The Case for Abolition: A Story of Love
Early on in the wild year that has been 2020, I found myself thinking about the fragility of relationships. About how we should probably try and focus on figuring out how to really, genuinely care for each other.
I was sitting around, tracking a situation where I was feeling activated by my own trauma. At the same time, I was with people I love and I slowly began to realize that I was simultaneously trying to hold space for:
My own feelings
Managing my own external impact
Everyone else’s feelings
Everyone else’s external impact
Understanding their external impact as a product of their own experiences and/or trauma
Again, managing my own external impact so as to not recreate those traumatic conditions
Understanding my external impact AND my response to their external impact as a product of my own trauma (o shit, now I’m thinking about my trauma again)
Identifying where my boundaries were and how to express them given all above factors.
That’s a fucking lot to hold.
And as my mind became less and less capable of holding it all, I’ve become a lot more aware of these moments through the signaling of my body. I’ve felt the ongoing tension in my shoulders, neck and back which no amount of massages, CBD, doctors visits, stretches have been able to “fix.” I feel the way my jaws clench and my hands ball up into fists while I sleep so that when I wake up, I have to allocate time to rest from my sleep. I have experienced the tension headaches, random migraines, irregular menstrual cycles which lead to many years of doctors’ visits and blood drawings and heart monitoring and CT scans all to learn that I am “perfectly healthy.” It is amazing to me in hindsight that I didn’t start to put the pieces together sooner.
It wasn’t until I took a trip to Montgomery, Alabama in 2019 where I was re-exposed to the violent history of slavery and lynchings that I began to make the connections between my physical health and trauma.
My mind has ruled my life. Which makes sense. I’m a Gemini…with strong Virgo placements. Need I say more? My intelligence and wit is something that can be “objectively” quantified. My mind is the one thing I can keep to myself, if I so choose. And what I came to remember is that my ancestors needed their minds — and each other — to survive as their bodies were ripped away from them. And that, just as much as my mind is my privilege, I own my body. Literally. At least in a way many of my ancestors could not. And it is my responsibility to protect it in ways some of my ancestors could not. To nourish and care for it. To carry on the work of those who came before me.
So I found myself, sitting in this moment, feeling activated and the rationales for causing additional harm in the name of “justice” were coming easy to me. And in true, gemini-brain fashion, I eventually found myself thinking about abolition. The talk of the time right now is “8 to Abolition.” In all honesty, I don’t know how many steps away we are from true abolition, but what I do know is we need to make one good long stop at transformative, restorative, reconciliatory, loving, trusting relationships. Cause those 8 things I was trying to simultaneously hold space for are hard with just one person holding them. I would argue it’s hard for even two people to hold — even if they are bound together by the concept of “love.”
The way love has been constructed in society is literally killing us.
It takes a toll on our socioemotional health.
Our mental health.
Our physical health.
It allows us to accept society’s Prison Industrial Complex as a reasonable option for “justice.”
It pushes us to believe that 1 man and 1 woman must be joined together to handle #1-8 on their own.
It prioritizes a certain definition of companionship and togetherness which ostracizes alternative forms of love and creates conditions for “loneliness.”
It teaches us to “mind our own business.”
That “children are to be seen, not heard.”
To value independence.
That it’s us against the world.
That self-love or romantic love is removed from community love.
It pushes us further away from the ideas of community care which consider those who we are not necessarily bound to by document or by blood.
It commodifies the idea of love into a resource only made available for certain type of existences.
Here’s what I believe. Agápe. There is no revolution without love. And there is no love without revolution. If you do not believe in my liberation, you do not love me. If you do not work towards my liberation, you do not love me.
When I think about abolition, I think about a world where — from birth — we are taught what it means to practice love for our communities. I think about a world where, because of this, every person feels committed to the following truths:
Personal:
I am aware of and allowed to express my own feelings and trauma
In knowing that, I am working my hardest every day to love and care for those parts of me. To move through shame towards genuine growth, self-awareness and accountability.
I recognize that truth in others
Community
Through the process of self-care, I also feel fully responsible for managing my external impacts in ways that do not (re)create conditions of harm for those in my community
I am committed to being aware and in loving communication with my community about the feelings and trauma we are all working through
Political
I will do the work to identify my boundaries and express them in ways that center community well-being
I will be equipped to notice when a member of my community does not have the access or support they need to be able to engage in these practices and make it a part of my work to help rectify to that to be best of my capacity
A world where maybe we are all holding a little bit of pieces 1-8 up together. And if someone needs a break, we know we have the infrastructure to keep those pieces lifted until they are ready to pick up their side.
The goal of abolition will come when we begin engaging wholeheartedly in practices of genuine love: community care, accountability and healing. This is a community practice. We need to be doing this work together. Like, right now. With the people you’ve quarantined with, the people you share space with, the people who I hope you will share this article with.
