Generation Nex: An Infinite Longing For A Boundless Future

It worked in our favor to not be seen
The privileges of blending in
Perhaps we may one day thrive
No longer needing to hide
The truth of our divine

One of the privileges of being an elder is witnessing the passage of time and noticing the things you never thought possible. In my almost forty years of life on this Earth, I’ve grown to notice the patterns and behaviors that make this world go round. How soon after the darkest days of the year, the branches on the tree outside my window begin budding bright pink. A delicate sign that spring will soon come. When after hours of pattering rain and cloud filled mornings, the birds finally forage and sing. Adding their melodic verse to the day, showing it’s safe to emerge once again. I notice and I listen, trying to make sense of the constant chaos emerging from Mother Earth’s sacredness. The story written across her spinning landscape. History has a way of repeating itself and Earth has a way of remembering, as we humans also do.

Waking up to the devastating news of another young spirit violently torn away from this Earth. I can’t help but ache at the disturbing reality that, for Native people, is our post-apocalyptic present. The permissive attitudes that force us out of safety, out of homes and out of living. I sit with racing questions, wondering why our authenticity and ancestral reverence poses a threat to settler colonialism and its descendants. Why do they fear our blessed power? Our children, from boarding schools to migrant camps, lost to hate in a perpetual cycle of ignorance that seems to never cease. My mind spins, my heart breaks. My neck cracks as I quickly turn to release the pressure building from holding all the grief. I feel every crevice of my cervical spine snap, crackle and pop, quivering at the static crawling up and down my nape. Letting the tears roll down as I learn the name of another child lost to the violent anti-queer rhetoric festering our land. Nex Benedict, the system failed you in ways I never thought possible. Ways I fight tirelessly to disrupt, to ensure you, and young people like you, receive the future you deserve. Only now you won’t be there to grow and steward the possibilities sown from your efforts and dreams.

As a teen, I never imagined I’d live into my adulthood. With the privilege of time, I’ve grown to witness the parallels between Earth and her children. The way power is wielded in an uneven playing field set up for people like me and Nex to fail. How the most precious and powerful crumble under the heavy, suffocating foot of man’s folly. I only survived because I didn’t have the care and courage Nex had, to be their authentic self in the world. To be seen as my full queer self wasn’t a risk I ever felt safe enough to take. I longed for a chance to simply exist in my skin without the labels white supremacy and heteronormativity imposed on me. But I couldn’t, not then and certainly not as a teenager coming up in the late 90’s. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I began to undo and unlearn the deeply internalized lie that I am broken. Simply for being beyond the binary.

I remember…
I remember Loti
I remember Matthew
I remember Brandon
I remember…
The inflection of disgust in
Marimacha y Maricón

I’m trying to make sense of this madness in a linear way, one that gets me to bypass the feelings and move through the process. To get me to stop crying and get back to work as a contributing member of society rather than a mentally and emotionally unstable hot mess. The thing about madness is the inherent impossibility of existing within linearity. I think about my ancestors and remember how language was stripped from their personhood. Unable to speak to the land in the tongue they nurtured together. How I’m crazy for wanting to dig deep and learn our ancient ways. To find the connection in their erasure to my own.

I remember …
Blow driers burning my crown
Pulling my hair long and straight 
Like cornstalk and arrows
I remember…

Living with CPTSD means being a time traveler, revisiting places and moments you wish you could forget. Better yet, never experienced. Dipping into the epigenetic fears buried deep in your DNA, moments that only make sense when you stand back and take a longer look at our collective timeline. Like clockwork, sometimes without warning, I’m taken back to the recently unearthed fears of my younger self. The darkest and most frightening parts of my life shroud me in racing rumination and swallow me whole. I’m not here anymore, I’m in high school, 16 and afraid of being seen. Ditching school and watching the twin towers fall from a small TV screen. 13 and at church, stumbling on my lies. Remembering what happened to Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry. Listening, always listening to how much hate spews out from those around, even those who love me most. A clock can be broken and still be right twice a day.

The other thing about madness is the labels and perceptions attached to existing beyond the linear. The crazy, the queer, the neurodivergent, the other and other and other. Unfit to move the machine of the world in the direction white supremacy and therefore, capitalism, dictates. I learned very quickly and very late that if one piece of the machine is broken, the entire mechanism can fall apart. To keep it going we must continuously replace the broken pieces with those who can sustain the momentum of exploitation. But I do not see the world in the way my oppressors or employers do. Nor do I see it as something separate from me entirely. Let alone a machine. I see her as mother to life and all that I know. The sum of all my parts and the essence of life immemorial, sacred and sovereign despite the borders and claims to her name. Feeling the rupture and crying for repair as her children battle for liberation and reclamation of their wholeness. The thing about this particular madness is that while I believe this with my entire being and know it in my bones to be true, society simultaneously seeks to deplete the very breath from my body dismissing my beliefs as crazy or worse, a threat. Madness has a multiplicity to it layered with misjudgments and misunderstandings. Is it any wonder I see the past in my present? Governments passing policies that harm bodies like mine, replacing autonomy with draconian authority. Instilling fear while inciting fascism, turning communities and land into cindering remnants of their ongoing colonial project. I think of Israel bombing Palestine, the death toll rising every day, demands for a ceasefire unheard and I fear they will not stop. Madness makes me see patterns, makes me see the story play out in the past/present/future.

I remember…
My mother 
Never braiding my hair
I had to learn on my own
Pareces India 
wasn’t an insult  
But a warning
To never show them 
who you really are

It’s impossible to move through these words and ignore the feelings of despair that arise from experiencing my reality. The collective experience of historical trauma can no longer be contained in the repressed silence of assimilation and the privilege of safety. Noticing Black,  Brown, Queer, Indigenous and Trans bodies fall. Precious people who were born into this pernicious cycle of abuse, bred by white supremacy culture and fear of the naturally sacred. Learning name after name, story upon story of what could have been and what will never be. I can’t unsee the damage being done, the patterns of behaviors repeated over 500 years of destruction. The sound of drive-byes and gunshots echo in my memory as images of war planes and drones scroll past my feed. Helicopters whir and the rain of bombs begin to fall and I don’t know if it’s in my memory or motherland or madness that everything falls apart when I witness the carnage unfold.

It takes continuous reframing and excruciating work to find the silver lining breaking through the clouds of gun smoke. So much dust and ash darkening my worldview, I ball my fists into my eyes to clean the grit tearing away at the soft, white membrane of sight. It hurts to look and see the truth but it’s impossible to turn away from it. To deny witnessing and acknowledging the harm humanity perpetuates denies the humanity in me. So I refuse to turn away and allow myself the discomfort of feeling grief with all of my being. I cry, I wail and I howl into the moonlight hoping for the same dreams of my own childhood to come true for this next generation of young, queer, Native children. I give myself permission to feel the weight of the loss. The souls of countless across time and space, here and now in real time and one not so long ago. I hold myself through the tears and find space to release the anger through deep breaths and following the traces of clouds passing over me. I slow my racing heartbeat by counting the birdsong outside my window, focusing on their gentle calls and not the booming breath of Boeing planes overhead. Mother has a way of speaking to her children and if we pause to listen, lean in even slightly, we’ll notice she too weeps and grieves in her own solemn way. I listen as each rain drop falls and weep another name for fallen spirits. Together we soothe our wounds, by connecting the dots across time and remembering, once not too long ago, our bond was as firm as solid ground. Unbroken and softened by the love and care we pour into the soil, strengthened by a millennia of stewards who came before me. Who continue to blossom and grow into the very spirit of resistance our ancestors sowed long ago. We grow, we wilt, we evolve and adapt, becoming stronger and more audacious in our character. More authentic and ourselves in each iteration of being.

I once dreamt of freedom and it felt like no fear. Nex was free in ways I will never be and so I honor them in the ways I never thought possible. Daring to be my full authentic, queer, mad, AfroIndigenous self. Daring to be seen in ways I never could have imagined because fear held me back for so long. But losing you, I’m not afraid anymore. Not afraid to be seen or held in the complexity of my truth. May we move through this loss with the fearlessness and audacity to stand in our authenticity. May we dare to be whole in the face of diminishing adversity. May we continue to resist the continuous call of assimilation and stand on the shoulders of our ancestors young and old. May we continue to fight for the boundless future Nex and the younger generation deserve.

Ashé. Payush.