the self

radical self-care and alienating the self

pointing to the importance of healing and care in the discussion of revolution will be the inception of last revelations of the liberation of self. Sarah Ahmed writes, “The impression of the table is one of negation… It is through such painful encounters between this body and other objects including other bodies that ‘surfaces’ are felt as ‘being there’ in the first place. To be more precise the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensifications of feeling.” This quotation by Ahmed represents the oppressive constructions of the state, while still in the ultimate life-death binary, as a negation until it is made manifest against the body engendering some recognition by the body that there is a surface there. The abstraction of race is a surface. It does not exist and only manifests when called for its subjugating utility to other someone else. This flexibility of these oppressive conditions proves a relativity of their existence. They do exist, but they do not have to harm. They harm when forced upon in the physical, but can be negated in the subconscious. Such harm and trauma is constantly reinforced to maintain compliance to the system. But the power that one does have is the erasure of the conception in their subconscious, to not allow it to pervade and alter. Similarly, I can sink back into myself and be an object, omnipresent perspective of the person that is “Tyler White.” My body feelings and act in a manner deeply foreign from myself. Once I am “impressed” by another can I be ushered back into this body I occupy in it’s materiality. 

I write that to say that all pain acts in a similar manner. We understand pain to be an internalized bringing back into the body by an external stimuli. All pain of any sort, even that that is internal is often a product of something that was brought into it. By shunning out that colonized form of thought and process there is an immediate resistance of that pain as no longer existing. The phenomena of the bodily system is a carefully curated system of timed, looped, and programmed biological functions. We encounter the presentation of this pain through the surface. Rather it be a scar, or a feeling of ache, our internal is attempting to communicate with our external world and selves that there is discord occuring in a rather idealized, high-level biological system. The determinants of health outcomes, stressors, emotion, response, fear, and all other expressions are the manifestations of the pain of the oppressive system entering into the body. As we are not ‘being there’ in the world, our body has no other way but to immediate external visage for there is a recognition and hopefully, a reconsciousing to track that experience in the memorial code. Surfaces then become not only objects of harm and trauma causing pain but the only possible path toward healing. 

The intensifications of our pain augment a process of inherent biological healing (scarring), constructed external psychotherapy (from seeing an actual specialist to talking to a trusted person), prayer and ritual (an externalized showing of thought and devotion to an externalized force for the healing of the external or the internal; as well as, the working and casting of ill feeling and sensation by physical movement). The surface of other surfaces in people or movement allow us to transform the same source of how we incurred pain into how we seek to heal. In contradiction, some may say that there exists internal dialogues and self-healing but the manifestation of emotion on our surface is how we, intentionally or unintentionally, display that we are in pain. Therefore, the internalization of this harm cannot be a suitable solution. Instead of being released it is cast up, and built up. Our impression was not made from the internal. The external hurt us, so it must also heal us. 

In our memorial code of experiences where we draw comparison and lesson from, it becomes integral to understand the complexity of how we utilize that code. Surfaces become known to us both externally and internally by the canonization of experience we have and build “an intimate relationship [with]... ‘materialisation’ -- the effect of boundary, fixity and surface.” Within that boundary of this constantly evolving external surface, the materialised realm we interface with becomes the truth we substantiate as our personified and embodied history of pain and our potentiality to heal. Healing as understood as maximizing the external as cause for the internal is a place of conception that uses the means of liberatory engagement to remove the external pain, and the maintenance of the self desire, self freedom, and self choice as the foremost goal of essenceship, in concert with others. Thus healing is an enterprise of reinvigorating that which was dominated, and realizing the continual quest for self-actualization through exploration, exposure, and openness of the body to the surfaces that are unfixed and boundless.