The Unraveling

"You don’t owe anyone your unraveling. But you do owe yourself the chance to see what is on the other side of it." - Roxane Gay

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There is something both majestic and mortifying about witnessing an unraveling. How small it starts, with just a single thread falling. If you have ever tried to reconnect a thread to a spool, you learn how quickly some things can never be the same. You learn how the smallest disruptions can never be controlled. These are the situations that we often hope we never encounter because they give us no choice but to jump off cliffs, utter the unspeakable, or do the unthinkable in our lives.

When we experience the unraveling of our lives- lives that we have worked so hard to keep “normal” and “perfect”- we desperately attempt to catch the thread and restore things to how they once were. We do this knowing we can make it appear as if everything has been fixed, but upon close inspection, the thread is misshapen and only loosely bound. It is scary to witness ourselves forced to live untethered from societal pillars we believed in for so long that we thought they were our own.

You can hide from others, but I am learning you can only hide from yourself for so long. The true person you were always meant to be will wait you out forever, forcing you not just to find, but fall in love with yourself.

This is the terrifying beauty of unraveling.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as we witness the unraveling of a country, more so a system, that we can agree has been hiding from itself for quite a long time. It is even more fascinating to observe people adamant about stopping the reckoning that had been taking place, where words and actions steadily revealed the incongruency in a convoluted tale about liberty and justice built on a foundation of genocide and slavery. When the holes are exposed, it can be frightening to those who have benefited from the oppression and suppression that their silence upheld. This is how some can protect, praise, and profit from a system that is choking so many more of us, by convincing themselves of the fact that those of us who are dying aren’t human enough to deserve air.

So, it didn’t take long for these thoughts about our current society to penetrate my internal world. I have had to come to grips with an equally devastating unraveling in the personal space I inhabit as a Black woman. For so long, I had reinforced my own subjugation through the suppression of my voice and silencing of my thoughts to “keep the peace.” In doing so, I kept the machine of capitalism, patriarchy and racism running because if it broke, it would mean I would have to as well. It would mean I would have to find new goals, new beliefs and a new way of life. So, I watched my career, my body, my marriage, and even my children break. The overwhelming shame and guilt that I felt for putting myself first was unrelenting.

Now, it has made me unafraid.

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"I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear”
- Nina Simone.

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Enduring a personal unraveling has allowed me to see it as both merciless and miraculous. It is merciless in how we are forced to confront our breakdown in slow motion, feeling every wound while we gasp for air. If only we were aware enough to simply go through the fire. Instead, we spend months, sometimes years, trying to convince ourselves that we will still exist after everything else burns. We want to be assured that we will indeed stay alive despite everything dying around us in ways that we never could have predicted.

We won’t. We will die and be reborn anew. That is the miracle.

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“how do you get through?
Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part.”
- Toni Morrison

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This fear keeps so many of us clinging as tightly as possible to the spool because we are so afraid to let go of the people and things drowning us. It took me almost five—years to recognize my slow death in relationships that I believed would be my legacy. I had told myself it was love to prioritize everyone else and watch myself wither away.

Because I was Black.

Because I was a woman.

Because I was a daughter.

Because I was a wife.

Because I was a mother.

So, a few times, when the thread disconnected, I would quickly wind myself back onto the spool as carefully as possible, hoping I could live the same life, although I was no longer the same.

With each crisis, my values changed, and then my priorities changed. This marathon of change culminated in my complete and permanent unraveling, and I could no longer be satisfied with the woman who had played me in the movie that was my life. There she was—this docile, pleasant, easy, and, most importantly, invisible woman who was determined to ignore the chaos.

But there comes a point when the chaos must consume you. A day when you start inviting conflict head-on and declare war. And after each battle, the dust settles and allows you to take off another piece of armor that was binding you. Until finally, you can breathe.

Each time I gathered myself together, I became less perfect and would catch a glimpse of her—the woman I used to be. Once I saw her, I could not take my eyes off her. She was so beautiful. Back then, she did what she wanted, lived for herself, loved her community, and learned with each unknown step. She didn’t own anything she needed to protect, so she took risks.

I am slowly watching the woman I had worked so hard to become dying as she battles with the woman she thought she had killed and buried. She is still alive under the rubble. And so, I resuscitated her.

When you are in the midst of your own crisis, it is difficult to turn around, exhausted, and fight for your people, communities, and humanity. Yet we do because the crisis causes us to uncover ourselves, remember our tenacity, and find our strength. In the storm, I see a braver version of myself who will do everything to ensure she will never be hidden again.

We now feel the discomfort in our commitment to following the rules and maintaining the status quo. With this revelation, we can finally become ourselves. We can no longer sleep. We can no longer “American dream” through this life. We must think. We must act. We must move. We must meet ourselves in the unknown and release what binds us.

May we let the threads unravel—to sew together what never was but always should have been.

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