It’s probably a bit dark to admit, but I was often convinced that I wasn’t going to reach 40. My conceptualization of the present took up all the space and my ideation of the future was difficult to orchestrate: in my adolescence and during my twenties, I had difficulty projecting myself further than two months in advance because I was so busy gathering my energy to get through my days. I am now slowly approaching forty. The future has become clearer. I know myself better and better. The passage of time helps with this, among other things: observing myself live.
For a long time I believed that one of the things that characterized me the most, and one of the things I loved the most about myself, was my generosity. I loved giving: my time. Gifts. Receiving people. Even if my resources were limited, I liked not counting when it came to others, my friends, and sometimes even strangers. Sometimes I believed that what I gave would come back to me through some karmic transactions, but I especially believed in the idea of giving, which I wanted to be as pure as possible, with as few expectations as possible. I loved giving, truly, totally, and then one day, I felt less like it. I would like to say that it was because of specific events, because my goodwill or my naivety was abused; but that is not entirely true. I simply noticed that I had the impression of multiplying the blows of a sword in water. I was exhausting myself in the void.
This is not a story that ends well. I have not managed to find that generosity that seemed to me to be at the foundation of my personality. You could say that I have changed, and it is not pleasant.
I was listening to an episode of Prentis Hemphill’s excellent podcast this weekend, Becoming the PeopleThe latter met Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who has just published a biography of Audre Lorde, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde, an African-American intellectual and immense poet, Gumbs said, had an absolute generosity that also came with great rigor. Lorde believed in the deep interconnectedness of members of a community, but each had to “do their job” (“do their work”) to strengthen the horizontality of the links. Doing one’s work: assuming one’s dark areas, one’s fallibility, knowing one’s power, one’s limits, one’s history, and working both for oneself and for others. Lorde could give everything, but not at any price, just to people who knew how to receive what she had to offer, and she valued her gift. I think I often gave little to mine, and that was my first mistake.
I spent the summer with Audre Lorde on a project, and finding her on this podcast seemed like a sign that I should continue to listen to her to better appreciate the magnitude of my gifts, the ones I would like to be able to distribute again. Maybe, one day.