Hippolyta and June and I
Do you know how I know I am destined for greatness? It is a feeling I have always had inside me, this pulsating knowing that reverberates like a heartbeat throughout my being. I would use different words to describe it over the years “being bigger than my skin” or a sense that “something big was about to happen”. It wasn’t something I necessarily craved, it just…was? In graduate school, a professor told me that I was what was called the canary in the mineshaft; sent into the unknown before the collective to see if it was safe to proceed. It sounded like nothing I wanted to be part of, to be honest. I was not interested in being a sacrificial lamb or a martyr. To me, greatness came from how I lived not how I would die. Then I got a few years between me and the idea and I came to understand that it was not about sending me off to die, it was not allowing the threat of death to stop me from pushing into the unknown and helping as many people as I could to learn how to survive it.
Understanding the truth about your Self is revolutionary work. Last week, I watched the “I Am” episode of Lovecraft Country . In it, Hippolyta travels through space and time to explore all facets of her being so that she can more aptly name herself. Beyond the episode being a powerful piece of artistic expression, it resonated with me because the whole thing was reminiscent of the work I’d been doing for the past year. In my most recently published blog post, on August 16, 2020 I wrote:
A bit of honesty? well first…it would be good for me to describe something that I explain to clients all the time which is the I am vs. Anything that can come after… e.g. I am | A Woman, or I am | A Father. The roles, relationships and responsibilities that form our identities are all ego self. We think these things are who we are because some of them, like race or gender or sexuality, are so salient (at the forefront) that we cannot imagine ourselves separate from it. However, most and arguably all of those identities can be taken away. The fragility of them is what causes our ego to be in constant management of how to protect them and keep them safe because the ego, falsely, believes that those things, those identities, and thus itself—the ego—is the entirety of our beings.
By contrast…
I am—the divinity that dwells within us as us? Is who we truly are. It is the part that Knows. It is the part that you might know as intuition, your “gut” feelings. It is the part that is the same as everyone, in that, all possibilities lie within it. I am, I like to joke, does not argue and go back and forth with you, I am is the “Okay, girl.” I am is sure and certain. When people say “I See You” they speak to seeing your I am, seeing past all the things that bind you to the material world and instead seeing the reverent sacredness of your very existence.
I discovered my I am when I lost all the things I believed I was.
In one of her iterations, Hippolyta spoke to a warrior army of women. She spoke words that were spoken over her as she learned how to recognize her I am. She declared:
We are here because we did not believe them when they told us our rage was not lady-like. We did not believe them when they said our violence goes too far. We did not believe them when they said the hatred that we feel for our enemies is not god like. They say that to woman like us because they know what will happen when we are free.
To name your Self means to take radical responsibility for the words that follow “I am”. It means to define yourself an alchemic aligning of Lorde’s idea that to define yourself for yourself is to avoid consumption and annihilation. And Carroll’s idea that “when I use word it means only what I intend it to mean nothing more, nothing less.” It is to hold the idea that I can be many things at once and still, none of it absolutely, beyond that I am. To name your Self in your own words means to redefine language you have used your whole life, stretching words like canvas across wood to make room for new meaning and emergent possibility. Many people over the course of my life have told me that I am “courageous.” It is not a word I would readily choose to describe myself because the way I made meaning of the word did not align with who I understood my Self to be. Yet when I string together this logic…courage is not acting in the absence of fear. Courage literally translates to speaking one’s mind by telling all one’s heart. Brene Brown says that courage is a heart word, for this reason. And then she says, “It's not fear that gets in the way of daring leadership; it's armor. Courage is about making yourself available. Courage is about vulnerability. Courage is about the act of hearing the desires of your heart and honoring them with intentional action. In that way, I can understand how the word relates to me. I can recognize the moments that I have allowed my actions to speak the desires of my heart. I can name myself courageous because the word holds a different meaning for me now, elicits a different vibration.
I have learned that my way of leading is through my heart. I have learned that by exploring my own being as though it were as vast and infinite as the universe, I am able to intimately familiarize myself with characteristics of the human experience and when I notice them in others I can speak to them. I have learned how to heal people simply by acknowledging them and I have learned how to acknowledge them by first acknowledging myself.
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Over the past weekend I have been binge watching Handmaids Tale and one of the most fascinating elements of the story is in season 3 where June slips into madness but comes out on the other side of it with renewed purpose. The veil between reality and delusion had become so thin that what was previously seen as impossible or improbable suddenly felt tangible. In those desperate moments she begins to construct a new reality, new possibilities. Self-care culture would have people thinking that awakenings happen in bubble baths with candles and essential oils burning. But my own looked a lot like June’s. I had to decide if I was going to keep the names I was called or if I was going to redefine them. I had to decide if I was going to accept defiance, or if I was going to claim divergence. Was I going to listen to everyone else (and my internalized voice of fear) when they said I had lost “everything”? Or was I going to listen to my Self when I knew, I still had me.
That these stories about these women found me months after my own naming and weeks after devising my own impossible plan, does not escape me. That I notice when instances like this align. I am a noticer. That I woke up this morning with half of these thoughts spilling out of my hands. I am a writer. It isn’t anything I do, it isn’t anything I buy or anyone I associate with. It isn’t my job that informs me or my friends, or even my favorite books. It is the still certainty of recognizing the divinity that dwells within me. It leads me back to my initial question. Do you know how I know I am destined for greatness? Because I know, and because I am that I am.