I’ve been thinking about how bodies react to stressful situations or fall into PTSD, and how private and public struggles compound each other.
There are many challenging and difficult things happening in our world right now and we all read, process, filter, and react to them differently.
At the confluence of demographic intersectionality, our personal histories, and the proximity of the domino effect to each of our societies, our individual bodies personalise and compound responses to a single stimuli.
All of us also use and curate our social media differently, for the personal or professional or news, as receptacle or broadcast or dialogue, by posting or reading or lurking, in peaks and troughs with intensities and lulls, all of these and everything else in between.
Whatever works for our bodies and helps us do life better without harm to others is valid.
*
I am careful with what and how much of this media I consume and what I put out because I think I know how much my body can take. But last night my subconscious brain concocted the most bizarre of nightmares in a mishmash of all my private and public pain.
There were scenes of minority raced people being profiled and processed on paper and assigned “authenticity percentages” to certify the purity and murkiness of our heritage, all iPhones were in “lockdown mode” under the control of headquarters and live speeches from a dictator were blaring out of every mobile phone, women were being lined up and physically assessed for their “moral fitness” to mother children, people who had lost siblings to death were dispatched to “zones of violence” to comfort the dying lying on the street because we were supposedly a caste of “grief soldiers”.
In what was to be my final mission in the field, I held a Black man (Don Cheadle?!) who was bleeding from his chest and sang him a nursery song until he went to sleep. The tune was from my childhood when my sister and I used to take piano lessons in Yamaha:
“Come with me, my happy music friends/
Come with me, our music time begins/
Listen to this wonderful sound/
Music all around/
Happy sounds are all around/”
And then I woke up.
WISHCRYS 