Witches Heal

The Importance of Home

This is my lovely friend Margeaux’s blog - Floral Manifesto.

Her essay about what home means to her resonates with me incredibly as I’ve been living in Berlin for almost three months. But more so this section right here really reminded me of Margeaux’s insightful and heart-filled analysis about home, poverty and how we identify ourselves and a feeling of safety in a place we want to call home.

Here she recounts her decision to get her own apartment coupled with the instability of poverty and low-income living as a grad student:

Growing up poor impacts how we think about home. This photo diary is an attempt for me to work through some poor shame and find something beautiful in the place I call home.

“This past February I got my own 1 bedroom apartment. After years of living communally (with 1-3 roommates) and with two significant others, I decided that I wanted my own place. Somewhere that I could come home to and know that if there were dishes in the sink, it was my fault. Somewhere that I could decorate with all of my things and fully embrace my design aesthetic, which I describe as “What happens when an adolescent girl and her grandma get together.” Somewhere that I could be as naked as I want, whenever I want.

But living in Toronto means that you have to comprise. Rent is so insanely high that if you want to live alone, you’ll either need to live in a basement apartment or in a high-rise. As someone who needs lots of sunlight, I picked the latter. This building reminds me so much of where my family moved after we were evicted. It is a low-income building. Many of the folks who live here are dealing with a variety of mental health issues, many are immigrants, and all of us live below the poverty line (in 2012, the Median after-tax income was just $27,300 for single people).“

Read the rest of this beautiful essay at Floral Manifesto 

Coinciding with her move into this low-income housing project in Parkdale was the tumultuousness that was occuring in my life. By the end of May I had left my shared apartment with my ex girlfriend three times. Many times, i had bruises on my chest and arms and soreness in the rest of my body from the abuse that was happening in my home. That winter when Margeaux landed her own apartment, she also handed me a second set of keys to her place where I went many times in order to escape, take a break and find safety. She housed me and my dog for a week once.  If it wasn’t for her generosity and ability to find stability within her precariousness, I would not have gathered the courage to leave to find my own home away from abuse and a place I could call safe and just mine.

lyric,”How does it fee”  -- “Everybody losin' friends, people change when they grow”

As i head out to discover the Audre Lorde Archives in Berlin, I was reminded of this song ( via pitchforks 50 greatest album list ) and how important its been to me all year long. In the spirit of feminist intersectionality i hear this song and first cite m difference in relation to it. I’m a white cis woman. However, my relationality to this song feels meaningful. I grew up on welfare with a single mom in governement ( subsidized housing ). My relation to poverty is an integral part of my identity as a queer woman. 

This song not only teaches me about the embodiment of asking “how does it feel?” but also the notion of considering how it might feel to be a black woman who is rich. In this video you see her in a modest apartment with playstation and drinking champaign. She’s wearing a 1990′s fresh prince style silk street and dancing while singing: 

I've been broke all my life Now wonder How does it feel to be rich? How does it feel to be rich? I done worked all my life Now wonder How does it feel to just live? How does it feel to just live?

This life affirming song about survival and female embodiment reminds me how vulnerable our life is when we’re living under precarious poverty. 

I listened to this song a lot last year while i was sitting in the library and trying to adjust to being in grad school. Here I am finally able to afford groceries ( no longer needing to steal my food ) and big part of me kept asking myself “how does it feel just to live” after being broke all my life, this question about *just* living was actually a lot harder to adjust to. it was a strange feat to uncover stability after entering my thirties and being on welfare ( government assistance) 

If you do anything this year, take a look at the songs you accumulated in your playlists, how have they helped you with grounding, embodiment and ‘just’ living? <3