this week, i am going to hand over the reins to ashley hefnawy! we met in 2017 and immediately clicked on being djs but then as time went on she has become a very important part of my support network and a place where i can go to feel free of judgment, repository of advice, and my number one supplier of cat memes, fresh off the content brick.
i said this in a writer’s room one time and i feel like they could sue me but do it – i don't think your show’s happening anyways – there are friends that you look backwards with, sit presently with, and look forward with but the best friends are the ones where you can do all three and ashley is one of those friends. don't get me wrong, i do have other friends who are like that but in such a short amount of time, she has become a friend, a confidant, a sister, and ultimately the physical embodiment of safety as a creative and full human being. all collaboration and inspiration, no ego; we build reality and community together rather then pit realities and people against one another.
in coming months, i will be reconnecting with some people that i either only look backwards with or feel like we haven't been sitting present together in a while. as a practice, i have been trying to reconnect with myself in a myriad of ways and i think that sitting with uncomfortable or recalibrating conversations has become an important part of that process. but for now, a piece by the incredible dj, fantastic human, fashion icon, and incomparable writer ashley!
On power in prayer, action, and the mirroring of individuals and societies
I’m sitting outside at the Lot Radio, listening to a soundtrack that I’m having trouble distinguishing from the construction happening all around me. Metallic sounds of techno and noise come from the speakers that perfectly complement the sounds of tractors moving ground and pushing dumpsters across the street. This neighborhood has been full of excavation activity since I returned to it from travels two weeks ago. As I walked into the Lot, I saw one massive truck carrying slabs of concrete. It attempted to turn onto a narrow street, inches away from crushing a tiny two door Toyota bug of a car. I couldn’t stay for the end result, so I crossed the street while accidentally locking eyes with the construction worker who was assigned the task of guiding this truck to not crash into its surroundings. He laughed, reading my mind, and shouted over all the noise, ‘pray for us!’ to which I responded with a nervous laugh. I just remembered that now, as I’m sitting down to write this, to say a little prayer for him and all the people working with huge metal objects. May they find ease in the rest of their workdays, may they be protected from harm’s way, and may tiny Toyota be safe.
I don’t want to say that prayer will fix *gestures widely* {all of this}—it won’t, just as I can’t pray my depression away without turning to any of my other tools like therapy, journaling, reaching out to friends, affirming myself, and nourishing my mind and body. Those things are hard to do when I’m feeling low. In these moments, prayer forces me out of my tiny little bubble, and sometimes it offers me the jump start I need to return to my tools. It’s part of a cycle—prayer reminds me that just because I’m small, that doesn’t mean I need to continue to make myself small.
Lately I’ve found so much power in prayer. Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve gravitated towards spaces where I’ve connected with other Muslim women from around the world. On several occasions, we’ve come together to pray for someone who was in need, or for a group of people who were actively being oppressed. I’ve seen group prayer before at the mosque on Fridays when the Imam begins and ends his khutbah (sermon) with a prayer, and I’ve seen the ways in which it can move many, myself included, to tears. But I’ve never been involved in this level of intimate group prayer until recently.
I realize a lot of people are used to hearing prayer talked about in a Judeo Christian context. Within Islam, when I talk about prayer, I’m talking about two different rituals.
First, there’s salat, which is the practice of praying to God specifically, 5 times a day. There are many experts of Islam who can define what this practice means in a more scholarly way than me, but for me, it’s about expressing my gratitude and love for God through a specific set of Arabic words and phrases. I use salat as time to receive what comes, whether that be revelations, a deeper understanding of myself, or just taking note of the distractions that arrive.
After completing salat, I have an opportunity to sit in prayer for others. This is also known as duaa. Sometimes that means praying for myself, and a lot of the time it means praying for other people who are suffering, or who are just a part of my consciousness at any given moment. I think the two acts go together well because ideally, after praying to God, I am in a clear state to pray for others. But they don’t have to happen in that order, sometimes I just pray for other people randomly, in the middle of a conversation—may anyone reading this feel loved and supported and held today, in the ways that they need. This kind of behavior is also built into the way that we speak to each other in Arabic, often sprinkling duaas into our conversations.
I think there’s tremendous power in both actions, but there’s something especially profound about the act of coming together with other people, to direct pure thoughts towards another person or entity. I’ve navigated mental illness all of my life, whether I’ve been aware of it or not, and one version of depression is a chemical inability to feel all the goodness, love, and compassion there is in the world. On my worst days, I have said to others that I know there’s tons of love that pours out for me, but I am incapable of feeling it. It’s as if all my love receptors are suddenly involuntarily shut down. When I come together with others in prayer for someone else, I try to tap into something deep, imagining my spiritual self physically connecting to the receptors of the recipient of my prayers, receptors that may be temporarily shut down as mine have been. I send not only my words to the subject of my prayers, but visual and emotional energy, too.
My prayers can only take me so far. I can’t stop thinking about how depressed and mentally ill this country and world is—not just the people who make it up, but the actual environment itself. I can’t stop thinking about how self harm looks to me these days—from skin picking (and digging, if I’m being totally honest), to neglecting the needs of my body, to not communicating my needs; how similar that is to digging for oil in places we shouldn’t be digging in, life upending climate change as a result of environmental negligence, global greed from political leaders, mindless violence in every corner of the world. On some days, self harm for this country looks like electing officials into office who actively cause harm and move us backwards in time. On other days, self harm is a police force armed in the name of ‘safety’ who are only capable of violence, paranoid thinking, a lack of empathy, and destruction.
Perhaps prayer is an action towards progress. Maybe collective prayer reminds us that we deserve better, that we don’t need to be self destructive as a society. Maybe the power in prayer isn’t just about ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the emptiest sense of the word, but in the ways in which we can temporarily remove ourselves from the bubbles we exist in, to think and direct our energy towards something much bigger than any one individual. I like to think of collective prayer as an action that enables us to see the tools we have at our disposal to help one another, allowing us to be kind to each other in radical, non-transactional ways.
If I am a tiny little microcosm of society as a whole, I’d like to imagine that my prayers and actions towards my own healing reflect out to society in some positive way. That possibility keeps me motivated these days, a reminder that there must be millions if not billions of others like me, causing the same ripple effect.
this week, i did an instagram live with the homie aundre larrow through his partnership with to write love on her arms (yeah, that one from the rawr xd days) and we talked about being a burden. well, we were supposed to but the conversation that came out of it was even more incisive and illuminative. but, as a classic overpreparer, i did write down some answers to the questions he shot over before and here they are!
enjoy!
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what is the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase, “you are not a burden”.
that i am one! lol no but
i feel like people assume that everything is always going well with me because of my internal you are a burden monologue precluding me from actually saying exactly how i'm feeling.
no but for real i think that culturally we are facing a balance between independence and interdependence and i think somewhere in the gray area is people feeling as if they are burden because we've abandoned our collectivist and emotionally intelligent true human behavior and practices for hyperindividualistic “self-care,” projecting problems onto other people, and ultimately creating a normalized culture of shame, fear, and around being vulnerable.
i think that it is human nature to seek belonging to a group or community but the current moment that we're in is trying to seek inclusivity through exclusivity and repeating power dynamics and hierarchies that have not served us before.
what is a burden you've released?
i held onto a lot of guilt for not communicating exactly what i was going through for years because of shame. and the burden that i'm trying to release every day is one of grief. of lost love, lost friendships, lost family members, millions lost across the world, throughout history, ancestrally. i put it on my shoulders, i put on the cape, but ultimately i am just one drop in the vast ocean.
i'm not gonna start getting into all of the thinkpieceification but something that i sit with a lot is we all went to the same sort of colonized education that was very regurgitative, shame filled, never learned how to be wrong, we didn't learn anything about people of color, indigenous people, queer people, anything outside of a religious binary, etc; for the way that we were all indoctrinated how to see each other and ourselves, we're right on schedule.
i believe that we are all seeing the consequences of a colonized education, based in purity, perfectionism, shame, and moral rigidity. i reject that and instead choose being curious and communicating when i feel i’m missing something. and i don’t feel ashamed if i respond on my time; that’s the only time i got.
what is one burden you hold on to?
i'm an older brother, eldest child, first gen, african, muslim. a family member of mine was assaulted and i personally felt guilty about that; like i should've been there, like i should've done something. i was so caught up in what was going on with other people in my life that i didn't ever address that i too had been assaulted, gaslit, and manipulated, causing me to poorly navigate my own period of being traumatized.
through therapy i learned that i take a lot of responsibility for things that are not my fault and for a while i had an incessant need to make sure that the people i loved were ok. i am growing up out of it but i still find myself blaming myself for things that were completely out of my control. even when other people have harmed me i have found myself apologizing.
there's something in my brain that wants everything to be/look ok even though my body screaming the complete opposite. but, a recent incident actually aligned both of those things and now i feel like i am able to take that step out of holding onto that insane responsibility.
as a writer, i believe that every single one of us has a story and is capable of creating a world that we want to live in. and the world that i choose to live in is one where i am not a burden, you are not a burden, we are all collectively capable of containing complexity in multitudes
how have you built community digitally?
by moving with intention and not just where there's attention
social media is a machine built on a comparison matrix and going where there is any type of attention. even if it's not the best for us. so i took a two-year social media hiatus because my mind wasn't right.
i was miserable every single day and i was compulsively lying that i was ok to everyone of my life and i wasn’t. and being a comedian where are you supposed to be doing hahas and heehee’s all the time… i was in hell. i love comedy but i think that it is both an art form and a coping mechanism, you really have to decide what it is and if it's serving you. i also think comedy is a powerful tool for change, i love to bring a smile to someone's face, but i also know it's a powerful tool for malice.
i hate how normalized capitalism is because growth in my industry is considered a rebrand and not just you becoming a more whole, healthy, educated person. there's a lot of competition and comparison on social media and that really has never been my thing; if you competing with me you're in third place because i'm winning i'm losing you losing to both of us.
so i had to interrogate that and continue to move intentionally around people that i wanted to be around, who in bodied the values that i had both online and off, and then i created a little pandemic therapy group called…
simply just vibing with the homies
i'm pretty good at recognizing eldest children and strong friends and i found a way to put a lot of people in a group and we did a weekly zoom call which you were a part of as well. we all got pretty close of the pandemic, vulnerable, honest, clear, honestly just dope. but then at some point i realized that i wasn't personally engaging in it as much i was repeating the strong friend behavior in myself and not being open. still working on it, especially the penchant for community and safety and making creatives feel collaborative and not competitive.
memes and being silly
yo the internet is a language and i'm fluent. laughing at the most unhinged goofy ass memes has really kept me on this earth, ong. sharing them as a love language and when you link with the homies in real life, and y'all speaking meme to each other, incredible. hits different when you outside fr.
abolition and curiosity. i think that so much of the world right now still stuck in a very judgmental space. in a world where people feel very powerless and apathetic, it's very easy to slip into judgment without understanding, projection without questions, confusing correlation with causation, scapegoating.
i used to be a teacher, i dj, my degree is in neuroscience, i write, i play soccer, i play video games, i love nerd culture, streetwear, etc – these things (and just talking about them) bring me joy and i think that moving intentionally towards joy and curiosity and learning and away from things that make me feel horrible all the time has been the move.
i think we are all guilty of and have been recipients of feeling shame because we're not saying enough, doing enough, using our platform enough, but at the end of the day if we are not human in any sort of way shape or form how are we supposed to continue? incorporating abolitionist values and looking at abolition as the destruction of all the systems that hold us hostage has alleviated a lot of the pain due to feeling like a “stormchaser activist” for the last 7 to 8 years of my life.
as black men, we often are encouraged to hold it all in, what does that do to us?
no long talk, it kills us.
elevated blood pressure, hypertension, predisposition for mental health issues, suffering in silence (or having an outburst due to the pressure mounting), becoming violent in some way shape or form, an inability to love deeply, form genuine connections outside of the typical stereotypes of male friendships.
like i now have a break in case of emergency xanax prescription because my anxiety was manifesting in physical spasms of my left arm. that's a heart attack arm. no lie my cardiologist was like yo you should stay away from stressful situations. and i cut out so many white people in my life.
as black men living in a post-racial world, we are told that we have every bit as much access as our white counterparts but it's not true. we're meant to provide at the same level, bring in as much money, have as much generational wealth, smile through it all, don’t take up too much space, keep your emotions in because your emotions can get you chopped or popped, by some rando or the state.
peoples projections and unchecked racial bias get us killed. and having to do the mental gymnastics to navigate other peoples ignorance is exhausting, a sort of brain cardio that we do every single day and we're exhausted.
but the answer is not keeping it all and it's letting it all out but in safe ways not safe for white people but safe for us with friends who understand, family members who get it, partners who see you as an integral part of their life and not “their other half,” and away from tokenization, racism, rats in a barrel thinking.
reading material
all about love, we real cool, the will to change - all bell hooks
be not afraid of love by mimi zhu (2022)
conflict is not abuse by sarah schulman
we do this till we free us - mariam kaba
anything mia mingus, shira hassan, adrienne marie brown
kendrick’s mr. morale and little simz sometimes i be introvert
https://gameshotline.org/resources/ (ty anita sarkeesian)
thank you to everyone who reached out after the last piece — I swear down we gonna hang soon and catch up ❤️
happiest of birthdays to melanie blanco, jordana jason (my nemesis and big homie), joyelle johnson, and upcoming birthdays to the twin nerds and buddies meghal and natasha, my lil sis aiche, rama, and none other than yung poppiana noor 👑
big ups jah, mars, and jon — thanks for helping me create something that will be a personal release. proud to have y’all partnering 🌱
alise!! your name still changes to “the AD” in my phone due to a bit from 10000 years ago! ✨
q! thanks for always being a brother and ordering mockys with me, collective soon come 🙏🏾
carmen for coming out of self imposed social media hiatus to do months of bonding in like 35 messages! welcome to the rodeo 🎶
haley! new homie but congrats on the new attorney gig and your ambassadorship at elsewhere! excited to collaborate 👩🏼⚖️
‘djinn and juice’ soon come 👀
quinta and sheryl lee ralph…just thank you for being perseverant and excellent 😤
dewayne perkins is the future. and the past. shit, he the present too. dewayne is him™️
and to my fellow gremlin in christ, amelia, who popped out to my chemical romance with me on september 11th because we forgot what we were supposed to never forget and remembered to go tf on some fuku chicken tenders at barclays🧛🏽♂️
more loosies soon come, thanks for reading always ❤️
Glad to see you made it to the concert!