To Be Where the Love Resides

“What do you want?”

“Dear friendship.”

I wanted to believe him but I couldn’t. I wanted to imagine that even after a few months of dating followed a couple months of radio silence that he really wanted to remain friends, dear friends. Deep down, I knew he was lying. How could he want to be something he never proved himself to be in the months leading up to this conversation? I had to let him go. Still, I couldn’t.

Sometimes you want to want somebody so desperately that you replay conversations, any form of communication you had with that person. You try your best to figure what went wrong, what you could’v done differently. In the middle of you figuring that out, a global pandemic is forcing the world to stop and take a pause, leaving you more time to rest and sit with your thoughts rather than avoid them and continue slaving for a capitalist system.

Even in the middle of a worldwide virus that primarily affected my career as an actor, in the middle of protests that shook the foundational lies of this nation, protests I engaged with in Louisville, KY, in the middle of seeing my mother for the first time after a year, I still miss him. It hurts to hurt but sometimes going back to that hurt is more comfortable than confronting what I truly need—healing.

The beginning of my new year was filled with much meditation and light. I moved into a new place, on the other side of the country. I had recently spent a month back home visiting my family, primarily my mother who works in a hospital and is always taking health precautions. I left a job in the same city I left him, both of which were draining the lifeblood from me. I tried to begin again.

If there was any resolution I could commit myself to, it would be to begin again. This doesn’t mean completing erasing what happened in the past but acknowledging those experiences and pushing forward into the path and journey I’m meant to be on. That path, the beginning is forged with gratitude but most importantly love.

My birthday is only 9 days after the new year. This year, I hit the big 30. I wanted to be doing something spectacular. Some friends chose a small select group to be with, following health guidelines, and lived it up in Miami or whatever destination they wanted to go to in the states. Financially, I could’ve traveled but I had no desire to do anything but be with myself. Most birthdays past, this was my preferred way of celebrating. This year felt different. I needed to be by myself, even though the past year has involved plenty of that. I needed to give myself love and gratitude for simply being here and not giving up on myself.

Choosing love has to be the thing. Choosing to do love is even more heroic. Love is, as bell hooks describes it, a growing up. In her masterpiece “All About Love” , she unearths some uncomfortable truths about how we love, how we think we love and more importantly how we can do it, healthily and honestly. It’s a meditation on the struggle to tell the truth in many ways. That’s my commitment, my resolution. As an actor, I have lived in other people’s skin and told their truths unashamedly in front of audiences I may never see again. How critical it is for me to do the same with the people who have raised me, loved me, failed me and those I have have loved, failed, cared for with everything in me.

I hope to be resolute in the doing of love. I hope to find a way to continue saying yes to my own happiness. That takes a great deal of inner engineering. I have a construction project to complete within me. Building and rebuilding and repurposing my foundation can look like telling that person who I needed to love me that I thank them for the lesson. I don’t even have to tell them face to face or through text. Telling them in my spirit can be enough. It eliminates any need for closure, which can never truly be closed. Having the courage to tell myself the truth, that I saw that person for their imperfections from the beginning and that I knew they would be incapable of loving me the way I needed and that I chose to stay anyway because it was so lovely to be with someone, is but a first step in my truth telling journey to love.

The resolution, in truth, began just before I left my birth home of Durham, North Carolina at the end of 2020. I was boarding a train the next morning to NYC with only 3 days left in the year. Mom and I had finished watching WW1984 to much disappointment and I was packing my things. I cried, deeply. Leaving home after any period of time is always difficult. These tears were healing tears though. My mom must have felt that I was in a more vulnerable, open space. She came to my room, still filled with artifacts of my childhood, and asked me a question. To paraphrase, she asked “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

Every so often during the past month I was there, I failed to mask my emotions which I prided myself on for many years. If something bothered me, I would find a way to smile it off or make a joke and all would be well. Not until very recently did I make the intention to stop lying in that way. If a coworker who became accustomed to me smiling and laughing and being a pacifier for their needs suddenly felt I was cold and distant, I didn’t stick around to coddle their frustration. I haven’t made a commitment to raise a child in this life and I certainly won’t do it with people older than me. In a way, I did a disservice to myself by not showing them the totality of who I am. That in itself is an act of lovelessness that only harms me. I chose to tell my mom about what my heart had been weighed down with since I’d been home.

I fought through tears that were still fresh and attempted to speak plain. I encouraged her to say yes to herself and find ways to worry less about what other people thought of her. It’s a habit that most of us can’t break. I let her know that the issues with the house, of which there were many, that I’d grown up in were adding extra stress to my life. I told her that I wanted her to learn to let go of all the noise, of the things that don’t serve her. As a God-fearing woman with a particular set of ideals, she didn’t understand fully what I meant. I knew she wouldn’t but will continue loving her as she navigates her way through it.

Beginning again is a feat that can be won with the armor of love and the safeguard of truth. The beauty of the journey lies in the knowing that it is all a journey, a continuous thing. I am forever on this ride, this quest, this excavation for deeper love within me. It doesn’t stop once I reach a certain weight and accomplish a worldly thing. It’s blood, pumping and steady and life-sustaining. I am resolute that doing the love that is not flowery but ferocious, I will get that much closer to the essence of God in me. In doing so, I cannot fail.