Carnival Reflections: 2023

I went into this year’s carnival wanting to be a spectator. I wanted to experience it anew without obligation. But ultimately I couldn’t say no to the collaborative projects I’ve loved and participated in. I wanted to do less and took on more, truly like a newbie. (Peak amateur hour: DRIVING to Muses, wearing no costume, with a trunk full of groceries. Plot twist: It may have been one of my smartest moves.) My body, ever smarter and more sly than my silly logic brain, decided to lay me out early instead. This body clearly knows what I need nearly every time before my consciousness does. Pain finds a way just as acutely as love.

My body has been laying down hard truths for years now and I always think I can outsmart her or ignore her. But she is nature and she clears her path by fire or by flood. My mechanical, solution-oriented thoughts have a hard time keeping up–or rather, slowing down. Nature is one of the few things I will bow down to. She will bring me to my knees and make this thinking thing remember some humility.

So while I wanted levity, while I wanted to dance through the pain and move through the sadness, every attempt to somatically experience these things the way I’ve learned to do literally crushed my spine and the nerves and discs stacked therein, leaving only agony and anguish. The pain made me surly.

I am a firm believer that my body reflects something that only my heart understands. I have spent my life in myriad bouts of excruciating, body-stopping pain and it nearly always reveals a dramatic change that must be made. This current pain has knocked the wind out of me since the day I first packed my car and drove down here six weeks ago, only to worsen each day, leaving me in tears when I first wake up.

New Orleans is the most beautiful and magical place in the world. There is a deep sadness to willingly want something different. I thought I’d done all my grieving, but I hadn’t yet mourned myself. The me who used to live here is gone, and I’ve got to learn how to integrate her. I want to remember my light and my brightness here even with this understanding.

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Carnival has been my devout spirituality for fifteen years. It only makes sense that there would be an occasional lapse of faith.The lessons delivered from on high may not always be well received. I heard from many MG veterans that this was “a weird one.” The world feels really heavy right now. It’s not always easy to reach euphoria within our states of hypervigilance. It’s hard to dance in shadowland when our fears reflect powerful, hateful, destructive enemies who wish to squander joy and liberty with a cruel ferocity. 

This past December, I journaled of the joy I felt in my life: “I am writing from the magical, transformative space that is between homes, between relationships, just endless unfurling, wings pushing at chrysalis walls, a bloom about to burst.” After three years of weeping, I felt I’d almost made it out the other side, about to emerge as a new entity, ready to soar, lift off the leaf.

I always put the intentions of my year into my costume. Last year I wanted to love the cold, and by fall I was taking weekly cold plunges in glacial springs. In January when I left the Northeast, I regretted leaving the snow. Should I mask as the moth I felt I may become? Should I be the cocoon, content in its protection? Should I be a snail, patiently moving across land and water with its home on its back? Each day I sat down to start and couldn’t sew a damn thing. 

I felt delight throughout this carnival season, but I also felt intense frustration, anger and confusion. I’ve felt distinctly like I’ve taken two steps back. Not to a cocoon and certainly not a butterfly. 

Becoming the winged creature isn’t the lesson.  But I no longer want to wear the robes of death. Remembering that I am and all of us are magical things in every moment is the lesson. Saying no, learning my limits, releasing what I cling to, accepting the losses–this is all part of becoming. Shining in the hard times is the lesson. That can’t be taken away by anyone but ourselves. We must learn to reside in a beautiful, sweet truth and glow within it even when it’s painful or heartbreaking. We must recommit to move from a place of softening and opening, over and over.

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A positive little post-script:

The palor of my previous posts may have been a consequence of serotonin depletion, but those thoughts have been ringing in my ears for 2 months. (Like PMS, the feelings are always true as a low hum but only get their limelight in a fever pitch.) But perhaps they lacked some delight and recognition.

These past few years I’ve been thoroughly dissociated from my body, especially on an objective level. To put on mascara made me feel like a clown. I couldn’t step out my front door in a dress. Very few days of the year did I want to be perceived as a sexual creature. But masquerading for MG opened me up to memories of Femme-dom I thought had been lost to the past. 

All of us have a socialized barometer of worth far from how we want to be valued. When my worth has been built up through attraction, feeling unattractive makes me feel worthless. Attaining value for my creativity and then feeling it revoked when I’m not producing makes me question my value. Being overly sexualized makes me feel like my intellect is underappreciated. Being regarded for my brain makes me question if I have a body. I logically understand this is absurd and dismiss it, but that doesn’t abate the gnawing feeling that without vigilance I will lose my value. B/c I’m contrary, I’ve spent a few years systematically removing myself from certain scenarios that have made me feel valued in the past, in order to seek a greater internal self worth beyond external validation. This only dysmorphs me further.

Jami and I were discussing the ways carnival costuming affects our aesthetic for the coming year, if only on an internal level. I needed this time of play in how I dress to re-engage with other parts of myself. I tried to remove my body and face from the world for years, if only spiritually, but this annual exercise of dressing as possibility allowed me to open up. There was a clear bell curve climbing up from the Origin at Lantern Parade and peaking on Mardi Gras in terms of my adornment and let me tell you it felt good to regain a sense of regalia. Here’s some selfie’s before walking out the door the last few weeks. Shout out to the really good shower curtain at the Tupelo house, ideal background.

The spring buds emerge, my back still a wreck, but I’m making space for some corporeal decoration.