Roses, Music and Musings

Toni Morrison rocked my life in different ways. Learning more about her life, her journey, and theshe navigated her challenges reshaped my relationship with time, as well as the relationship I have with my dreams… AND with my inner child.

This is Part III of my ongoing discussion about time…take a seat and make yourself comfortable while I unpack this, huns ! 

Now that I am a more mature woman, I can acknowledge with more clarity the extent to which trying to survive abuse and trauma took most of my mental and emotional capacity during formative years. I was hurting. Tremendously. I felt ashamed. I wanted to hide, to vanish. I searched for comfort left and right, desperately, and, as you might imagine, landed in some bad, unsafe places. 

I had little guidance during my formative teenage years. The pain created a huge distance between those who were trying to reach me and my heart. When I think about it, it also created an abysmal distance between me and myself, between the tortured-soul, society-facing me and the healing, authentic me. I made bad choices. Not out of recklessness, but because I felt it was the only way for the ‘too-kind, too-nice girl’ to be seen. Survival and understanding what was happening to me was simply too much for a young, broken girl. It was way too much for a young, broken girl to understand. I couldn’t cope, so I withdrew. I closed myself off from the world. To the teenage me, the world was too scary, too unloving, too unfair, too cold, too threatening. 

Evidently, this withdrawal took a toll on my social skills. I was a clever school avoidant, caught in this tension between my deep love for learning, my instinct to retreat and my discomfort with crowds. After being ignored for so long, now, ironically, I didn’t want to be seen anymore.

However, as much as it hurt, I would attend my Sociology, Language and Literature classes. In those spaces, small lights flickered back on. I felt some parts of my brain and of my heart sparkle again. That’s why I value education and the role of (caring) teachers so much. 

Music, literature and creativity really came through to keep me afloat. stories, words and melodies created a world I could escape to and feel safe in. Although I was already familiar with songwriting, I started to write poetry. I also turned to prose with a more intimate, urgent purpose this time. I had to exhale. I needed to release emotions trapped inside me,  because I had no one I could safely speak to about the depth of my anguish. I had to live.

Fast forward to my discovery of American and African American literature, as a (still broken) young woman.  Then I came across a book from Toni Morrison. It was ‘Sula’. 

Let me tell you this… Reading Toni Morrison felt like an intellectual and emotional tsunami… waves of clarity washing over me while chaos slowly receded. I remember closing the book and sitting in silence, stunned. A multitude of new meanings, new paths opening before me. Or maybe they were always there but were hidden from my view…

Questions fused in my heart…. “Toni Morrison… Who is this woman?”

Who is this queen? This diva?

I had to know. What can I learn from her ? 

Maybe, subconsciously, I was also searching for some motherly guidance. I was yearning for it.

I needed to know Toni beyond the pages. What stories she was made of. 

So I researched. I watched, read, studied anything I could find related to who she was as a woman. 

Toni knew loneliness. She knew the weight of responsibility as a single mother, the estrangement that comes with relocation, the alienation of being a woman within a minority group. The weight of racism and a heavy, fragmented past.

Toni felt broken too, and yet she alchemised that brokenness into language, into magic. She held our hands without pretending the path would be easy.

Her life trajectories taught us that Hope is not an arid land; it is never sterile. Toni told me : “You belong. For SURE.”

In the face of adversity, it is never too vain to cultivate strength and courage.

Slowly, something within me began to shift. The seeds she planted took root and started to bloom. Courage settled quietly within me. 

There was a message that was growing clearer and clearer, as intimate as my heartbeat:

I can do it… 

But there was another question Toni left me with … a question that still lingers, tender and demanding all at once:

What are you going to do with your time, now that you know who you are?

To be continued 🤍