What do I see from the window of the Struggle Bus?
Notes on change, making a bed for my anger, missing my friends back home and loving the ones near, and not knowing where [not] to find myself.
Often I hear people around me say the phrase, “I’m on the struggle bus these days.” I love buses- I try to persuade people to take one with me whenever I can, even if it is less convenient than the tube/ metro and longer than walking. The bus ecosystem makes me feel comforted in ways I cannot express and the world outside feels like free cinema meant to be keenly witnessed (maybe I’ve mentioned this in an earlier post, I forget). But what is this Struggle Bus, why has it felt like I’m on it a little too often, and what does the window offer for respite?
Tangentially: I have been reading a book called The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. In this book I have found lessons and wisdom that I only ever find in talking to people living lives and histories intimately different than mine. Thanks to N, I have fallen in love with parts of this book over and over - in sharing my experience of reading it and listening to theirs. It builds you a life, deeply shaped by and (un)intentionally shaping other lives; everything Becoming the way I imagine life in the deep sea becomes and keeps becoming. There is so much we do not know and so much we never will. Of joys and sufferings not our own, but we are all flesh and bones and a heart so even if we don’t know it all, we have felt some of it through deep, deep generational association. It feels like I am talking in abstracts, but it is a story I cannot make sense of through quoted retelling, but rather in communicating how I have been experiencing it. Not often do I come across expressions of human life so profound, so sand-like in my ability to grasp it, and so beyond its paperback containment. I am grateful this book came into my life, in the many mysterious ways that it did. I read it on every possible commute and in parks on the grass and sometimes lying in bed after I have woken up - it has become the biggest part of my respite on the struggle bus.
The internet has been difficult to navigate these past few days. It is not pain, suffering and testimonies of survival that I struggle to witness and confront, but outrage. I think a decade younger version of me would feel comforted by outrage around women’s safety, but it often saddens me now. Who is a woman? Who is a woman that should be protected? Who is protecting this woman? From what? Who is it not protecting? Who is it making allowances for? Why? What violence and on what body calls for exceptional anger? There were just these questions for a long time, and now that I have answers - it estranges me from movements and people I once thought were where I could belong. I wonder who reads what I write- the few that do, I wonder if we sat down and spoke our minds honestly about it all if we would leave feeling a bit further away from each other. I wonder if I could tell my mother that although her hurt about apparently disjointed suffering(s) might not be selective, but I notice how her actions are. It doesn’t in the slightest alter my affection for her, but I do feel dissonance often that is irreconcilable. But she lives her life in a way that is far more real than how I have been living mine for the past two years at least - doing love and politics (or the politics of love) far better than I have, for all her six decades of being alive. So really, is my dissonance due to a specific (in)action or my inability to live a life that makes up for the gaps my limited human geography cannot fill.
The Struggle Bus moves on. I have a friend in distance who is suffering at the hands of the State. This is not the first time, nor the first friend. I worry, I listen, I call someone else after she ends the call and cry my eyes out helplessly. The heart feels heavier than a sinking ship. I read my book again and there is wisdom, always relevant and always ready. Yes there has always been suffering, but we must look beyond. I read a quote on the internet the other day: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Raymond Williams - the person who wrote/ said this - thank you. You helped ease the heartache that day.
I want to see art again, learn again. I want to stop feeling so unfree.
I don’t know what this is, but I find myself trying to find grass to sit on whenever I feel the sadness welling up. The despair clears out if I sit and watch the birds, listen to the wind and let some grass hold my body. The anger is always there, and why should it go anywhere else. I am its home like I am home for everything else. It helps me walk, it helps me talk, it helps me do the things that matter.
I came back to this draft after having spent a day (today) with a friend I hadn’t met in a while. Reh (my alias for her) is like a soft, beautiful, gentle creature full of unimposing wisdom and sincere care. I love spending time with people who stretch time, talk about the perils and joys of living - all in one breath, never evoking a sense of loss even if talking of it. I think I realised that she has rewired my unintentionally learned understanding of being "put together”. She is all that I had painted in my head of being put together, and yet is also the most vulnerable anti-thesis of it. I always thought she would be, if you found her personhood out, to be withholding and distant. Yet, she is anything but. I love people who seem to have kindness oozing out of them. I love how they make me feel about the world: like how my strange dislike of sunny hot summer days is overwhelmed by my want for them to have more of it if they so desire. Sitting on grass and feeling it tether me to this world is that much sweeter a feeling when a friend finds a tree, a shady spot, and sits us down together.
On my way home, I was looking through photographs in my phone from the last few weeks. I saw faces of my friends, of N (who is moving back to their country, and away from me, soon), of plants and trees (endless green on my screen), and screenshots/forwards that I need to be better at deleting. I saw pictures from an exhibition N and I went to last week and it brought together a lot of my feelings about the world (inner, outer) in ways only art can. I will end this post by sharing some of these artworks by the wonderful Gavin Jantjes. There is so much depth and communication (and unbelievable range) to his art that my selection from my poor 2 year old android phone camera can never do justice- but I felt the need to share. Good art changes lives.
Have been listening to NTBM since I caught them live a couple weeks ago, love their song Wave ever since I heard them play it. Give it a listen:
Keep hope alive if you can, even when you’re on the Struggle Bus. Remember to take a book with you or a friend (even better).