Holding
“The desire to be held exists inside everyone, for the few who have not been held fully yet in this life, let go of the fears around it and let yourself have it. The more you voice it, the more you become aware of what particular sense of holding is yours.”
There’s a special part inside your heart and your body that wishes to be held. You oftentimes play out what you learned in society as ways of receiving that kind of holding. For me, I noticed a huge shift around 2021, during the pandemic around the need to be held. That line between honoring people’s physical and emotional safety, as well as honoring my desires to be held.
Baj, my roommate at that time shared something sacred with me, Creativity. Both of us anchored ourselves into our creative practices during COVID. He launched this beautiful patron page where he gave live broadcasts from our home out to the community that was following him. I was super impressed by his ability to stay connected with so many people at that time. Together, during those first couple of really new fresh months of quarantine and uncertainty with the world, we created this beautiful bubble. All of our supplies were out all over the place, and the living room became this amazing creative den. I shared with him my love for images, creating them, editing them, and color-grading them. Things he would see me do in my little world, that I offered him for his new growing projects. He had started out creating these amazing cardboard figures, photographing them, and bringing them all together to make his stop-motion films. I offered him a peek into my world that gave him something to be able to play with in his. Simple tools he could use, programs to help him bring his images to life. He was so grateful. It was one of the first vivid memories of someone telling me how grateful they were for something I had shared with them, that helped them touch something they thought they never would have been able to touch had I not shared it with them. Those connections mean everything to me, those connections are infinite. They are the ones that reflect that self-love and care you develop for yourself when connecting with a craft so intimately. We were there, together, in our intimate worlds, sharing the intimacies we have with our crafts. Merging and blending between different worlds, to create new ones. He played with me too. One day I asked him if he could teach me some chords on the guitar. By that point, I was pretty solid with a couple of cords to play some Radiohead songs that were etched into me from my ex-fiancé who had introduced me to Radiohead. He offered me such a simple note around music, that I still carry with me to this day. He told me, Jessenia, you just need three cords, that’s all, it doesn’t even have to sound good. Just pick three, and play with them. We made whole melodies together with just that. I ran off into my room and played quietly with that, occasionally coming back to him to show him what I had found. My heart was so giddy with glee and laughter. I was happy with them. The part of me that had grown up playing the piano and the violin finally had a friend to connect to around music. Not just going to classes, teaching, coming home and practicing, and having my mom applaud at everything I played, but someone who also felt the same things I felt, every time I touched a chord. That secret language of vibrations, that comes through the other side. My ability to play with chords I chose on the guitar from genuine curiosity amplified my ability to be able to sing freely anytime I’m near a guitar. It elevated my experience as a musician myself. A fact that I kept just for friends and family. Baj carried such a generous wisdom about him.
He had become my lifeline.
On Baj’s end, he had way more life-lines cast about New York at that point after living there for almost 5 years, and I was aware of it. You grow up creating these lifelines. The lifelines hold you into this reality. The love you have in your family net. The love you have from a partner. The love you have from your career. They all link up to a magnitude of people. Some, go on living their whole lives not realizing that this net is there because they are so fully supported by it. If you were born flying, with wings, spread through the air, would you notice your ability to fly? This invisible infinite grid of light feeds us daily. COVID for me, was such a strong opportunity, to look at those lifelines. The first-generation farmer, my mentor direct experience, throwing seeds about and praying for the best-case scenario. That’s not how you become a farmer. Throwing seeds into a pot of soil doesn’t make you a farmer, your dedication to come back to it, over and over again, grow and learn from your mistakes, and become wiser as you grow, that dedication to the craft of farming is what makes you into a farmer.
Those lifelines, you need them. They aren’t things you are entitled to, and they need to be taken care of.
They are alive, just like that umbilical cord that grows from a mother to her child. After you are born, you enter into a lighting speed growth. You evolve and become aware of these kinds of connections. How to keep them alive. Look at our culture. So much of our culture is based on highlighting the fear aspects of it. Oh! What happens when you don’t have access to those connections? Panic, Isolate, Disarray. But, if you let go of the fear, hone in on the love, amplify that love, tend to it, and care for our grids like any spider carefully tending to her web, the more you appreciate the grids you create over time. The more these lifelines, become rivers. The more these lifelines become giant roots that connect to a giant healthy collection of trees that you then call a forest, held together by a beautiful mycelium network underneath.
The more that life blossoms because you know life is held.
Some of the lifelines tether you to this reality, some of them make you feel more free and alive, and some of them are discombobulated, more like a strange mush of weeds needing pruning. For me, New York became something new. The ample amounts of connections I had access to vanished. More nomads are scattered across the world. People moving all over the place. I had moved around so much without dedicating time to keeping those connections alive, that when I came back to reconnect, it was gone. By the time I decided to ground and re-introduce myself to those connections, a majority of my friends decided to choose to stay with themselves. Quarantine became this big awareness around solid connections becoming even more solid. The energy you had at that time, became a life source for your immediate circle. For someone who had spent 5 years traveling around the world, I wasn’t part of that immediate circle anymore. It was the time of becoming a hermit, being with the self, and trusting those connections nearby. My timing to ground into home life just happened to align with a global pandemic… weeeeee!
The desire to be held exists inside everyone, for the few who have not been held fully yet in this life, let go of the fears around it and let yourself have it. The more you voice it, the more you become aware of what particular sense of holding is yours.
After 6 months, I found myself wanting to connect romantically and sexually with my roommate Baj. It all grew from a need to be held and a feeling of a deeper sense of connection with another human being. The desire to be connected with another person was amplified by what was happening globally, even if I didn’t fully recognize it at that time. Being human becomes a beautiful experience when you release the guilt, judgments, and shame around evolving with your choices in life. So, One day I decided to ask.
I bit the bullet, I felt a safety within myself to ask. I called him over to the desk I had created as my writing station at that time and told him I wanted to ask him something. I remember him sitting down and listening. I told him, “I would like to connect with you sexually and was wondering if that was something you would be interested in, especially with this whole COVID Scenario.” It was really direct. He said he would think about it, and get back to me. Two weeks passed, and nothing. He never came back to the conversation. Within our COVID sanctuary of cuddles and safety, late-night hot chocolates, and occasional spoons, I had unknowingly opened a portal of memories for him. The pressure cooker effect of the world around me, with the added factors of having lost my dancing community at that time, plus living with someone attractive long term for the first time, physically and creatively attractive, fast-forward things I would have normally given space before asking. Before that point, he was someone who I could connect with and meet my needs creatively, and everything I learned beforehand through experience was summed up by just asking him straight up. To receive a clear yes or a no. To save me from having to live with the subtle uncomfortable sensations of sexual attraction for someone I lived with, whom I admired as a musician and a creative. That’s what I’ve been used to so far.
Give me that clear no! And I’ll put it down and never look back.
Receiving a yes would have been a whole other plethora of uncomfortableness, and I was ready to explore that with him. Intimacy comes with all kinds of things, I was ready! That’s where I had been internally from the time spent together. But honestly, 6 months of living together with someone, isn’t enough to pick up on the subtle things in each other’s lives that are kept a secret because you are in such proximity to each other. When you are just passing through, so much more can be revealed quickly, because nothing is holding you together by that point. The unspoken safety net of shared space was something I did not have a reference point for. And I’m okay admitting it. By admitting it, I allow myself to grow, to become more adaptable to my environment, and to welcome my environment in. I was ready to receive the clear no, and to deal with my side of things with the clear no, but the whole ambiguousness of it became such a deafening experience. I let it exist, and in that, it gave him so much space for all his stuff to come up to the surface.
I watched my friend grow distant from me at that moment. I watched how speaking up for my needs created this space between us, for having spoken about a desire to become more intimate with him, physically intimate. I became immediately aware of his internal world and never expected what was about to come out of it. The last moment I remember sharing a connection with Baj was in our shared kitchen. We were chatting, laughing, and talking. Later, he came back to me and told me how my touch was sexually suggestive. The way I had touched his arm was sexually suggestive.
I listened. The was HIS experience, I didn’t discredit his experience. Why would I fight him?
He looked at me and told me his history of having been heavily sexually assaulted and manipulated in the past, by many women and throughout many stages of his life. In his eyes, I transformed into a sexually manipulative person. I became that woman. The trust that was built within our first 6 months of COVID space together disappeared. My touch from that point started appearing sexual to him, manipulative. That was the last time I saw him as Baj my friend. The friend I had connected with for many evenings. Sharing meals, cuddles, and amazing creative adventures.
I told him, “I understand, I’ll be more mindful about touching you in the future”. I knew within myself that those touches were clean. I didn’t have to prove it to him only acknowledge it to myself. Fighting about it would have led to added fuel to his perceptions, and his need to start making me into this sexually manipulative woman, to prove his reality.
I grew sad over those last months, witnessing my close friend shift, transform, and grow distant from me, yet, physically still be near me. By that point, my desire to connect with him physically vanished. I have a practice of not having any regrets. I trust myself deeply and admit at the same time in different circumstances, it would have come out completely different. I trust when I have a need, I will voice it, even if it creates something unexpected. For me, it was the evolution of my innocence around asking for my needs. Involving into more of a maturity. Letting the innocence remain, but growing with the awareness around other people’s needs, where they are at, and sometimes, that just doesn’t align. You have to let it go in those moments.
With my Baj, I located a need for emotional safety. It only became super apparent after leaving that household at the end of the year. By this point, I was so guarded from focusing on my safety, that it never occurred to me that someone else may be guarding something too. Someone else may be protecting something that doesn’t want to be touched. My isolation from traveling so much for 5 years became so apparent during my time with Baj. Living with a person is different from traveling with them. Plain and simple.
The parts of me that were numb from HAVING to cut off from connection, to keep ME safe, became visible. The boundaries I had placed before Baj, weren’t creating an authentic connection. With Baj, it became my first wake-up call to create boundaries FOR connection with myself. I began noticing the blindness in a room that appears when you are deep in a protective space. Like an animal backed into a corner because of fear of being in danger. Because something got sparked, activated, and has them reliving an experience all over again. How, when things like this happen, you want to take personal responsibility for it. The hyena in the room.
I’m Sorry, Let me fix it, let’s make it all better again.
No, fuck that, plain and simple.
What I became aware of was trusting myself more, no matter what ends up happening. To allow myself to become more authentic even if it’s uncomfortable sometimes. Releasing the need to disvalue and discredit my experience so that someone else feels better about theirs, even if it’s emotionally very painful for them. As long as I show up with love. When things start to present themselves that want to take you down, turn you into the villain. How the world in those moments, when someone is super activated, becomes an open invitation for a villain to appear. It was the first time I noticed that invitation. An invitation from the universe to play with you and make all your suspicions real. The Universe will give you exactly what you want, so if you want to go around playing scared, like the big bad wolf is going to eat you, it’s going to play with you. It’s going to create the big bad wolf, that you specifically asked to be created so you can play being scared. Or confirm that you are the big bad wolf. When you are playing that game, nothing else will be able to get in because your guard will be up the whole time, wondering when the universe is coming to get ya, playing that big bad wolf you called in. Or wondering if you are the big bad wolf. My invitation for intimacy ended up opening up a portal as an invitation to step into becoming a sexually manipulative person for someone else’s experience, and I wasn’t about to have that. I placed a boundary for myself that day, to trust myself, and keep myself in the light no matter what anyone else says about me. To be open, with love, to adjust and grow, but to also trust my intuition when it’s someone else’s pain is wanting to invite me into a scenario without consent, to relive an experience.
For me, in my world, that’s rape. To be brought into a one-sided experience that only plays itself out to justify the other person's reality. That’s such a rapey energy to me, and so many people just let themselves enter into those spaces for other people’s needs, their comforts, their rightness, their realities. I have, which is why I’m aware of it. My boundary at that point became about caring for my emotional support for myself. Not caring about the image someone else had of me, loving them from where I was, and also noticing all the ways that it just wasn’t salvageable by that point. The need to relive it was just gone, and rethinking all the ways I could have done that differently, gone.
The rest of that year ended up shifting into Baj Hijacking the apartment. The official owners had moved out of the house, it became his home, even after voicing my desires for it. He took over the living room space, everything started overflowing everywhere, and I always felt like I had to ask for permission to use the living room for my own space. “Hey, can we clean this? Hey, this has been messy for quite some time.” It became Baj’s space, not a living room space. I had hit a level of fed-upness by all of it, that I gave him two-week notice that I was done and out of the house. It led into a whole other world of disarray, which has given me so much insight now about really investing and doing your best to have clear endings with people, especially if you are furious with them.
With the short notice, I had left some big pieces of furniture, with the expressed awareness around needing to come back for it later in the year. They had found a new roommate by that point, and I told him he could use it in the meantime. What ended up happening was noticing all the ways unspoken things turn things into weird images for people. I became the full-on villain for Baj. After my short travel out of the country, I came back to pick up my things. He declared it as his thing. I needed to contact the previous owners of the house who were still on the lease to arrange a time to come pick up my things. We all agreed on a time, my dad came to support me once again in moving all my things, the door was thankfully opened so it was easy to get in. We had often kept it open when I lived there. No one was home, which was a bit weird. The room still had all of the other person’s stuff on it, I had assumed he would have at least moved his stuff out so I could move it out of the way. We uninstalled all of my furniture, and on the way out Baj had returned home. He started yelling at me, telling me I was stealing. I pointed to the phone at the owner’s message, the time we had all agreed about me coming over to pick up my things, and Baj’s messages in it as well agreeing to it. At that point, I realized he had no intention of letting me into the house again to pick up my things. He was playing good boy, answering the messages and keeping everyone at bay. A very Baj thing to do. Distraction.
He was Furious, and my dad was there watching it the whole time. Eventually, I was able to just leave that whole experience. Anything I said, was countered. Baj needed to be right. By that point I had learned, there was nothing that I could do or say to change the perspective he needed. He had also come with a student, and I felt how much he needed to be a savior for himself at that moment, for the image he had in relationship to his student. The white knight scenario. I wasn’t going to take that away from him, I had no need. No vindictive motives, I just wanted my stuff back.
On the Car ride home, my dad and I shared some silence, but also some good old Ecuadorian laughter at what the fuck just happened. Goodbye, New york, hello New Jersey. I watched him share his rage with my mom afterward, letting her know all the ways he could have defended me. It must have been a lot for him, to witness his daughter be belighted by a man in front of other people. In our culture, our image is really important to us. But I knew that he was there with me in Spirit. You don’t have to prove anything when you have that level of self-care and love inside you. One of the things you grow up learning as an immigrant, and as a child of an immigrant is that in the States, remaining silent can be the best option for you and your family. It can save your life, and keep you safe. Sometimes, you don’t need to rage quit and get all roaster with your feather up in the air to prove your innocence to someone. It may have flown in my parent’s home country, but both my mom and dad have had enough experiences to learn, that in this country, in America, silence, for better or worse, will let you live. Keep your head down, and let life just keep passing by. Talking is for white people.
For me, my journey has been about eradicating silence. Cultivating a sacred place of silence by my home, in my rituals, but making sure when I’m out and about in the world, that I’m fully Letting myself speak when I can. Fully, appreciatively, and letting this Dominican housed in this beautiful multiracial body out and letting her thrive. The Earth bursting through my rays of sunshine. But with this moment, with Baj, it wasn’t about being loud or speaking up, behind that brilliant Dominican woman. At that point, he wasn’t worth that beauty. Even though, On some level, I could have seen how it could have supported me claiming my voice in the long run. It was about realizing, I didn’t want to invest any more energy into his home, or fueling someone else’s fire around me being a villain in their movie. I’m not getting paid to be in his movie.
With Baj, A little thing opened in my brain, a beautiful doorway of colorful multi-lensed-kaleidoscope level beauty. You need to develop an attuned 6-sense to make sure that the person you are connecting with is aware and attuned to their own needs. You can’t assume this anymore in this world. To make sure what’s coming out of someone’s beautiful mouth matches what you are sensing in their bodies. That 6-sense that lets you, that lets you sense someone’s vibe, that gives you a hint of something for your awareness to start kicking in. Thats maturing. To be very self-forgiving, when playing with the universe leads to unexpected moments that have you really needing to refine your ability to hone in on that vibe. What do you want to grow with yourself? What do you want to grow with people? What do you want to hold as your safety net of values? An internal value system that magnifies outward, through, and into people. They either match it, or you go off into your worlds creating the worlds you both need to continue living as the creator of your world.
Sometimes, I feel people are utterly scared of making mistakes. My inner child loves making mistakes, that’s how my inner child grows its ability to sense this world. At some point, one experience injected fear into me, and from there on out it became a fear thing instead of an inquisitive inner child thing. From that fear of making mistakes, our ability to be held fully comes with so much judgment, from either ourselves or the people around us, sometimes even religions ( If you sin, you will go to hell! Repent!). Part of the maturity around holding yourself is being able to give yourself the grace to let go needing to do everything perfectly all the time. Let the moments where it didn’t turn out great become something you grow from. Because of our your fear of making a mistake, and being judged on it, You don’t ask for your needs to be met. There’s this whole beautiful grey zone in the middle that can come out, that is so big, so vast, and so beautiful when you let go of the expectations of how people are meant to show up, and you give yourself the grace to be with the parts of yourself that are present either way. To continue amplifying self-love, to hold yourself, especially in scenarios that question your character. When someone on the outside says, “You are bad, and I need you to be bad for me right now” even when you feel it in your body that you don’t want to because it’s not true for you. Let that other person have their reality, you don’t need to fight it or defend it for them either. You can hold yourself in the light, be there for yourself, and allow people to stay in the chaos they are attracted to. It’s not your job to bring people out of chaos. I’m done with that war.
The mistakes you continue to make, are because you are afraid of making those mistakes in the first place and holding your experiences in a tight grip from all the pressures of the fear of making a mistakes. Of course, you are going to fumble, anyone would. Do you feel how tight that is? My throat feels so tight just mentioning it. When you let go of the fear of making a mistake, you access another point of freedom. When you access that point, it expands your soul so fully, that everything else before that moment becomes so small and insignificant, that it just vanishes into the forever current of waves of just being yourself.