Part 3: The Grieving Process from a Dancer’s Perspective (On Creation)

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

Part 2 can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1htoppf/part_2_the_grieving_process_from_a_dancers/

I’ve been writing this in my head for awhile now, but it’s been difficult to put thoughts to syntax and grammar. I am very grateful that so many readers found care and a little bit of light in my previous two posts. This is part of why I am writing to you now. You know the deal by now, rim your reading margaritas with salt and let us begin. 

It’s been almost 3 weeks now since the terror attack, the streets are once again flooded with tourists. I watched a man chug a beer, throw up a little on himself, pretend it didn’t happen and then wash it down with another beer. There isn’t enough sage or hand sanitizer in the world to make the scene pretty. The city is healing.

When I first began thinking this third piece into being, I had deleted Tetris off my phone after clearing level 200. While pattern recognition is excellent for dopamine release, it is not so beneficial for alleviating dissociation. (And as someone responded before, not sustainable.) It’s back on my phone again though. I’m on level 331. 

I’d like to express gratitude that everyone I love in this life was nowhere near the terror attack or Bourbon St on NYE. They did not see the deaths, they were not hurt, they were completely safe. I do not know how my world would fall apart if it had been otherwise. I cannot imagine the agony those more directly affected are navigating.  I have been held gently and tightly by those close to my heart. I have felt such love and care and concern. 

In real life, people who have never said hi to me before keep asking how I am. It feels so... I think they feel they’re supposed to, running a preprogrammed script, if x then y. Even if their intentions are nice, I do not owe my vulnerability as a social courtesy to anyone who never gave me a second glance before all this; I’d rather pour it into the arms of loved ones and the fingertips of strangers.

How am I? I don’t want to answer. Please don’t ask.

I know the socially acceptable response is to be grateful and offer reassurance. I’m okay. I’m fine. But my brain glitches out with inauthenticity or platitudes; it feels like compromising my integrity to mask to ensure someone else’s comfort when they’re intending on inquiring as to mine. I’d rather be considered abrasive than lie. There exists a disparity between being kind and being nice. Niceties are shallow, aspects of mandatory customer service. Kindness is extension of self and care. Some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, people who are generally accepted in polite society and properly socialized, are also directly antithetical to ‘kind’. 

How am I? Swimming through molasses.

It feels a lot like just being dropped back into a world that kept moving while I’m still a few weeks behind. You know the movie scenes where a character is moving in slow motion, while the world and everyone around them is moving in a super fast blur? Spiders by System of a Down has been playing in my head for days, but I’m finally falling asleep at night before the sun rises.

How am I? Transmuting.

It wasn’t until a little over 11 years ago that I understood what a real new year celebration was, and it doesn’t happen on December 31.

On my desk there is a half finished assortment of Mardi Gras throws I’m making  for the Saint Anne Parade; I’ve been working on them on and off for months, all complicated crystal beads and o-rings and wires and way more expensive and time-consuming than initially intended. Last year, I was the masked angel with eight sparkling white wings who made the front page of the times picayune. This year… approaching carnival feels different.

I realized a few nights ago that the costume I had been planning and working on for several months on already needs to be tabled. I had been working with purple and gold but now the whole world has shifted towards greyscale and I must dress to match this new black and white kaleidoscope.

Today I’ve been knuckles deep in pliers and o-rings and crystal beads, interacting with the external in an attempt to make sense of this shifting internal world. Costuming and throw-making is good work, alchemist work, and the throws I’ve been working on will carry a lot of power. I get flashes of what the final products will look like, both of costume and throw, but never know until they’re finished. I prefer to keep it a surprise, both to myself and the world, and have never actually worn a fully composed costume until the event or day of. Chaos energy is play.

Perhaps it sounds very silly or inane or vapid, but allow me to explain. 

This is why I still live here.

In my mind, Mardi Gras Day, specifically the Saint Anne’s parade, is the one day of every year that justifies every other day of the inconveniences, sadness, loss, and tragedies of what it means to live in New Orleans. Mardi Gras Day is the peak experience of what death and rebirth, physical and emotional renewal, and metamorphoses can actually be. This city has eaten me alive and spat me back out as something far beyond what I ever knew I could be. And every year I have a new opportunity to show how I have continued to make myself, how I have danced along the backs of dragons. This is the day where the head and the tail of the Ouroboros join. 

This year, I will be the black and white angel, but the gifts I have to give will be in full color.

My little inner child is weeping and so I have been letting her play with rainbows. The thing a rainbow is you can’t hold on tight it will disappear. But you can show other people, and this is a most radical act of healing.

I pour my grief and anger and fear into every act of creation. My heart filters pain like a sieve and what comes out the other side of my fingertips is love. What I have to offer you is all my love. My heart is in pieces, but I will give you a shard. Be gentle, it is fragile but also the strongest gift I have. Some of the edges are sharp but this is where the gilding comes.

I think of how messy healing can be and am glad that this is what I have chosen. Even when I have to pause in between feathers and rhinestones and sequins and tassels and crystals and wire because I cannot see through the tears.

Whatever you are choosing to do at any given moment is a prayer. Time, attention, and energy is the real currency in life, as I’ve mentioned so many times before. When you act or speak, you’re saying that is the most important thing in the entire world, in your entire life, that you could be spending your resources on. I am reminded of this now.

So often I use this concept as a way to explain what it is I do at work, that what I sell is not a private dance or champagne room but rather time spent in my focused care. The level to which I am compensated ensures how deep I can work light with someone, how much energy I can delegate to be present with them. Our souls and minds have bodies which carry us to one each other to be connect in our human experiences. 

When I go into work, I do so very intentionally, and have written extensively in other places about it. Lingerie is armor, make-up is warpaint, perfume and jewelry are protection spells; the ritual aspects surrounding each shift before or after and in-between are years deep in my bones. 

Costuming is different. You cannot judge someone’s value based off of how they look, but you get a glimpse of their internal world depending on how they’ve shaped their avatar. There is never more creative freedom than during this time of the year and I never feel more like myself than when I am in costume. 

When I am at work, I am a very real, very cultivated version of self. Costuming though, moving through in the world wearing what I’ve made, feels more naked than wearing nothing at all.

I never make just one costume, there are so many different aspects of self and growth and change to manifest at various balls and parties. My Mardi Gras Day costume is the most labor intensive and time consuming (financially and by the clock) by far. Over the years I have made so many horned headpieces and worn so many different wings. This year will be quite an evolution but the idea that I have in my head is exquisite.  There remains always a gap between what I can imagine and actually create, but this is how art (and financial responsibility) works. The act of creation and costuming is not a guilty pleasure or escapism or a waste of time… this is a place where my soul breathes. Especially now, as we weave our way through the sickening miasma of late stage capitalism / fascism, now than ever, we have to believe our magic into being.

Every Mardi Gras morning, I walk from where I live in the quarter to the Bywater to be part of the Saint Anne parade. This pilgrimage is holy. The city is still quiet in places, but there are pockets of music and revelry. Everyone who takes this seriously has either been awake all night or is up and making their way to begin the best day of the year. When I say ‘best’, I don’t mean ‘happiest’. It is a vividness you cannot look away from. It is a vitality which permeates every crease in our many chambered hearts and lets the stars in. Sometimes this is painful. Let the light in anyways.

The further away from the quarter you walk, the more the world thaws into a vast palette of minds on display, self-actualized in their costumes. They are giving entirely, have extended much effort into embodying a deep part of the beauty of humanity.  As the sun gets higher, and the tides turn, and the parade rolls... There is never a more distinct difference displayed between people who have the ‘givesies’ and people who have the ‘takesies’. The closer and closer to the parade gets back to the quarter and tourists, the more ‘takesies’ there are; these are those who haven’t dressed up and want to live vicariously. These are the people who haven’t put any effort into shedding their skin to bare their souls, and the same who will spit and yell and curse if you do not stop dancing to take a photo with them for their facebook feed. I am not here to lay judgement on professional photographers or people new to the city who don’t know yet or people who are unaware. If you know you know and I will not explain further except to say it is better to be a givesie.

The more we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable and show our insides out, offering up our gift of creation to the world, the more likely we are to find our people. This is how a way of healing the world. Authenticity is priceless. Sometimes the mask is more real than the face behind it— does not an artist use lies to tell the truth?

Here are the truths that I will do my best to bring you: I am weary, as so many of us are, but my heart still beats gold. I have found a way to navigate the tragedies of this life in ways which make sense to me. This is not a prescription for anyone else, it is not the one right way of being or handling grief. I am full of judgments but also curiosity, a teeter-tottering balance between ego and soul; this is not acknowledged with pride, only awareness. This year more than ever, it feels vital to play, to engage with creation. Continuing to celebrate may seem vapid or tasteless when there is so much loss and so much wrong with the world, but this is exactly why I must. I must participate, for I am still among the living for better or worse, at least for now. 

If you see my black and white wings on Mardi Gras Day, ask for what I have to give. Ask me for a rainbow and I will give you one that won’t dissolve. I cannot tell you everything is going to be okay, or that I have everything figured out. I do not have answers for you. I think however, there is value in seeking better and better questions.  What if we love despite the loss? What if our instincts aren’t silly? What if play is sacred? What if we dance for the ghosts whose bodies lie still and sing for the lips that have been silenced forever?

What if I turned my grief into a rainbow?

Thank you for reading, dear stranger. I wish you the most beautiful carnival season and unexpected moments of healing. 

(Author’s note: I have more or less doxxed myself with the specificity of concepts, and also by disclosing a previous and intended future costumes. I do not believe what I have tried to share would be complete without these ideas, so they stand. I write this from my heart, and hope once again what I have to share is taken with the understanding it is my experience, not a declaration of ‘The Right and Good and Proper Way of Being and Believing and Doing’. I know I on the fringes of generally accepted society and that my brain and body (and how I have chosen to use them) ruffle plenty feathers and often. I do not speak or act with the intent to cause discordance and deeply try to be a net positive for humanity and those I cross paths with. If what I have offer serves you, please enjoy. And if not, please disregard and I wish you well on your timeline.)