“Why can’t you just ease up?”
Whenever I hear this question, I feel tension manifest in my body. But even though I’ve begun learning how to let go of that feeling, it still follows me around.
It feels as though my breathing becomes a little more restricted, my heart rate rises, and I’m unsure as to whether I’ll stay upright, burst into flames or pass out from exhaustion.
It’s a tension that I carried with me throughout my existence. Growing up Ghanaian, Queer, in the diaspora and with a family and community that maintained the “it takes a village” mentality for raising children, that tension was everywhere.
From being told “When you leave this house, you represent your family”, or hearing grown men call people’s children “disgraces” to the community in the barbershop. It manifested in me whenever I overheard someone say “Oh, I heard their son is gay now - such a shame for the family”.
This tension became my norm. I constantly watched myself in every situation. I would find myself scanning rooms and scenarios, assessing and predicting outcomes even when there was no need to be so vigilant and alert.
I had to watch myself when in groups of men, so I didn’t give my queerness away, for fear of ridicule or worse. I would have to watch myself when expressing my emotions around my family for fear of being called “dramatic” or “too much.” I would have to watch myself in each of these situations not to let aspects of my personality that thrived in other instances slip out and give up the game.
Life began to be less something that I actively experienced than something I observed.
I became less prone to fun for the sake of fun. Everything required a reason. It needed to enrich my life or benefit me somehow – to help me grow. I would find myself stressed that everything in my life seemed to be work. I couldn’t see that it was my ‘hardening’ around the tension I was still holding in my body that was causing it.
Relationship after relationship failed because every time I went into a situation that required me to be vulnerable, my fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses were triggered. I would push people away when I needed them.
I was unable to laugh freely. Not because I didn’t find anything funny, but because I didn’t want to give too much away. I couldn’t give too much away. My 10-year-old self couldn’t give too much away, or they would be humiliated, insulted or punished.
Growing up in a world that asks you to be hyper-vigilant of yourself so as not to offend, irritate or be seen to threaten or cause fear, irritation, or all-out anger creates the exact pressure I described. It creates an existence where you are a spectator and adjudicator rather than a participant.
I always felt a little left out and lonely, even amid joy, because I had not allowed myself to feel and be true to those feelings. The thing that I’ve only recently realised, however, is that we can let go of this tension.
That hypervigilance helped me. Kids in those situations get smart like I did, figuring out how to keep going by putting those systems in place. And here we are now, smart adults making their way in the world and making decisions for themselves.
We may feel the tension the same way, but we must remind ourselves that we are much smarter, wiser, and more capable. Holding on to the boundaries we place on ourselves in the name of safety or to better comprehend the world around us while we are still so new to it cannot help us grow. We have to let go.
And I did let go. I let go of fearing what people would say if I were myself. I started to enjoy myself. I started to enjoy my quirks, allow myself to question things taught to me as fact and look deeper to find what these things meant to me instead of absorbing what society told me about them. I started allowing myself to move forward rather than being mentally suspended in time.
It’s like being on the monkey bars. To progress, you’ve got to let go of the bar you feel safe on. You can’t hang there forever because, eventually, your arms will fail. It’s best to keep moving.
In a way, we all need to look at some of the boundaries or restrictions we put on ourselves in life and see if they still serve us. The steadfast holding on to belief systems, social systems, norms, and ‘values’ that exist mainly to uphold our painfully capitalist society is causing so much division.
In examining how we mute or restrict ourselves, or how we hold on to ‘knowledge’ that was fed to us rather than experienced by us, we can tear down a lot more barriers intrapersonally and exist better interpersonally.
And doing that will help us all ease up a little.
More than a month
At QueerAF, we're obsessed with journalism and storytelling that puts lived experience in the driving seat.
So we're thrilled to be able to bring you Nathanael's perspective - and those of several other Black queer creatives - this Black History Month.
As a small indie publisher, we've done this series on a shoe-string budget. Everyone's been paid, and received mentoring and support - but imagine what we could do with more resources.
This month, our ask to you is this: if you learn, grow from or enjoy our UK Black History Month series, consider investing in it.
Help us fund even more Black, queer and trans creatives to tell stories - all year around.
