come out
“….white people”
“This is probably some crackhead that got hold of the wrong batch”
“_Europeans”
“What is Trust Fund”
“That’s ecstasy at its finest”
“Is that Janis Joplin”
“Just pay reparations.”
This is what I woke up to one morning after a spiritual experience that happened to be in a public space, where someone recorded a clip, posted it on social media, it went viral and most all of the comments are related to my ethnicity and the approved assumptions that go along with that or what drugs I must have been on.
It was April 2021, under the arch in Washington Square Park, almost a year after my last embodied sober dance experience. An unexpected symbiotic relationship happened between my body and Peyton’s brass horn. His sounds lifted my limbs like puppet strings. I pulled my hair and thrusted my pelvis in the air to music we were making together. I crawled like an animal with mouth gapped open. Not seeing, only feeling, muscles becoming tentacles, brain dropping into feet. We danced in a communion of sound and movement in a space and time beyond measure.
I grasped the empty space in his horn as if it was a tangible thing, screaming come out, come out, come out. Gripping the grate on the ground by his feet yelling come out. I scaled the wall like the child I had just seen. I rolled my hips. I mimed Peytons body, put my hand in his horn and screamed breath. breath. breath. I touched his face while he was playing with the other hand on my chest. Finally he released the saxophone from his lips, pulled me in for a kiss. People clapped. I dropped to the ground laughing. When I finally opened my eyes, there was a crowd with iPhones recording. People coming up thanking us for the performance. What performance. That was a trance. An exorcism.
The night before, I cried to Grandma Beth over zoom during our writing session, desperate for a ritual. For something to lift what words could not. Having dug deeper into my family constellation and written so much, I craved a different kind of release to move on as a different kind of daughter. Through my muddy tears and crumby words, she asked over the screen with hands on her cheeks, what is the glue? With your parents, what is the glue? We are. I responded. My sister and I. It wasn’t until someone asked, named what I couldn’t did I realize being glue no longer holds me together. My insides wanted to unstick themselves from enmeshed relationships where I played parent.
It was on the stained concrete in the park unplanned that my chest broke open, where I unglued myself. After collapsing to the ground, I was cold and wanted to curl into a ball, completely naked fully clothed and exhausted. A woman came up and very earnestly said, I want to give you this. It was a $20 bill. Are you sure, I asked. Yes. She stood there thanking us. Nothing fancy, no floral words or attire. Her face read stunned, something she saw in us that was in her too.
We sat under the arch after the crowd dissipated knowing it was never about them. They just happened to be there. We shared something without words and deeply sensational. Communicating in another language. No frontal lobe second guessing. Not for show or likes. True improv. We just made church, I expressed with his green blue eyes just two feet away looking greener in the sun that day.
Two days later. A girl who asked us earlier in the park how we met shared with us a video clip of our improvisational saxophone dance that someone had posted under the #whatisnewyork handle. A few days later, a separate video clip went viral on TikTok (an app I didn’t and don’t have). A million views, over 50,000 comments and below are some of them:
—
“NYC is such a fuking dump now thanks to these hippie liberal trash snowflakes”
“Does no one realize how much mental illness there is in new york city its actually sad”
“Crystal meth at its best”
“Please leave this fucking city….youre ruining it”
“She trying hard to fit in with the rest of the crazies”
“Why is he playing music for a crack head”
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug”
“Weirdo uppie maniacs”
“These are the people that insist they know what’s best for everyone else”
“When the gentrifier smokes K2”
“Please try to limit your weird interpretative dancing to your own living rooms and bed rooms. No one needs to see this shit. Also she definitely has 4 to 6 cats that feel the same way I do”
“….white people”
“Why are her clothes so clean”
“I could have saved her parents the tuition in performance school and teach her same moves in Washington heights!!”
“It’s Beckie from Wyoming that was looking for more culture and only found drugs.”
——-
I starred at the cold inaccurate 2D comments that completely conflated my 4D spiritual experience. Strangers judged my character. My appearance type casted. Nothing but a white hippie. Nothing but a Beckie looking for more culture. Nothing but a gentrifier who smokes K2. I don’t know what K2 is. What is Trust Fund. I didn’t get the only money my parents saved for our college, they spent all of it on divorce lawyers. At 33 years old, I am in $89,000 (and growing) of student loan debt. I live in a neighborhood where my grandmother’s aunt lived four blocks away, but gentrifier with a trust fund is the label I receive from a video clip dancing with a partner playing the saxophone in Washington Sq park.
The words these people chose to somehow describe me speaks louder than my voiceless dance. How quick we are to label. How self righteous we stand behind the screen in the privacy of our home bullying like we’re still in middle school except this time using ‘approved’ language. How easy it is to name and call it progressive. To me, undoing systems and ideologies of oppression have nothing to do with flipping the words and doing a similar kind of pointing.
The whole story was missing. The deeply intimate, improvisational experience we shared was zapped by cruel one off comments. Some were funny and harmless but many were mean, judgmental and inappropriate. It stung because they were similar write offs I received since Middle School when being friends with different ethnicities fueled a divide in my school and I became the bullied target.
I’m interested in exploring relationships, all of them, as a place of educational learning and a means of creating justice. I don’t think we get to the just and joyous world we are capable of by posting cracks and cruel assumptions on social media about strangers. Or calling people white hippy or Karen publicly as if it’s the end of a sentence. Need I say more. Actually you do. If we want to evolve beyond the whiteness that has taken people’s lives, then I believe psychologically we must also stop projecting the same narrative on individual people as if it’s the only one possible. It isn’t.
These acceptable comments and the human beings behind them don’t know anything about my life, work, commitments, spiritual practice, relationships, way of being in the world. Of course, they don’t know me, how could they, this is a virtual landscape. And what happens when we make sweeping generalized assumptions about a certain ethnicity or person we don’t know. What happens when we are primed and conditioned to look for something psychologically, that’s all we’ll see and reinforce. We reinforce divisive, dominant based, right-wrong, good-evil, black-white thinking. Which is exactly what racism and patriarchy want. Because at the end of the day, this isn’t about me. This is about moving forward. Coming out as the essence of who we are and being witness to each other.