Transcript: ANDREA GIBSON on the Blessings of the Wound /347
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Andrea Faye Gibson.
Andrea Gibson We are largely out of control. And I think that we think we will gain happiness and gain a sense of power over our own lives if we try to control things in every moment. And it's really liberating to understand that we are largely out of control in that way to try to then sort of catch the wave of the universe. And that for me has been this experience of coming into my own powe—is understanding the power of creation, the divinity of creation, the wonder and mystery of it all, and sort of just going with it. And now as I'm sitting here, really confronting my mortality and thinking, everything that I've ever lost, I've gained something greater because of that loss. I could see how these things made me and opened me, continuously opened me.
Ayana Young Andrea Faye Gibson is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken word poets of our time. Best known for their live performances, Gibson has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a poetry show altogether. To hear Gibson is like hearing songwriters play their music. Their trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display. Gibson's poems center around LGBTQ issues, gender, feminism, mental health, and the dismantling of oppressive social systems. The winner of the first Women's World Poetry Slam, Gibson has gone on to be awarded the LGBTQ out 100 and has been featured on BBC, NPR and CSpan. Gibson is the author of seven award-winning books and seven full-length albums. Their live shows have become loving and supportive ecosystems for audiences to feel seen, heard, and held through Gibson's art.
Andrea, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation and just want to say thank you for sharing some time with us today.
Andrea Gibson Thank you so much for inviting me.
Ayana Young Whew, well, gosh, where do I start? This is always the question where to dive in—the deep end or walk in gently? But mostly on my mind to begin with are the themes of separation from ourselves and anxiety. And so much of your work seems to focus on overcoming those moments when we feel fear and worry over disconnection and I'd just love to start by thinking through the ways our culture primes us for anxiety and disconnection.
Andrea Gibson Yeah, that's a really beautiful question. I feel like the question itself is, is the answer. My therapist, who I always am quoting... my therapist has always talked to me about how depression and connection are sort of opposites, though, when we're truly connected, it's difficult to go to those really hard places. And I don't want to ignore the fact that people are chemically depressed and that might be upsetting to folks, but for myself, I've always known that when I'm not connected, when I'm not connected to myself, and I'm not connected to others, I go to, I'm far more anxious, I'm far more low, I feel lost and like life doesn't make sense.
I've spent most of my writing life for 20 years writing about anxiety and panic attacks and I was doing everything I could to try to find new ways to heal my relationship with myself and just the whole world and to dive into the deep end as you were saying. About two years ago, I got diagnosed with ovarian cancer and something happened in the moment of that diagnosis where I almost felt most of my anxiety and panic and dis-ease would just fall off me immediately. And it took me some time to really integrate why that was and I can now look back and see that it largely had to do with the fact that just as soon as I was diagnosed, I had almost this new way of seeing where I could see that I wasn't separate from anything or anyone in this universe. And there was something about feeling that I was no longer a loner, like there was no more loner Andrea. Yesterday, I was doing this sort of writing workshop and I think I said it for the first time where I felt like my hand was holding my partner's hand and then I could feel my partner holding her mother's hand almost like this paper doll string of life connecting all around the planet. And I think that probably had a lot to do with why a lot of my anxiety and fear melted off of me.
Ayana Young The other feeling of loneliness is so, so anxiety-producing and of course, depressing. And I think about the word Anthropocene, meaning the age of man, or Eropocene, the age of loneliness. And I really feel like we as collective humanity are really feeling that loneliness, consciously, subconsciously and to be able to reconnect to that unifying force is so relieving. And before we move on to some other topics, I wanted to read this quote from a podcast where, which is called We Can Do Hard Things and you say, quote, "When I got diagnosed, all of that anxiety stopped, and the first thing I realized that my whole life, there was grief underneath that anxiety. That ultimately under all of that was a fear of not being connected, a fear of dying, because of a fear of losing everyone that I loved," end quote.
Andrea Gibson Yeah.
Ayana Young And so, yeah, I wanted to ask how has your life journey led you to places where you've had to reevaluate and reframe the ways you've made meaning.
Andrea Gibson Well, first, I want to say I think one of the really liberating things in that moment that happened was, I realized that the feeling that I always thought I was feeling was largely not the feeling. There was another feeling. So I'm finding that all over the place now. So for many years, I thought my fear was fear. And then to see that it was grief. And I think it stemmed back from a trauma when I was very young, where I was disconnected from everyone. Or trauma makes you feel, I think it gives you the illusion of being disconnected from everyone in a way, it separates you from yourself. And I think healing is coming back to yourself and coming back to everyone. Coming back to everyone at the same time, but you have been feeling that a lot lately. If I'm angry, I can tell that anger isn't really the feeling that I'm feeling, it's something else.
But the ways I've made meaning. I mean, right now, I don't even know if it's any evaluation, because I don't even know if there was much choice in it after my diagnosis. And especially recently, when they said it was incurable. It's almost like something keeps blessing me with opening my eyes and heart further, and it doesn't feel like anything that I'm really doing. I think it's sort of like this gift that is being bestowed upon me and it's a common gift, I think, for folks in my situation where you're suddenly very directly confronting your mortality, and it just widens your lens.
My therapist taught me years ago that one of the ways to get out of fight or flight is typically when we are in fight or flight, we have a very narrow focus. Our actual eyes, like focus on a small spot. And one of the ways that you can get out of that really heightened place of fear is to just expand your peripheral vision. So when you're looking out like right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm holding my hands way out to the side and, and focusing on both of my hands to widen their lens. And so I think that there might be something even though I think we're inclined to think the opposite. We think that if somebody tells us we're going to die, then all of a sudden we go into a trauma place but then suddenly, when they say that to me, I see the whole expanse of life and everyone's life. I see my birth, I see my death, and then that in itself creates this whole widening of my lens and it almost takes me out of that. That really accute place where I'm I have this very narrow focus and that narrow focus could be God everything's against me or had this is so tragic, or whatever the story is that goes along the lines of a narrow focus and gratefully, that's not where I've been. It's not to say I don't have moments of it, but that's not where I've been as of late.
Ayana Young Yeah, I noticed when I kept my focus narrow, and primarily focusing on myself, I really felt horrible. It was really amazing how much anxiety and depression I went through when my focus was on myself, my life, my dot, dot, dot, dot, and when I was able to expand and be in service to the earth, find connection, beyond my one story, my individual story, the relief and the openness and the spaciousness that came with that was so healing. And it's not to say it didn't come with its own grief as well, of course, for me, when I open to the world, and to what's happening on Earth, it was devastating in its own way. But things seem, it's not that they are more manageable, but I didn't feel as afraid. I mean, I felt afraid in different ways. But I don't know how to say it. It just really shifted my perspective and all of, the attention was dispersed. And that was just yeah, it incredible part of the journey.
Andrea Gibson You've said that in such a beautiful way and I'm always looking for words, to say exactly what you said, and you said it in a way that really touched me. And I know what you're talking about, because, you know, I was in years, years and years of therapy, which were necessary, they were vital to me. But in that process, I found myself I was continually looking back at my psyche, looking back at my wounds, and then looking at the world through the lens of my wounds. And I think that was important for me to see and understand my experience, but when I started to find joy, and when I started to feel my life sort of blooming anew, it was because I was looking out at the world and I wasn't looking back at my wounds first and perceiving the world through the lens of my wounds. And so I don't want to ever tell anybody not to investigate their histories and their traumas and why they might be acting or feeling the way that they're feeling. But it's this sense of being life. You know, you look at the animals, the animals aren't spending time contemplating like who they are, and I was for so many years, just like why, what do I feel about this? What do I think about this? What happened in my life, so I know how to feel about this other person. And then to suddenly just be life being life, like living and giving.
And, and the other thing that you said, yeah, that's been so potent in my life. If I'm having a hard time, I guess the natural inclination would be to think, How can I do more for myself?, and almost always, if I feel like I'm not getting something I want or something's challenging, if I can give something to somebody else, or if I could ease a day, ease the moment for somebody else it really, and I think that only speaks to how connected we are. It's not even like there is such a thing as somebody else. We are also connected. And yeah, so I love the way that you said that.
Ayana Young Thank you. Sometimes stream of consciousness really works out for us. And sometimes it's very all over the place. But luckily, that one was clear. Yeah, I want to talk a bit more about wounding, and I'm appreciative that you've brought it up. There is an interview you did, called "Our Angle of the Get Through" and you say, quote, "When I look at my life, I don't see many absolute facts, nor do I see many absolute truths. My life is what I call it. And the more I have called it beautiful, the more beautiful it has become. What I have called my biggest wounds have very often been my biggest blessings, because of where they led me and because of how often they further opened my heart," end quote, I really...
Andrea Gibson I don't remember saying that at all, but that's nice. [laughter]
Ayana Young Oh, gosh, well, it is, I really relate and it's gorgeous, and I think about... Somebody said to me the other day, they said, "The only thing you can control is your attitude." And of course, it's really easy to kind of blow over for me like "Yeah, yeah, okay." But it was interesting too, because I thought a bit more about that later, because life is so uncontrollable which is the beauty and the terror of it, of course, and maybe control isn't the right word, but it's this mystery. And in a sense, all we can do is to regulate ourselves through it all. And that regulation can then be reflected by everyone and everything else in our lives. It's almost a positive feedback loop. And I feel like that's connected to the wounding too, like the wound can grow, and the wound could be fed. And the wound can also be looked at as a blessing or something that gives us sensitivity to others, and so on and so forth. So I guess the question is, how does wounding lay us open to new identities or new understandings to the scope of human emotion?
Andrea Gibson Yeah, beautiful question. Um, well, my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, when one of my favorite poems is just this tiny little poem that says, "Someone I love once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, is a gift." And I think I think that there is a way I've had this experience. So recently, where I almost feel like my acceptance of a situation—people don't love the word ‘surrender.’ They think of it as passive. I love the word surrender because I think it recognizes that thing that you're talking about, that we are largely out of control. And I think that we think we will gain happiness, and gain a sense of power over our own lives if we try to control things in every moment. And it's really liberating, to understand that we are largely out of control. And in that way, to try to then sort of catch the wave of the universe. And that, for me has been this experience of coming into my own power, is understanding the power of creation, the divinity of creation, the wonder and mystery of it all, and sort of just going with it. I mean, when I think about, like, anything that's happened in my life, I can't look back and say, Oh God, I wish that hadn't have happened. Even these things that were very hard at the time, given distance I could see how these things made me and opened me, continuously opened me. And now as I'm sitting here, you know, really confronting my mortality and thinking, everything that I've ever lost, I've gained something greater because of that loss.
For example, in a couple of days, I'm scheduled to start this medication that is liable to take a lot of my vision and so I keep thinking about you know, right now, I'm thinking that sounds so difficult. But if I consider that it's going to be what it has always been, then as I lose the particular vision of my eyes, then what vision will I gain in that process? And, you know, folks can tend to have trouble with this way of looking at things. The reason why it has felt so good to me, is it almost—how do I put this? I used to believe that difficult things were not supposed to happen, that if you had a life that was bringing daily challenges, whether it's like, the tiniest thing... you know, the snowplow knocks down my mailbox or the biggest things: you get a really scary diagnosis. I had gone through my life thinking these things were not supposed to happen and that something was going wrong in my life. If anything came that was hard. Making the decision that they come on my behalf, like actually deciding that and knowing that I mean, I know it, I know it in my cells now. It has transformed everything.
And so what you were talking about earlier, your attitude... My therapist, again, I'll quote her. She says it a little bit different. She says the only thing we have control over is where we put our attention. So I'm thinking, okay, I can put my attention on the fact that I'm likely to lose a lot of my vision, or I could put my attention on okay, I wonder what vision will I gain from losing vision in my eyes. And so that's something an individual has to make. And I've talked a lot about this over the last couple of years because this is a new perspective for me. And it's always really important for me to say that people come to this on their own and it also won't be for everyone. I have friends that are going through cancer right now that they're just cursing all day long. And that's what's right for them. I mean, there were people who didn't always curse and so sometimes you just have to do the thing that you weren't doing before. You know if I wasn't screaming at the world before, that might be the totally appropriate and healing thing for me to do right now. But this place of gratitude and acceptance is what feels right for me right now.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing such intimacy with us around your diagnosis and your process. And I was thinking about something I feel like I've heard you write or say in other interviews and such and that diagnosis seems often it's something that like happens to a person, especially within our current health care system. And I'm wondering how you are continuing to find autonomy within your diagnosis.
Andrea Gibson You know, when I first got diagnosed, I realized I almost in many ways, just gave away my power to the medical system in a way, and not necessarily in a way that I regret now. I don't regret now, because I can see that I would have chosen the same treatments that I did do. I mean, they've kept me alive for two years. But the thing that I didn't do was say, I am making this decision to do what the doctor is suggesting, I think that could have made a world of difference and just think everybody should do that. I think that's, that's really important. But this time around, I was like, this is my experience. This is my life. And even when the doctors are telling me this bad news, I'm as present as I can be right now. I'm looking them in the eye and I'm engaging them as human beings in a new way. I'm picturing them walking their dogs. I'm picturing them at the bar. I'm picturing them in arguments with their partners to sort of just orient in myself that we're all on the same level. There's no doctor above me telling me what to do and then I'm tapping into myself and really listening. What do I want to do here? What is inline with my joy? What is in line with my spiritual practice? And what seems like a sensible option to take? Even days when blood tests would come at first or or scan results would come back, I would almost feel at the mercy of. And it took me a long time to get to a place of no longer having that sense of I'm at the mercy of what the blood test says or what the mercy of what the doctor says. That this is my life. I get to be living in every instance of it and I get to be alive and thrilled about my life even in places where I guess I always believed it was impossible to be thrilled about: having a body, thrilled about being alive, and actually being alive in this exact body with whatever timeline it has. I don't want anybody else's life. I don't want anybody else's body. I don't want anybody else's lifespan. I want my own. I've talked about this a lot I've stopped thinking of lifespan in regards to length, but width, and if you start thinking about how much you can fit into a second just with your own attention. My attention is the most precious thing to me right now. It just can be so full. The tiniest amount of time can be so full.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young That reminds me of a quote from an interview I did a couple years ago I think with Christian Schwartz and he said, "Attention is the most valuable currency in the universe," or something like that and I am really with you there. Your attention, our attention, what we give attention to, and especially living in a culture that is wanting to take our attention all the time and control it and make it go up and down. And it's just truly.
Andrea Gibson Yeah.
Ayana Young Yeah.
Andrea Gibson See what you can sell to one's attention. Yeah. And I think about that in regards to, you know, our phones listening to us and all of that it gets, it gets spooky. But yeah, I love that about attention and I also think that the more we're present with our attention and paying attention to where our attention is, then I think our attention we're meant to be just odd. I keep thinking about... I cannot stop thinking about astonishment and awe, and all it requires is, is just our presence.
Ayana Young Yeah. Yeah, I feel like you've touched on this a bit, but navigating mortality and on the podcast, We Can Do Hard Things you say, quote, "A loving relationship with mortality, which does not mean a joyful, like you're thrilled to die, it means that respect for it, because I think our mortality is what makes this life rich," end quote. And so yeah, I'd love to dive into that a bit more like, what richness can come from examining and sitting with our own mortality? And how might mortality be a connecting force, especially when we recognize the patterns of life and death that surround us?
Andrea Gibson I don't think that we were ever meant to think that—how do I even say this? I wish it was taught in kindergarten, Hey, you're gonna die. Like I just wish it was taught because I had no idea how juicy it was in regard to its nourishing capacities for life. That death itself is the seed that blooms a beautiful life. Like the brevity, but also just the mystery of it. People ask what the point of life is, well, what's the point of death might be? How we would answer that question? And I don't even know how to answer that. I don't know how to answer any of it.
But I have just seen so many experiences in my life. Every time every time I've watched someone in my life die, I have watched something incredible happen. My friend, Liza, who was dying of cancer while I had a belly ache that I didn't know was ovarian cancer. And just watching her at the end of her life, she was an incredible person and when asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said, "No superlatives, just, just don't let anyone say I was the best at anything." So obnoxiously American. But watching her at the end of her life was extraordinary. I was watching her get excited for events that were going to happen three days before she died. I mean, she knew that she was dying in a few days and she was still getting excited for an event that was happening in two days.
I watched my grandfather die, who, he was an alcoholic, and he was an abusive man throughout his life. I watched the end of his life. Hhe just came to this thing that I call the infinity vision where suddenly you can see more clear. And he had just this, the softness and this tenderness about him, and this remorse and it was full of love and looking at people in their eyes for the first time. And I was young when I was writing about this for the first time and I wrote, "I hope God is in a good mood when he shows up sober and shaking outside the pearly gates. I don't believe how it can do anything good for anyone, especially not the devil." And then my grandma, when I came out to my family, it was quite hard. I went home I had a shaved head. Everybody in my really rural small conservative town looked at me like they were terrified and my grandma who, she wasn't a liberal person. I saw her on her deathbed and she looks at me and she's the only one that doesn't see my hair, that doesn't see anything different. She's just looking at me with love. And I remember at this young age starting to see Oh, there is something about death. There is something that helps us live the way that we were supposed to live.
I write about this in my last book. But I had a partner whose grandfather when he was dying in the last five or six hours of his life, he just laid in bed and repeated the word love, love, love, love, love, love over and over just for hours until he died. You know, I'm not gonna say it happens to everyone. I don't know what Trump's gonna do on his deathbed. It just there's something that just it almost, it just brings us back to who I think we were intended to be. And I definitely have felt that happen with myself, and so while I don't wish anybody the news of a terrible diagnosis, I do wish the clarity that that comes from just this awareness. And when I think about it, you know, my friends are asking what would be most comforting right now when we're hanging out and, and the thing that would be most comforting to me would be if everybody sat around and talked about their death. If they talked about what their fears are about dying, how they would want to die, what they would want to do before they die, because I walk around the world right now thinking, wow, I'm the only person that knows I'm going to die. And nobody else seems to and I want them to so bad, but people are afraid to. They think it's going to make them unhappy? And I don't think it always does that. I think it commonly does the opposite.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's really interesting to think of the fear and the, is it aversion? or it's like such a deep 'No' in our culture of talking about death or being near death. And I can understand the fear of letting go and the fear of losing, especially when we're in a culture that's so much about control and not about surrender and not even about natural processes. I mean, thinking about just even how we build homes like they're soaked in formaldehyde, like even our houses are and then, you know, that's so much of how bodies are treated once we've passed. It's like, don't let go, don't let go. Don't allow yourself to go back into the cycle. Or not even go back. We're in the cycle all the time anyway, but it's this real aversion. And I think that's also partially probably why the fear grows so much is because we don't talk about it in kindergarten. And we don't talk about it as part of what we're all gonna go through and I don't know if normalize is the right word. I don't know allow or something. Yeah, we really live in a death-phobic culture, and that's opposed to decay. And so all of this really makes sense and I think is challenging for all of us in our own ways.
Andrea Gibson Well, I think that the idea is that, like, it's also a fear of feeling, because when I'm talking about this, I mean, there are moments that I actually am–and this is very new to me and I mean new in the last week–where when I think about death, I get sometimes a little bit of excitement to me, because I think I'm pretty sure I've done that before, but I do not remember and I don't have any idea what it's going to be like. And there's some part of me that is excited with just the curiosity of Oh, my goodness, like, what is that going to be? But that doesn't mean that those feelings don't live alongside despair, or grief, or longing, or just feeling like I have a million arms on my body that at every moment are just reaching out for everyone I love and just clutching and being like, I do not want to let you go. It's just all happening at once. And I think that we're just afraid of the feeling. And I personally, I didn't know. I didn't know how much feeling I could handle. And more so than the grief or the fear. I was afraid of the grief or the fear making me go actually insane. Like I would lose my mind. I'm just sort of clutching to this world and, and grabbing for this world. And it's not been like that. But yes, like that's from the very beginning where as a culture training each other to fear feelings and thinking that feelings can ruin us. And a few years before my diagnosis was the first time I mean, I was over 40 when I realized that there is no feeling that is bigger than me. There's no feeling bigger than my spirit or are bigger than me. And yeah, but I was like maybe 42 before I realized that I thought my feelings were gigantic. And I was this sort of tiny thing, living at the whim of them.
Ayana Young Oh, gosh, I could stay on this thread with you for a long time. It just keeps pulling. But there are other things that I also want to get to. One big topic being gender and fluidity and identity and expression. And I just really love and I'm so drawn to the fluidity of your work and how you speak of your experiences and particularly around gender identity and expression. And gosh, I think often this fluidity is something so many people feel regarding their identities and yet have so much trouble finding the words or footing to even explain it. So if you could just take us through how you've grown to embrace fluidity in a way that feels simultaneously expansive, but also comfortable.
Andrea Gibson Yeah, so I feel grateful to be a poet, because I don't know how much I would have figured out about my own gender had I not been writing because I never really came to the page. And I don't think anybody should come to the page to write down what they know, I always come to the page to find out who I am to uncover the world to explore it. And so, never come to the page thinking, you know, anything, come to it with curiosity, and then wonder.
And so I would, I would start writing about my gender and be shocked. I mean, I would run out of my writing room and just, you know, be in fits of laughter, like, understanding myself through writing it was, it was really beautiful. And so years of writing and uncovering my own self, and then also loving how...with gender it was, it was like a change. I mean, it changed. It changed all the time, the becoming never stopped. And I think when I came out, as I guess it came out as bisexual, then I came out as a lesbian then genderqueer, then, you know, it was always changing. And I was thrilled that it was always changing because I think at first I thought that there was a destination. And thank goodness, there isn't a destination, because that would have gotten boring. Maybe there is for some people. But I think that we're always expanding in that way if we let ourselves.
I just recently did this whole speech, like this half-hour-long speech, about gender. And I'm in a very different place with it now and this is never where I expected to be. But since the diagnosis, I almost immediately started feeling the sense of the ‘me’ that was most present was a ‘we’ that felt eternal. The me that would survive my body, which me is a hard word, because it almost feels more like a we, but the part of me my soul, my spirit that would survive. And I could feel that very distinctly as a genderless me. And so right before my diagnosis, it will have like very specific things that like sexually, for example, where I'm like, "No, I can't do that. That's uncomfortable for me." And even sexually, that all just sort of changed, where I suddenly felt like this being that wasn't that connected with gender. And when I say that, I mean, in a pained way. Things stopped hurting me. Like folks have always used all kinds of pronouns for me. And I typically use they/them, but now, if somebody says she or he, it doesn't even hit my ears. All of it is just like, whatever. I feel kind of not resistant to any of it and it's not even like, I feel like I don't mind. It's just like, Yes, sure. She, yes, he, yes, they whatever. But I'm at a fun place with gender at this point in my life. And I think that was happening in the years leading up to my diagnosis.
Ayana Young I love hearing you speak to the different identities and that you have been enjoying the shifts and the changes. I think it's hard when we get too stagnant, or I'm actually making a fist. Although you can't see it, like this kind of feeling of like, This is me, this is who I am, forever. It's like well, or not, or not. What if we let that go? And I would love to read a poem that you wrote called Your Life and you say:
that made you into someone
who now often finds it easy
to explain your gender by saying you are happiest
on the road, when you're not here or there, but in-between,
that yellow line running down the center of it all
like a goddamn sunbeam.
Your name is not a song you will sing under your breath.
Your pronouns haven't even been invented yet.
Andrea Gibson So I'll tell you the story about this and I can't remember what I said in The We Can Do Hard Things podcast.. I said so much, I talked so much that day, but I don't know if I told this story or not, and it's just one that I've been loving. One of the most beautiful conversations that I'm hearing people have right now about—and I'm so glad that this is happening, you know, because we have the country seems to be pretty split in the world right now—seems like half the world are really hating or fearing trans people. And you know, I think transphobia to me, that's the best word to use. I know there's hate out there, but I think that when people are afraid, and I think that people are more commonly afraid, and I think it's important to call it fear when it's fear. Because if it's hate, what do we do with hate? Besides, say you're a bigot. If it's a fear, we can say, what are you afraid of? And I know why people don't want to go into those conversations. They don't want that happening on their bodies. I understand that folks don't want to dive in. But some people do. And I do, because I want to ask, what are you afraid of? So then I can have that conversation. But one of the most beautiful things I'm hearing people talk about, which I think is so important, is that we are at this amazing place in time, where forever we have been telling children who they are. We have been saying, This is who you are. I remember growing up like that's just what parents did. They told us who we were. And now think about its impact that people are beginning to ask the children, "Who are you? What name do you like? What pronouns do you like? What's your gender?" If you ask every child that. I'm talking about cis children as well. Think about what that does. It says "You get to tell us who you are. You get to tell us," and that expands far beyond gender. It’s impact, it’s evolutionary impact of what it will do in creating a beautiful world. It's not going to stop at gender. We need a new world. We need so much to change and think about how more changeable that will be if we are raising children to define themselves and to be able to create themselves new all the time. I think it's just such a beautiful sentiment to think about how impactful it will be for generations if we're asking children to tell us who they are instead of us telling them who they are.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Gosh and all of the wounds and pain and confusion of us telling children who they are, what that's led to, it's like this hasn't worked out well for us. And there's so much beauty in allowing people to unfold for themselves. And of course, it makes me think of surrender and not control like we've been talking about. Whether we're talking about mortality, or gender fluidity, or grief and wounds, it's like surrendering to our attention to the present. There are
similar themes that are coming up for me or I don't know if theme is the right word. But there's like these connection points that feel like it's all coming back to this circle. I'm seeing it visually, which is hard for me to explain. But maybe that's actually a good transition to talk about, Something else that feels very unexplainable, which is God and the relationship with the divine and you discuss your relationship to and, and thoughts on the divine often. And so I'd love to open up the space to think through what kind of God or what type of meaning for God, we may need in times like these.
Andrea Gibson Yeah, it's the hardest thing for me to put words to. So I'm talking about it constantly trying to find the words but I think it might be. It might actually ultimately be a wordless thing. But, I grew up in the Baptist Church, I went to a Catholic University and there were lots of negatives to both of those things, especially as a young closeted queer kid, but there were also a lot of positives. Because I believed in miracles. I believed in magic and I was thinking outside of the box. I was like You can have a virgin birth? You can part the sea? You can heal the sick with the touch of your hands? You know, whatever you think about that stuff at this point, and I sort of at some point in my early 20s when I came out as queer, I throw that all away at that point too. But the miracle part of it stayed with me. And it always found its way into my writing. Like when I did my last book and, and the artist was designing the cover, the only thing the only feedback I gave was, Please have the cover be a miracle, something that actually couldn't happen, and so the cover is a person lassoing the moon. And I know that this creative part of me that is imagining outside of what I've been told is possible, and has come from that like was born from my Christian upbringing. And now I left all of that for a long time, I sort of threw away, I sort of, I guess you say 'throw the baby out with the bathwater,' but I just when I wanted, when I realized my queerness I thought Okay, I have to leave God at the same time, and I always had a loneliness to myself. I always felt, I wish I was connected to something greater and for a long time, I thought it was just poetry making art. I thought of love as—whenever I'd say ‘God’ in my writing, I meant love—the divinity that connects us all, the heart within us all, our compassion, our empathy.
Now I understand it as something different because it's no longer a belief for me, it's an experience. It's an experience that happened in these last two years, and it keeps happening. It most commonly happens if I ever get away from it, if I'm outside, I look at a tree and I can feel and it almost overtakes my entire being that this tree had to have been loved to have been made. Like I can feel it so intensely. Like I look out at the beauty at—my whole yard is blooming with flowers right now—and the love and the divinity and the creation of that. And I'll look at a flower now and I can feel in my heart of hearts that I was made in the exact same way that flower was made. And just this abundance of love and so much trust comes from that, so much trust comes in looking out at this beauty and feeling my heart pumping, feeling, you know, my feet take steps. I am just in the experience of being loved by God or source of the Divine or whatever you call it. And when I think of God, I'm not thinking of something outside of us. I'm thinking of a God within us. You know, I could replace the word God with any of my friends' names. And it's just, that to me goes back to your original question. Because you know, loneliness resonates in the same part of the brain as physical pain. I always think about the fact that it's physically painful to be lonely. And there is a loneliness that I always felt, no matter how much I was loved. I have amazing friends, I have an amazing partner and family. I felt a loneliness until I felt connected to the divinity of creation, and to just the source that makes us could not possibly have made us in anything but love.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm gonna read one of your quotes because it's going to help me get into the unexplainable or a hard to put into words question. And in an interview with Rough Cut Press, you say, "I use the word God a lot in my work and I never quite know how to explain what I mean when I say God. But if I had come up with a one-word definition, I'd say ‘truth’. On a personal and political level is what I put my faith in: truth. And on the flip side of that what I'm most afraid of are lies. So even when the truth fills us with grief, it's a healing grief. It's a grief with momentum towards positive change. It's something to count on, to believe in, to build our lives in service of," end quote.
There's so much in this quote, I'd love to talk about but the word truth is interesting to me because I see something similar in terms of God being truth. And, then there's this question that goes, well, how do I know what's true? And I think about the place we're in right now as a humanity on Earth and we're surrounded by so many different true truths and also a real lack of accountability because we don't all share the same truth or the same value system or believe in the same God or spirituality. And so there's so much confusion there. And of course, there's one way to say, Oh, but it's beautiful. We can all have these different belief systems, but it also can be really destructive if our belief and value systems are so different in terms of dominion over Earth versus reciprocity. And so I go, Gosh, yeah, God is truth to me, and how have I come to my truth? And that's like, I feel like I can rely on my intuition. And I don't even know what the question is here, I'm more just kind of in the tangle of it and I'm trying to come to something that feels a little clearer with you.
Andrea Gibson I can feel the tangle of it, too, and I just know, there's somebody out there that can make sense of it all, because I know exactly what you're saying in regard to the different truths. Like, okay, so somebody's saying, You know, it is my deep truth that two women should not get married and I feel that in my heart of hearts, and I know it ... something like that and that just isn't truth. And so I think that the thing that I think of is truth is clear seeing, seeing without our biases, seeing without our attachments, seeing in many ways, without our mind or our psyches. And it's a hard thing to—it's a practice, you know, it's a practice to see, without your mind. I think about it all the time, or I don't necessarily think about it, but I feel about it all the time. Who am I when… who will I be when I no longer have thoughts? Because I know I will be most myself when I no longer have thought. I've written about this. When people say so and so is rolling over in his grave. And I'm like, No, nobody rolls over in their grave, like, this is my belief. But folks don't get to the other side and still have all these mind attachments of right and wrong. You know, I think it's a personal thing, but we know it when we know it because I can think like, the truth is, for example, I need to have a very hard boundary with this friend, and I cannot have this friend in my life because they did this and this and this. And I will be sure for a few years that that is the right truth. And I will be sure that is the truth. And then one day, I'll just be walking around and I will feel a love in my heart for this person. And it doesn't mean that the person has to come back into my life, but the truth is the love. And the truth is that I love this person and that is what I know of the truth. I don't know if I can put any truth around... I guess the details. And I think that's the thing that I'm learning is that I don't know how much circumstance, I don't know if that's larger than what's happening within us. And it's a really tricky thing to talk about, because I think to some people, it sounds like abandoning the world. But I feel like when we are going to healing the world without prioritizing healing our own selves, we're jumping over a necessary step for healing the world. And so I think doing both at once, where we're, we're working to love the world, and we're working to love ourselves, but I understand the tangle that you're talking about. And I too, can land on truths and I can be like, "This is what I think is a truth." And at this point in my life, it is only when I feel entirely at peace, where I notice I'm not having many thoughts at all that I understand that I've actually landed on a truth, that I have landed on truth. But it took me a long time to even understand that. And I don't know if when I even said that thing that you read previously if I fully understood how to know when I had reached a truth.
Ayana Young I think there's also something so beautiful and humbling about not knowing too. You know, it's like we don't know, we're not going to know. I think there's some kind of knowingness that can occur, which maybe is the feeling of love or reciprocity or being in right relationship. There's there's a type of maybe peace that comes with that type of humility and service. But it's so challenging because I don't think we can ever know. And if we think we can know, we've kind of gotten too full of ourselves. But then we have to come to a place of knowingness or something where we can feel steady in decisions and in our lives. So it's, it's really, gosh, we don't need to keep going down this path because we've been going for a while and there's a few more things I want to ask you. But it's maybe for a second conversation. Because...
Andrea Gibson I mean, the thing that you said about I don't know, I've been thinking about that. And I will tell you that I think that there is a chance that the 'I don't know' is the answer. And because I feel so-every doctor I go to has all the answers—[laughter] Every single one of them, they all have different answers, but they always have the answers. And I instinctively trust any doctor who is willing to say, I don't know. I find that to be the ultimate wisdom. And if a doctor says, I actually don't know the answer to that, I feel immediate trust. And so I feel like we've got a lot of folks running around the world and I was one of them for a long time. And I can still catch myself going to these places sometimes of you know, I know this or I know that, and no, it's the I don't know. And then even like writing that way, you always get to come to the page not knowing. And it might be that if we all collectedly agreed, we don't know, I feel like the answers would just give themselves to us. If you even feel into the physicality of the 'I don't know,' it's almost like you can feel your arms thrown open, like, you know, your arms throw open as if to catch the answer. So maybe that is just the step that the only step we should be focusing on right now is the 'I don't know,' because all the knowing, I don't know if that's working right now.
Ayana Young I don't think it is, on any level. If we just even took the topic of climate change and solutions for how to, quote, “take carbon out of the atmosphere,” it's like, We really don't know. Just think that all the time, like, oh my gosh, anybody who tries to sell me an idea, kind of like what you're talking about the doctor, like, I know how to solve climate change. I'm like, Nope, immediately, red light.
Andrea Gibson Yeah.
Ayana Young Or I know how to we know, you know, this organization or this idea. This is the solution. This is what's going to save us. Anything about saving or knowing I'm like, Oops, okay, I want to take a couple steps back and just really not like, Listen, you know, I want to listen. I think it's interesting psychologically, of course, because we, gosh, there's just that deep desire to know and to save, and to... kind of goes back to the mortality issue to like, We must not let go. But I think there are so many problems to that hubris, and it shows up in every aspect of our culture. We're too certain that we have the answers, it really hurts us in the end. I think it even hurts us in the process. And it takes years or lifetimes to uncondition that knowingness. And so gosh, yeah, so much there.
So in our last few moments, well, it's just been so beautiful. And I think what I'd like to begin to close on is a theme that comes up through your work and your conversations. And to me, it seems like it's the idea of striving for internal peace and peace within the world. And I'm wondering how you've come to recognize this balance of peace with yourself while working for broad peace in the world. I think it really connects with so much of what we're saying there's so much noise and distraction and so many questions and those questions are expansive and can really open us but at the same time, how do we also come to a place of stability and regulation within ourselves and within the greater world-humanity-Earth collective?
Andrea Gibson Yeah. So I think about it in regards to nourishing ourselves and when I think about nourishing myself with the best way I can see that is, is offering myself or creating as much peace within myself as possible. And what that means for me is to not be in resistance with the facts of my life and to not be, for example, battling against, um... Like, I've never thought of myself as fighting cancer, what I am doing right now is I'm giving my body every single thing that I know that I've ever learned in my history of learning about medical, or nutrition, or anything, just giving my body as much health as I possibly can. And then at that point after that sort of being hands-off with the universe, like trusting the universe, to do what it will and that trust, and that trust in my own journey, and that trust, also in my own depth, for example, of like, everything coming my way, coming in service of my soul. And so I'm with that trust right now and that creates an abundance of peace in me. It doesn't mean I don't cry all the time, it doesn't mean that I don't have Yeah, grief. I just have so much joy, I can't, I can't believe how much joy I have. That's something I could cry about how much joy I have because I'm not battling the facts of my life. But at the same time, I am giving my body everything, everything that I know that it would need, if it would ever have a chance of being well. And I think that that is so important to do, at the same time as not necessarily battling with the world, battling with the facts of what are happening in the world right now in my psyche in a way that creates pain within myself in a way that creates constant arguments with people who disagree with me. But to be at the same time nourishing and giving to the world everything i can. And that is nourishing to myself, too. I think we are here to care for the planet in the way that it is caring for us. It is just..you walk outside and this planet is caring for us it's doing everything it can, to thrive in spite of what we're throwing at it.
And so I think both of those things happening at once, when I was young, I used to think I would save the world by just, I was always looking outward. And now I really feel that nourishing of myself and nourishing of the planet at the same time, but to not battle against it. And, you know, that's for me. Because I mean, I grew up in protest, I grew up in activism, I grew up for many years just for myself believing that was the way and some people that might be perfect for them. For me right now, that sort of battle energy. It's not what I'm right now believing will be most transformative.
For example, I used to write a lot about factory farms and the horrors of factory farms. Now I could write about that same issue and maybe the first thing that I would say on that issue, instead of writing the details and the horrors of the factory farms, maybe the first thing I would say would be cows have best friends and cows do have best friends. And so just leaning in this way for my own spirit. And maybe there will be a time you know, maybe something else will change. It doesn't mean that tomorrow won't require my rage. Like I have no idea. I just know where I am in this moment and nourishing both at the same time.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really feel you. Well, I was actually talking to one of my mentors last night, who does the Work that Reconnects facilitation, and it's like this spiral journey and moving through. I mean, there's a fluidity too, to the activism to the grief to what we focus on. And I much more used to be in a rageful place, which was beautiful. And I'm very happy for that. And maybe I'll come back to it. And right now it's much more focused. Yeah.
Andrea Gibson I understand what you mean. Like I was part of a year-long show that was called Sacred Rage and I think I was around 30. And it was beautiful. And so I think that he has whatever is you know, people can tap into themselves and know what is the best way I don't I don't know the best way for for others. But I agree. Neither of us know. You and I might wake up screaming tomorrow morning and that might be right. You know, call me if you are and I'll see if I am too and we'll just scream together. Yeah!
Ayana Young Yeah! Right, and that's the surrender part too. It's like we're not we're not one thing. We're never going to just be. I mean, I don't know. Maybe some people are just true to them and that's cool, too. So yeah, I appreciate the allowance to be present with where we're at and that intuitive state. But oh my gosh, I could really speak to you for so long. I so appreciate this time you've turned my mood upside down. I'll tell you. Starting this interview I was excited but I had a hard morning and so this really set me in a good way and I appreciate you and yeah, thank you so much.
You know, thank you so much. Your questions are so beautiful and I too started the morning off weird and isn't it amazing how it can just change with just connecting with another person? So thank you for for that. I really, really love their conversation.
Ayana Young Me too. Awesome. This has been wonderful.
José Alejandro Rivera Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today is by John Carrol Kirby (generously provided by Patience Records), Kesia Negata, and Katie Gray. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and José Alejandro Rivera.