.

I am angry at all of the people who are partying on the streets which were covered in blood only a few nights prior. I am angry at all of the people who thought that their vacations should not be ruined, that drinking hand grenades and getting wasted and acting revolting was acceptable.

I am angry at myself for going to look at the street that night after it all happened, before they shut our balcony. I am angry that I had my phone out and took a 2 second video before running back inside. 

I am angry at all the businesses who have not remained closed. I am angry at myself for participating in it all. What separates me from a street performer besides security, a cover charge, and black lights? I am angry because even though my motivation wasn’t to make money but to be in community, money was still a factor. I am angry because I need to take care of myself, and to do so, I still have to participate in the late stage capitalistic dystopian future we find ourselves in. I am angry that we live in the center of a venn diagram of 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaiden‘s Tale (And if they’re right about the aliens, maybe Ender’s Game). 

Already I can anticipate the reactions of ‘don’t be angry at this because xyz’, etc. I am not looking for anyone to explain away my emotions. It will dissipate on its own; the more I feel it and allow it to pass through me experientially, the less likely it is to come out subconsciously in micro (or macro) aggressions. I know anger is not logical. I know that every one of us has to work to survive. I know that tourists spent time and money to come here, to have an experience. I know the world en masse will not stop for anything that happened Tuesday night. We each do the best we can until we know how to do better. Sometimes there is no good choice to make. 

And I want to be very clear, I am not blaming anyone, except for the perpetrator himself, for their choices and actions. 

This is a tricky place to be, balanced between logic and emotion. I have been trying to feel whatever I feel, without judgement, though I know I need to add these explanations so the internet doesn’t simply label me ‘illogical’. Feeling fully, without rationalizing away the emotions, is imperative. The robot part of my brain is perfectly capable of understanding: this is how the world works. Listening only to that aspect of intellect though leads to helplessness and nihilism and self-gaslighting out of having the human experience. 

Learning how to feel all your feelings so they don’t get trapped is a difficult but worthwhile practice. It’s taken my whole life to find and understand that I have the ability to be angry. Now that it’s here, I cannot silence it away again. I have spent so many years already trying to catch up to now, going back to collect soul fragments stuck in the past where they got stuck, because it was too terrible to be in the body of someone undergoing those experiences. Now there are new pieces to collect.

This is where, perhaps dear stranger, this post will be relevant to you. I’d like to make a few recommendations. Yes, there are so many other ways of processing, no, I am not intentionally excluding them. I repeat, take it all with all the salt in the world.

Let your body tell you what it needs. It does not have words, but it has emotions and feelings and sounds and symptoms. Your body loves you, even when you are so often disappointed with it for one fault or another. Remember who profits off of your insecurities; there is no ideal body, the body is not a trend. Your body loves you and has kept you together this far. There will always be good days and bad days, it need not be a war zone. 

Sing. Your body is an animal. Howl down the cosmos if you can. (If you try it will let you, you can call down the milky way with a whisper.) Let the sounds move through you and follow it without judgment. There are no bad sounds. Often singing turns into crying. Grief lives in the lungs, and crying, laughing, and singing help set it free.

Dance. It’s not about how it looks to anyone else. It’s about how you feel in your body. Move to music, or to silence. Follow your intuition. It does not have to be choreography or defined. Movement is art. Movement is medicine. Healing is similar, nonlinear, would that it was so easy to be a straight streamlined path towards being broken and then mended.

Create. Now is a really good time to start (or continue) to work on carnival costumes and throws. The season is almost here, a time where chaos overtakes the normal ordered way of things. It’s a cyclical death and rebirth, a much needed release of physical, emotional, and psychic energy, wherein the trickster reigns supreme. Mardi Gras Day has always felt like the real new years day, especially the Saint Anne Parade. This year especially, I imagine joy and grief will be so deeply intertwined.

There is a art form of Japanese ceramic pottery called, kintsugi. Vases and cups and bowls and all manner of things are shattered and then repaired with gold, so that they are more beautiful for having been broken. This is also the art of healing a human heart. You know how big your heart is because you know what it feels like when it breaks open. And the trick, the real remedy to the agonizing deepness of these wounds, is to keep the origami folds of your heart open. And open and open and open again and again and again. Despite every urge to close off and become brittle.

Your heart… it’s a forever blooming flower. There are seasons and cycles, and sometimes the chambers are wilted and sometimes shorn of petals or locked somewhere in the sunken places. If you are patient though, there is always a moment when even if the sun is gone, the very faintest starlight will come. The night is often long, but be tender with your broken parts. Handle your petals with reverence. What I spoke of before is difficult, the intentional internal alchemy of magicking the darkness into something impossibly light. It is blood magic. But also, it is the same magic that spun the constellations into being. It is the magic which brought all our atoms from inside stars to now. The universe doesn’t waste resources and all of your life you have been so busy becoming. The entire Big Bang unfolded just so this moment could occur. So you might read these words while you hold your heart in your throat, wondering if it will ever stop hurting. 

There is no replacing what has been lost and there is no going back. Innocence is nonrenewable. Choosing to heal, to open, to grieve, and to love are the most radical things you can do now. It is a difficult path, but the alternative is much worse. Easy decisions are not the worthwhile ones. I am no one, but I am so proud of you for making it this far. I am so proud of you for making it here from the inside of a star so many years ago.

Do not give up, dearest golden blooming hearts. We are what makes the constellation that is New Orleans so bright, especially in this inky night.

(Thank you for reading. Again, no editing for palatability. If you like my words, I wrote a book of poetry and self-published it back in 2020 just before quarantine quarantine unfolded. I’ve never really made extensive posts to reddit before, usually I use my IG as a platform to reach community. While I would love to self-promote that space, I’m not sure what the rules are for that sort of thing on this subreddit and I think officially doxxing myself might be dangerous or negatively impactful. If do you know me irl, you know my writing style and belief system, and it’s probably obvious to you who I am. If so, hi, hello. It feels deeply scary to write all that and wonder how the internet will react. I feel as if so much could be taken the wrong way, even though I write from my heart with no malicious intent. But… I need to put this somewhere, and I think it should live somewhere other than my journals. It is my deepest wish that this will be potentially be useful to someone.)