Things we’ve done to support individual and community healing
For Mangos With Chili’s 2013 National Queer Arts Festival show FREE: Two Spirit, Trans and Queer People of Color Visions of Freedom, S.D. Shah and Manish collaborated on a video + performance piece where they asked the audience to write responses to the question “What are some things you’ve done to support your healing and community healing (physical, emotional, cultural, sexual, spiritual, etc.)?”
Here’s what community members wrote at the show and placed on a physical altar or posted to the event’s web stream or facebook page (The piece wasn’t a Peacock Rebellion project, but we’re posting it here so the list has a virtual altar that’s more permanent than facebook. and Mangos’ web site is down):
How we’ve supported individual and community healing:
- I’ve developed my inner dialogue and taken time to make intentional goals
- let myself cry
- go to therapy
- kink
- learn the truth and speak it
- honor my body and sex it up
- dress in drag
- allowed myself to focus inward and cry for a lot of years
- hibernate
- smoke pot
- light candles
- learn to meditate
- eat orange and green foods
- write down my dreams
- connect with other survivors and healers
- make art about my experiences
- stop trying to organize and run everything
- learn how to let myself be touched and feel my body
- find people to love authentically
- singing and teaching people to sing
- stare into someone else’s eyes
- study Kabbalah
- unlearn oppression
- support my friends and lovers and community
- I came out at 45.
- create cultural spaces for marginalized folks like myself
- cook and grow food as medicine
- stayed in my body
- held my sexuality and pleasure as central
- therapy and more therapy
- loving and massaging my dying friend
- loving my friend/her girlfriend
- sharing my amazing daughter with the world
- sharing my dreams and journaling
- coming to this show with a hot woman
- not accepting how things are
- (trying really hard to) love my body
- listening to trauma
- speaking despite fear
- care-giving for caregivers
- food making
- write stories
- PLAYING a lot
- share knowledge
- be open and vulnerable
- be able to accept pleasure
- knowing I deserve
- masturbation
- allow myself to be adored
- unlearn catholicism
- love
- learning – always
- make art with other people
- have sex with a lot of people
- listen to our elders
- short skirts
- dance
- breath
- burn medicine
- stay out late with [someone’s name]
- walk naked with no shame
- no judgement and open to infinite possibilities
- sharing smiles and kindness
- taking steps to take care of myself
- I forgave myself and asked my family to confront our collective historical denying to begin ending the ancestral cycles of violence in my family
- let myself be.
- listen to others
- meditation
- walk my dog
- being open
- being honest
- shared my experience
- I asked for help.
