Transcript: FARIHA RÓISÍN on the Courage of Listening to Our Bodies /354
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today, we are speaking with Fariha Róisín.
Fariha Róisín In our bodies, we are that living, sacred form of our ancestors. You know, we continue in both a spiritual and physical sense, I think. All of these layers of sometimes harm and sometimes beauty, but it's sort of for us to undertake and face in these lifetimes—at least that's what I have come to understand in my own healing journey. And so through that, I have seen that the body is really the strongest template for us to understand who we are.
Ayana Young Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities and has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), Who Is Wellness For? (2022) and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, due fall 2023.
Fariha, I'm really excited that we are connecting. And yeah, I'm just feeling really good to be here with you and looking forward to connecting.
Fariha Róisín Yeah, me too. I feel like it's been a long time for me so I'm really excited to be here.
Ayana Young Yeah, I love that feeling and I really love your work. And I wanted to begin the conversation with talking about your most recent book, Who Is Wellness For? So yeah, I guess just to jump right in...What contradictions exist within our modern conception of wellness and how did writing this book bring them to light for you?
Fariha Róisín Oh, my God, where do I even start...the contradictions. I think the contradictions exist in really this feeling that we've or this belief that we've come to embody or understand or just subconsciously just feel that our personal wellness or individual wellness is more important or impactful than community wellness. And while I was doing my research for this book and writing this book and just comprehending the vastness of what I was engaging with and what I was, you know, facing for the first time at this level, what was so astonishing to find was that people, yeah, have just kind of completely decontextualized and removed themselves from our responsibility to one another.
And that was so depressing to me and still is so depressing to me as a reality. And it's something that I'm constantly navigating myself, but like within myself, and also within the wellness community because I also am participating. You know, I go to retreats. I do yoga. I'm learning meditation. And all of these skills that I am learning—and learning not primarily from white people or people that are not, you know, from these spaces, but I think in a Western context—there is so much that we're...that there's so much loss that we're grieving, and we haven't faced that and that I feel...that in the process of just living and being in the material and looking at the research and looking at our lived reality, all of it sort of really came together. And you know, I was writing...it also primarily during the pandemic, so those realities were so palpable. So I learned a lot while researching this book. And it was, yeah, it was profound and also debilitating at the same time.
Ayana Young Yeah, profound and debilitating is a really good way to describe how I feel a lot of the time when I'm kind of awakening to a lot of the realities. And I'm thinking a bit more of things you said about when you're writing who is wellness for. And in your substack article on protecting women, you wrote, "Researching who is wellness for made me realize how often illness is a sign back to ourselves. Illness is a conversation your body is trying to have with you and it is up to you to decode it. But all the evidence is there," end quote. Yes, I'd love to decipher this, quote a bit more with you. And I really see that culturally, we are in a time of mass death whether that be due to climate change or broken systems of care or outright systems of violence and war. And so I'm wondering how you see our bodies reacting to this and how can our bodies teach us about the need for collective wellness?
Fariha Róisín Mmmmm. I think our bodies are revolting, and like they are in revolt. And I think about that often just existing under the perils of capitalism and the sort of unnaturalness of how we exist with one another and how we're how we're all, yeah again, participating in it...it's a struggle to sort of detach and decode yourself, you know, in a new way, but I think that what our bodies are telling us and what our bodies are showing us through illness, primarily, and through everything from grief to depression are lighthouses back to ourselves. They're lighthouses back to our internal feelings and the way that we are inside of not just our brain, but you know, our emotions and our body. And our body is such a vessel and a vehicle for us to heal, and better understand one another because I think there's a reason that we are embodied in this lifetime and this form during during the Anthropocene—during such tectonic times and such, you know, just awe inspiring times, because so much is happening at once.
And of course, you know, we're responding to that. We're responding to the deafening sadness of existing right now, and what sort of faces us with large-scale, ecological collapse...where I think many of us are, yeah, feeling that on multiple levels. And what I've learned from my body and from this, you know, technology that I'm trying to understand within myself—or human technology or human skill. I'm allowing my body to kind of lead me each day. Because I have a, I have a chronic illness, a chronic issue I've had since I was 14. And it's emotional because it's learning how to humanize this experience that I was having that was so dehumanizing—taught me so much about how I have to take myself more seriously, and therefore my pain more seriously, and what that pain was saying to me more seriously.
And I think that's a larger conversation. That's me on a micro level, but on a macro level, the same thing is happening. Our land is suffering. We are suffering. We are more disconnected from one another than we ever have been before. Millions of people have died in this country since 2020, you know, a couple of years ago. And it's a shocking reality to live in. And I think that that's why sickness, illness, disease are all sort of around us abundantly. And I think that most people I know are struggling with something.
So you know, you can look at it and you can say, This is frightening. This is, you know, this is unlivable, and all of those things are true. And I think what's been personally profound is that when I've trusted my body, when I've gone back to the body's own intuition and the body's knowledge, allowing the body to speak to me directly so I can understand all of these other fragmentations in my life, the more than I've done that, it's just allowed me to see that there's new pathways of potential and ability that I've never understood because I'd always lived and had a relationship with myself that was quite ablest and quite removed and dissociative. And I didn't like that I was always sick. And I always had an issue with something. I had asthma or I had eczema, or, you know, it was one thing after another. And, you know, I just completely always felt that my body was in revolt, and I didn't understand why.
And, yeah, the moment I just started to pay attention so much cracked open, but so many things were explained. And that's where we're at, right now, with the world and with this Earth, where we're being forced to face new horizons, new parameters, but we don't understand how much stretching and possibility is going to come out of that. I think that that was one of the actually most profound things I took away from writing this book.
Ayana Young Yeah, I want to get into the nitty gritty a bit more with you on trying to understand illness as a sign back to ourselves. And I don't know if you would want to share something personal, like an example that you've seen in yourself or that you've seen in others, but if you could just walk us through something kind of tangible that we could see ourselves in. Because I definitely am starting to kind of track myself and think, Oh, when have I seen this? In my own journey with my own healing or even right now dealing with my own...I don't know what the word is exactly and I want to be careful what I say in that way. But yeah, I'd love if you could just kind of take us through a relatable example of this so that we could kind of feel it with you.
Fariha Róisín Yeah. Whew. Okay, so in my own life, I am gonna go back to the beginning and I think that this is a really important thru line that I figured out in my late 20s, which is when I really had sort of a breakthrough with my body. And so much of it was because it was the first time in my life where I had acknowledged to myself that I had been sexually abused as a child. And it was only one moment and experience that I was aware of at the time, but I was finally allowing myself to have language around what had happened to me, and also what the impact had been. And that's the most important part actually, because my body had been in revolt for a very long time and I assumed it was because it had failed me. I assumed because it was wrong and it was extremely humbling, and it is such…as a current process so it's not something that I've moved through completely or I'm at the other end. I think that these kinds of experiences are lifelong. And they're given to you as totems for knowledge and safety and keepsake.
And, you know, it's, it's...I believe that child sexual abuse survivors have some of the most powerful abilities in the world, because we have to transmute so much in order to exist. And so once I started to see, like, how I was fragment to fragment, including the illness and what the illness had been telling me all these years, which it was, I believe the message that it was sending was that It's okay, it's okay to be here. Stop rejecting yourself. You're not wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. You don't have to disassociate to be lovable or to exist even. And my own illness was a way...like in all of the ways that I think that my own rejection was more than what my body was responding to—you know, eczema, asthma, like in Ayurveda or even TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine. These are such powerful indicators, right, like you know, your meridians and how you eat, what your doshas are, all of that gives them so much knowledge about—these practitioners—so much knowledge about how your internal ecosystem is.
And that can also be understood and like explained and expanded through a bigger and better knowledge of knowing what happened to you as a child, who your parents are, what kind of lineages you come from. All of that is explained, in our bodies, we are that living, sacred form of our ancestors, you know, we continue in both a spiritual and physical sense, I think, all of these layers of sometimes harm and sometimes beauty, but it's sort of for us to kind of undertaken face in these lifetimes, at least, that's what I have come to understand in my own healing journey.
And so through that, I've seen that the body is really the strongest template for us to understand who we are, because the mind has been such a sort of Western obsession. The mind is the be-er or the do-er of all things, but you can't do anything—well you know—you can't do much if you can't be in your body or if your body isn't working, and even then it's okay. We have to understand what that body is telling us. And, you know, to accept all bodies, even in even in their brokenness, or even in their decay, even in their trauma, even in their, in their harrowing, sadness, all of those things, all of those states are allowed when we understand the kind of things that have impacted us. And so we are able to have compassion for the ways in which our bodies work, and sometimes how they work against us. And all of that messaging is there and I do think that is, again, such a wild way for us to start understanding the rest of the world when we can actually start understanding ourselves
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing all of that and, gosh, there's so much there. But I really wanted to hone in on something that came up for me, which is about compassion and blame, and I have definitely been in that place the last few months just having to work my way out of those feelings of 'this may never end' and it's so scary. that feeling like when you're suffering and you're in pain, emotional pain, physical pain, and you think that there's no way out.
And of course, now that brings me back to wanting to talk a bit more about faith. And your interview with Gossamer you say, quote, "To me, we've lost that nuance of faith and we've lost the room for the languidness that comes with faith. People should be able to have complicated relationships with what it means to be a person of faith,"end quote. Yeah, so, yeah, I want you to talk to me about how can we bring in more complex understandings of what it means to be a person of faith?
Fariha Róisín Yeah, I think that we're in like, pretty godless times and I think capitalism has taken over our relationship with God and what that means—the divine. And I know that God is different things to different people, and I don't want it to be sort of even tied to religion. I think my own relationship to God has really transformed in the last couple of years as well—having been raised Muslim and having, you know, all of that, sort of at a foundational understanding, but then doing a lot of spiritual work and, you know, having relationships to plants and having relationships to different kinds of medicine—and I've expanded, and I think that that is also very Muslim and that is actually a very divine relationship to expand with everything especially on the Earth.
And I've learned a lot about just, you know, so many of our faiths, so many of our indigenous technologies, and spiritual cosmologies were created or came from the elements and this what you were saying—you know, Wind, Water, Fire Earth, you know. We have divorced ourselves from the Earth—believing that we're better than Her, believing...that's what intellectual capacity means. It means, you know, a human man's evolution means disconnecting from nature, when in fact, nature is the entire blueprint for how we exist. And so that, to me, is about faith. And I think we're in a crisis of faith because we live under capitalism, and we live in the shards of colonization...And Anthropocene, I think, is directly, you know, it's been proven to be linked to colonization and sort of the destruction of the world for the bellies of a few, and that kind of violence, I think, removed a lot of people from the compass, from their own spiritual compass. And so in order to decolonize, it is a matter of coming back to not just Earth but to God and whatever God is for you.
I think faith is so complicated for so many different people because there's so much harm that people have faced, you know, and I think that that's something that is a part of the healing—naming the harm that's been done, whether it's, you know, the Catholic Church or any person who has experienced harm under a religious or someone who deems themselves religious person, ways in which many of us have been castigated from places of spirit in and places of worship. And, you know, as a queer person, that's something that I have wondered--what kind of world exists for somebody like me who exists in many different peripheries and is many different things. Where do I get to exist and be? And I think that I've, you know, it's a very Rumi thing and I've been reading a lot of Rumi recently and comprehending his work and what he meant, and Who is he writing to? Whom was he writing about?—we'll never know. But, you know, his profound relationship with God and this understanding of, you know, the beloved, and so much can be the beloved. It can be a tree. It can be a spouse. It can be a former beloved. It can be a teacher. It can be a friend. It can be God. And really this idea that so much of Rumi's poetry is actually always to God. It's always in reverence to God, but those things are never explicitly said. It's often you know, he often would use, you know, love poems to kind of express his love of God.
And Rabindranath Tagore, who was the great Bengali writer I was raised with as well, as well as Rumi. You know, so much of his work, you know, he wrote many poems, Nandan, Dunne... Dammit, what is it? I think they were like, just, I can't remember exactly what he would call them, but they were like one-love poems, because he was raised Hindu, but the poems were very much alike in reverence of a lot and a lot of different things. And, you know, India before it was colonized was a very syncretic society so Muslims and Hindus...many of them experienced faith in a very hybridized way. And I think, what's happening with more nation building and more borders, we're losing that syncretic sensibility. We're losing the understanding that faith is multi-hyphenate sometimes. It's many different things. It's...because you can't express it with just one thing. And you can say that how the Muslims say all of that, you can distill into a love God. And I think, for me, it was saying that as well. All kinds of love is just a love of God. And I love that. I love that understanding and I love that way of existing. And I think that it's something that saved me time and time again, that understanding even if I was in the pit of grief, accepting my life has taken a lot. But being in a love of the Divine has saved me, and it's given me so much and that's kind of extraordinary.
Ayana Young Yeah, I am thinking about an essay you wrote, "How I Learned to Accept my Queerness as a Muslim Woman," where you say, "My entry in the workings of my sexuality didn't feel like the antithesis of my religion. In fact, I felt my love for God, for Islam, for theProphet as a companion for my love, for the exploration of myself, and of the world around me. I didn't think they were things that were mutually exclusive. I just knew that people wouldn't understand," end quote. So how have you made peace with the idea that some people may just not understand your relationship to the divine?
Fariha Róisín Hmm Yeah, I mean, I've started to accept it. I think that it doesn't really bother me much more because a lot of people will think a lot of things about everyone and what can I do to convince somebody? Nothing. I don't have to convince anyone, but I do have to move with God and understand that that's the most important principle that I've signed on to do in this lifetime, to be somebody who embodies that, and I don't always. [Laugher] I struggle to and I have a lot of human flaws and human struggles and go into a lot of darkness. I have, yeah, I have difficulty with all those things.
But, you know, I found a lot of queer community that's Muslim, and my partner is also queer and Muslim, and that has helped me accept myself and know that there isn't a distinction between good or bad in this sense. You know, we...Many of us, I think, have been taught into society that being different in any way, especially if you're queer, you're trans, or you're disabled, your fat—there's so many ways that people will make you feel terrible about yourself, but we're trying to move towards a society that accepts all things, all beings, and I want to participate in that society. I also have done immense research and a lot of it is in Who Is Wellness For? There are multiple chapters that talk about my connection with Islam and how it's evolved, but kind of going back to sort of ancient literature and seeing how queerness existed within Islam, especially when it was in India, through the Mughal and but you know, Kalif—al-Ma'Sur, al-Ma'mun which were early Abbasid caliphates. All of them had sort of queerness in their court and there was some of them had queer lovers—you know, it was known and written about, and this happened throughout the Mughal Empire as well.
With Shah Jahan's daughter, being sort of apparently openly queer, and that just being known and accepted. And obviously, you know, there's unfortunately not enough information that's come out that is available, but these things do exist in literature and in research when you try and look for them. And I think that that's been my own lighthouse back to myself—understanding that queerness is not a modern thing, it's not something that just came out of, you know, Westernization, which was something that I was definitely told when I was a kid. You know, that these things are not for us and I beg to differ, obviously, through my own life experience.
But also, I know that, again, coming back to sort of pushing beyond something to come to something new to come to the next horizon. Like, that was always my relationship to Islam growing up, I had a very elastic relationship with God. And I think that that's something that I see in a lot of these early works in literature that come out of Persia, that come out of Spain that come out of all of these places where Muslim thought and thinkers were were comprehending beyond just what they knew, because so much of that was the Muslim way to kind of question and challenge no god to question and challenge ideas, thoughts, things, and to come to your own interpretation about them. That's the people I come from, and that's my lineage.
And so that's what I'm harking back to. I'm harkening back to a time where people were in conversation with one, one another...that they were in dialogue with one another even if they just agreed and there was space to talk, to debate. And, you know, people did disagree, but it was a part of society. And there were a lot of thinkers and different types of thinkers. There were more, you know...now we would call them fundamentalist thinkers, but there were also a lot of very, very, what we might call mu or spiritualists, you know, astrologers in these Muslim courts, you know, as long as very rooted to the solar system thing. God is in the heavens and beyond just, you know, the heavens actually, though. It's beyond in Islam. There's like a very comprehensive understanding of this cosmology that exists. And I think that that's something that I was lucky. And after, through my dad, he didn't give me all of this material, but he's a professor, and a very, very interrogative and divine student, and he wants to know things and he wants to also learn things and comprehend things and talk about things. And I think I became his friend. And that way, you know, us surviving a pretty terrible home life situation together was with my sister. My relationship with my dad was talking about faith and talking about, you know, bigger things, deeper things, and that's still my relationship with my dad. And so I'm lucky that he kind of taught me a lot of these things early. So I can go and have a place to start from, but then also go off and do my own research and find my own things. But yeah, these days, it doesn't feel odd at all to be queer, or queer and Muslim...like the queer or Muslim we've come to, I think, a different understanding of both of those identities in the last couple of years. But there's so much more work to be done. And I consider myself humbly a person that is trying to do the work to show...that to show the connections as well as the beauty that exists, and just us being who we are, and accepting and loving each other regardless of how different we are. And, yeah, I try and live my life like that.
And, you know, we are a society that hates women. I just want to say that in itself because I don't think that we comprehend that enough. Yeah, we're a society that hates women. And in every shape, or form, all of us have been taught to hate women. And to different degrees, obviously, I had a very abusive mother who hated women, so I was taught by her specifically, and also she harmed me in many different ways, and including sexually, so it kind of makes sense to me as I get older that she had so much disdain for women. And I think that that is explained in her actions. But I see it everywhere, not just in my mother, who I also understand. I understand why she felt that way, because that was her experience.
But I feel like we don't think about the grave impacts that we're all facing and I see this a lot in wellness spaces as well, because we're not coming back to the core of everything. I've been in, you know, schools with Ayahuasca teachers who are very connected to the land and the indigeneity of the plant and are extremely learned and wise but are still harmful because of I think, misplaced...misplaced feelings, misplaced relational aspects towards women. And that's perpetuated again and again and again and again.
You know, this was something that I was working on, just before the pandemic as a docu series that I wanted to, to direct but now I'm sort of pivoting and making it potentially into a podcast, but it's just about this idea of jealousy, and I face that a lot in my own work. But in my own life as well. And it's a feeling that I am currently facing in myself towards, you know, people and people that I even love. And so this is something that I'm constantly thinking about, I'm, I'm thinking about how I'm implicated all of the time. And that's where I always start, because I think it's much more interesting when you start with yourself, and there's a lot more material. And I think, dissecting my own behavior, and then also sort of dissecting a lot of the things that have happened to me as a person in the world, but also as a public person in the world. You know, writing publicly for many years now, it's been over a decade, and existing online, being a woman online. And the ways in which people interact with me, I know that we hate women. I know that when my friends tell me what people say to them online, you know, when you don't have to be, you know, well known, it happens so randomly, that if you just exist, you are a target.
And so I'm really curious about how we start, not only facing but moving through, digesting. Really, I think using this disconnection...this...and it does at times feel like a travesty, because, you know, we can go into sort of Silvia Federici's work and talk about, you know, The Caliban of the Witches and in the ways in which I think, and she does too. And I think many scholars around the world would agree that the witch hunts and the destruction and the murder of women and witches around the world was... I mean I write about this in Who Is Wellness For? It was the fourth epistemicide, and an epistemicide is the word for the destruction of knowledge.
The women specifically, I think. You know, the piece that you're referencing, I was trying to metabolize, you know, yet another serial killer murdering, you know, multiple women across decades and not being caught. It just really disturbed me how common it is that the murder of women is just known and accepted across the world. Like this is not an American problem. This is a global phenomenon that we have all accepted.
And, you know, I come from a land that experienced the genocide not not too long ago in 1971 and 400,000 women were reportedly genocidally raped by the Pakstani army. That kind of legacy of hating women, and that is the largest documentation of a rape, of mass rape ever in the history of mankind. That is my legacy. That is where I come from. So how do we accept that, and how do we begin to face that? I think it goes back also to what you were saying about illness. How can we believe that we are not ill, or that there is no reasons for us to be in these bodies when we come from these lineages. And all of us are coming from some kind of lineage, and harm and pain and struggle. And yeah, it's just, there's a lot at the foundations of all of this that I'm trying to untether from, and see clearly. So as we move forward, as we begin to reimagine, as we begin to rebuild our features collectively with one another, we can start to see how we are perpetuating harm and we can end it. And I think that is the key.
And we can speak all we want about, you know, love and healing and wellness and whatever self care... Great, good for you. How are you showing up for your community? And that comes back to how are you showing up for yourself outside of capitalism, outside of what you're buying yourself, outside of therapy, outside of all of these things that sadly, we all need to a certain degree, and then many of us cannot afford. Outside of all of that. How are you with yourself? How do you speak to yourself? Do you validate your own emotions? Do you validate your own feelings? Are you jealous? Why are you jealous? What does that jealousy trying to tell you? What is it trying to speak to you? All of these things, I believe, are showing us something deeper about who we are and how we are and how we can be and how we can move forward with one another, and I think all of that kind of does come back to how we feel about women.
Ayana Young I think I'm going to paraphrase you wrong right now, because I'm forgetting the exact word, but I think you said is…this culture hates women? Or—
Fariha Róisín We are a society that hates women.
Ayana Young Yeah. Yeah, that really, like I felt you say that in my body. And, of course, I want to find ways that that's not true, or, or, you know, I don't want to believe that and it also then reminded me of a friend who had given birth in the last few years. And she said, basically that same exact thing during her birthing process, how much this culture hates women. And I was really, I don't know the word but pained by that, and it's been interesting hearing you talk about some of the historical references, both modern and in the past of examples of that. But I guess what I was thinking when you were speaking, one of the questions that had come up for me was, why, why? Where did this start? Is that control? Is it...? Yeah, I'm just trying to understand where this comes from, because I think that can help us shift it, like shift our mindsets and our indoctrination of that.
Fariha Róisín I think it came from capitalism. I think it came from the idea...because it's, it's ancient, in many ways, like absolute, like hating women has existed in different cultures throughout time, but I think it also hasn't. And there's been a lot of matriarchal cultures. There's been a lot of, you know, divine worship of women and even in Western civilization up until the introduction of capitalism and sort of this understanding that women can be owned—that sensibility really shifted, at least, the Western trajectory. And that's the most important. I think part of understanding, like how we can break free from it, because I think a lot of us just need better examples. I think it's actually like, as simple as, what does it mean to live and embody loving women and how can we become that for ourselves and for each other?
I don't think pop culture, social media, anything that we exist in or have a relationship to has positive or devotional relationships to women. It's very niche. Still, I mean, we, you know, think about it like, you know, I feel like I have a very diverse group of friends in many different ways and so many of us still find ourselves implicated in the mistreatment of women. And really underneath all of those kind of surface level feelings. But yeah, I think a lot of it is about being accountable to one another...just comes back to accountability. Even this idea of, you know, sacred reciprocity, and what does that mean? That I think comes back to like, how do you treat someone? And if you're being self aware about how you treat people and you're being accountable to them, then I think that those things just get easier to track.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. And I think this definitely relates to the celebrity cancel culture, social media stuff you were referring to earlier as well—how our hate and lack of accountability to each other has been amplified through these software applications basically, that are then bought and sold. And of course, the more we hate each other and the more fear we have, and the more we reject each other, the more money that's being made off of us.
Fariha Róisín Yeah.
Ayana Young And then of course, we're being sold that and indoctrinated more. It's this horrible, self-fulfilling loop that only disconnects us. And then I think does...It's like we turn against even ourselves at that point.
And so I guess that kind of brings me to this other thought about survival. And you have an article called "Celibacy As Survival" and you write quote, "So over the last few years, I've chosen celibacy as a way to slow down and understand myself. The mind forgets what the body keeps the score of, but sooner or later, you have to face it all. My body stopped wanting to have sex as a way to remind myself, take yourself seriously. Take your body's pain seriously. And that's just it, isn't it? So many of us are so far from ourselves, distant from who we are, because for so long, we've been running. Celibacy as an action has meant that I have to look at that void. I have to face it. I've had to stop running, but I've also had to come back to myself and honor everything that is here within me alive," end quote. Oh, yeah, I think when we prioritize and center the importance of survival, I think we often open ourselves up to the reality that our relationship with oneself might change, and our body may surprise us with what it needs. So how do you make the space to listen to what you need in order to prioritize survival?
Fariha Róisín Well, I think it just comes back to the body, like the body is the template and the body is the guide. You know, it's interesting, like even about motherhood, I've had to as I've, you know...I always wanted to be a mother ever since I was a child, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had a really bad childhood with my mother. And so I wanted to rectify that. I wanted to give love. I am somebody who has always just wanted to give my love to people, and it's gotten me into a lot of trouble. But in the last couple of years, especially, as I've really come back to body and forgiven the body and forgiven my body comes, you know, to some kind of embrace or just softness with myself ,a tenderness that's arrived through acceptance, surrender.
In that experience, I've just I don't know, it's very strange, but this feeling of motherhood no longer feels possible in this lifetime or in this body anymore. And that has been my listening to myself. And it's something that I had initially a lot of grief over because I didn't want to lose this thing. And this, like, tangible connection to my own femininity, or, you know, a possible way that I could actually heal my lineage. And, you know, through having a child and loving that child, I understood how powerful that could be but when the abuse returned back to my body when I was 29 years old, something completely shut off. And I write about that in "Celibacy As Survival," the piece I wrote for The Cut last year, because it was so disturbing to suddenly feel like my entire relationship with my womb, with my uterus was no longer mine anymore and that there was a deep severing that happened because in order to understand the totality of my sexual abuse as a child, I had to understand my own transgression. And in that it was just the only thing I knew to do was to disconnect and disassociate from myself sexually. And it did happen very naturally, but it didn't happen even with me thinking about it. And that awareness that like sort of that feeling that sensation, and trusting it, listening to it, devoting my ear to it, devoting my time and my attention to it--all of that takes so much courage, and it takes so much humility to just be like, Okay, okay, maybe motherhood is not for me...I don't know if I could ever, if I can ever sort of move past this feeling and, obviously, the biological clock is against us. It's part of the reason that I think so many of us have this anxiety around motherhood.
And I don't know, I think that in a world where there's so much harm that's been done by mothers silently, I want to support the mothers that are in my life and support the children that are in my life, however much I can. And accept my own pathway to healing and potentially just re-parenting myself, you know, using that love and that devotion that I've wanted so badly to put into somebody else. What, what if I use that energy and put it back into myself?
And I think that's really where I've been. Who Is Wellness For? felt like a birthing of something violent and necessary. And, you know, Like a Bird, my novel that I wrote in 2020, came out in 2020, I had been writing that book for 18 years, and it also felt like a birth. And, obviously, I don't want to…I don't know what it's like to actually give birth and carry and, or carry into full term, you know. I have a deep respect for mothers and what they do, but I think I've just come to, yeah, come to my own agreement with myself and it feels good. I feel like that's what it means just listen and trust, just to know that your path will look however it needs to. And if you are trusting and listening to yourself and to the Divine, to whatever messages that are trying to communicate with you, because everyone is, I think. I think we're all trying to be communicated to by somebody. And whatever our destinies are, I think it's important to listen to that. I think we always know deep inside what is meant for us and what it's not meant for us. And that's the human story. That is human evolution—coming to that self knowledge and knowing that there are always other chances and other options and other lives and other trajectories. And I think that's why I'm you know, queerness and being queer in every way that I am thinking queerly is about expanding in that way too, like expanding to become much more than what I ever felt was determined for me before but actually just like trusting what is coming and what is being shown to me. That has been the gateway to my own survival and to my own honestly, thriving. I don't feel like I'm just surviving anymore, and I think it has so much to do with attaining trust in spirit and in love and knowing that growth is good and seeing the signs of the Earth and seeing the signs and myself as signs to just follow. And if I do that, then I'll be okay, and that has really proven right for me. And, yeah, it feels good.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that with us. And I think so much of the healing journey for many of us, but everyone I know is about re-parenting themselves in some way or healing that really deep wound of being raised in a way that they don't belong or something. And so I mean, there's, it's a spectrum, and there's so many levels to it, but I think mothering is far beyond just to a human that comes out of one's womb.
There's not some silver bullet solution. It's a…probably a lifelong practice for all of us. But as we conclude, I want to thank you so much for your vulnerability and openness in this conversation and just want to give you a chance to share any final reflections on maybe the power of vulnerability, or anything else that's on your mind.
Fariha Róisín I think vulnerability saves us. I think that I'll give a personal thing—the spirit of vulnerability. You know, I see this even in relationship with my partner where we will disagree on things and I will feel so angry and so rageful about something and so right. And it is something that I've been experiencing a lot in this relationship, because I think when you are in relationship—I wasn't in one for a very long time, I was celibate and I was really not wanting to date anyone and then I found someone I really wanted to date. And within that, I realized that there was a lot of life lessons that I hadn't learned. And I think when you disagree with someone and when you, especially when you feel righteous and when you feel like you know, you have the right theory or the right concept, or whatever you you're holding on to something. I think that it's so helpful and easeful, to use vulnerability in that moment. And it's funny, like I've been saying that a lot to my partner recently, just use vulnerability because when you speak to me vulnerably, you're speaking to my heart. And then I can speak to yours.
And that makes me think of something that my therapist has talked to me often about how all adults really, when they are disagreeing or when they're fighting with somebody, when they're struggling with somebody, a lot of the time a child self is actually there. Not the adult self. So the child, the fractured child, the triggered child, that child, that child has overtaken the adult, and they're moving from that space. And I think that we are still uncovering and unlearning and learning, relearning so much about ourselves and the planet, and how we exist in relation to the Earth, and others.
And, I think humans right now are being asked to do in order to face the future, we're being asked to face our ancestors sins, the sins of colonization, the sins of the planet, the sins of murder, partition, genocide, the sins of occupation, the sins of just violence...We're being asked to face those things in our lineages, in who we are in our families. And if we can do that, then we can get to the other side, but that takes vulnerability. It takes the ability to put forward your heart, even though you've been hurt, even though you're scared, even though you're sad, because you know that your vulnerability is actually not for the other person, it's actually for yourself. And when I understood that, it changed everything. For me, I'm not being vulnerable for you or for my audience. I'm being vulnerable for myself. I owe it to myself to come truthfully to this, and I owe it to myself to speak myself to you. And that responsibility is everything to me.
Again, I don't succeed. I have very human flaws and I struggle with all of us all of the time. But vulnerability has been some of—if not my biggest strength—it's been one of the things that has really elevated me as a human being in all of the work that I do, because I refuse to be constrained by fear. And I refuse to be constrained by capitalism. I refuse to be constrained by any kind of structure that won't serve me or the people around me or people in general.
I want to live beyond the ideas of white colonizers. I want to live a life that is not just free for myself, but for all. I want to live a liberated life and I think all of that requires vulnerability. I think about every revolutionary movement that I know of in the last 100 years. So many of those revolutionary movements were led by men who had egos and we don't think about that very often—Why men get bought? Why this keeps happening? How does power keep shuffling into the wrong hands? It's because of a lack of vulnerability—of a lack of wanting to not just do good, but do right for the heart, not just what is right for the self or for an individual or even for one movement. You know, how do we coexist with one another? How do we come back to that? Or how do we learn for the first time in the history of this planet's imagination? How do we learn to live together equally, fairly? All of that requires vulnerability. It requires the vulnerability of the loss, of the grief, of the genocide, of the the enslavement, of all of the things that we're constantly navigating in this lifetime—And the brutality of race, the brutality of class, all of those things, you know, where we're trying to face that.
And that means that people need to be vulnerable about how it's harmed them. And people need to be vulnerable and listening to how it's been harmful. And that work is the work of our lives. This is the work that's being called right now. I think this is the work of revolution.
And it means really going back to yourself again, and finding all of those little corners in yourself that you've denied that exists in the shadow and understanding them so you can be better. And you can show up for the people in your life, that you can show up for your kids, you can show up for your partner, you can show up for your friends, for the women in your life, for the women in your community because you have looked after yourself, you have faced yourself and you have done the work to love yourself. I really think that all harm that's ever been done in the history of the planet is because of a lack of love. And when people have felt that they have been rejected or hurt, or it always comes back to love. And if we were to be vulnerable about why it hurts or how it's hurt us, I think that we would just be different. We'd be a different people. And I long for that. I long for that kind of connection. So if I can't have it with others, I might as well have it with myself and I can have it with anyone else who wants to have it with me. But this is how I exist and this is how I want to access so...Vulnerability is everything to me.
Ayana Young Thank you so much for this. Yeah, this has been really heartening and I feel changed. I feel like I...Yeah, the way I'm leaving this conversation is not how I entered it and I can see my day already unfolding differently. So yeah, I appreciate you so much.
Fariha Róisín I appreciate you so much in the work that you're doing is so important and I'm so grateful to have done this with you. Thank you for asking me, it just was so beautiful. Truly.
Ayana Young Thank you so much.
José Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Misha Sultan, graciously provided by Patience record label, Amo Amo, Colloboh, graciously provided by Leavings record label, and Amber Rubarth. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and José Alejandro Rivera.