Fear and Freedom
Fear.
I am afraid of death. I will wake up in the middle of the night and my heart will be pounding. I lay my hand on my chest and feel it beating. The rhythm confirms that I am alive. At the same moment, I know it will someday stop. I close my eyes in the darkness thinking about the people who might miss me when I am gone, one of them being my own body. I fill with loneliness and longing.
On YouTube, I watch a video of Nina Simone being interviewed in 1968 in New York City amidst the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She is asked what it is to be free. I watch as she looks away to pause and think it through.
How to answer such a question?
I see how she begins and then stops – as a Black woman this question is loaded with the histories of trauma infused into her body’s DNA by generations of endured oppression. She exclaims, “I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear.” She explains she finds this absence of fear on stage when the music is reverberating through every ounce of her body. She says she feels liberation in jazz - in song and dance. She concludes that freedom is “a new way of seeing.” I witness how she finds this new space of vision by making something.
When I watched this recording of Simone, I was shocked by how this was so simple and yet so profound. Like many others, I am plagued with the fear that I am not enough. I am afraid of rejection. I am afraid of ending. I try so hard. Freudian analysis might say this is the death drive taking over, feeding off past trauma. However, I believe it is also due to these very fears that allow me to know the freedom that Simone talks about. The darkest moments make the light ones brighter, no matter how much I wish to resist pain.
I have felt a sense of freedom when I am wandering the cemetery. As I converse with the place, a part of my body unlocks. I use photography to drive the fear out of my mind. I find a practice of making. I let it loose, trusting where it will lead me. I start to unwind death’s grasp and find the beauty within my life’s ephemerality. The weight of my gender, age, and level of accomplishments are lifted. I can just be me, alive. There is nothing to prove.
Freedom.
Fear.
I am afraid of death. I will wake up in the middle of the night and my heart will be pounding. I lay my hand on my chest and feel it beating. The rhythm confirms that I am alive. At the same moment, I know it will someday stop. I close my eyes in the darkness thinking about the people who might miss me when I am gone, one of them being my own body. I fill with loneliness and longing.
On YouTube, I watch a video of Nina Simone being interviewed in 1968 in New York City amidst the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She is asked what it is to be free. I watch as she looks away to pause and think it through.
How to answer such a question?
I see how she begins and then stops – as a Black woman this question is loaded with the histories of trauma infused into her body’s DNA by generations of endured oppression. She exclaims, “I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear.” She explains she finds this absence of fear on stage when the music is reverberating through every ounce of her body. She says she feels liberation in jazz - in song and dance. She concludes that freedom is “a new way of seeing.” I witness how she finds this new space of vision by making something.
When I watched this recording of Simone, I was shocked by how this was so simple and yet so profound. Like many others, I am plagued with the fear that I am not enough. I am afraid of rejection. I am afraid of ending. I try so hard. Freudian analysis might say this is the death drive taking over, feeding off past trauma. However, I believe it is also due to these very fears that allow me to know the freedom that Simone talks about. The darkest moments make the light ones brighter, no matter how much I wish to resist pain.
I have felt a sense of freedom when I am wandering the cemetery. As I converse with the place, a part of my body unlocks. I use photography to drive the fear out of my mind. I find a practice of making. I let it loose, trusting where it will lead me. I start to unwind death’s grasp and find the beauty within my life’s ephemerality. The weight of my gender, age, and level of accomplishments are lifted. I can just be me, alive. There is nothing to prove.
Freedom.
Simone, Nina. “Nina Simone: To Be Free,” YouTube (YouTube, February 16, 2013), https:// www.youtube.com/