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| No Allegiance but to ... |
The use of my identities within community are frequently overlapping, competing, and contradicting. This makes who I am to others unmanageably variable, despite the importance being accurately identified is for being understood. In this context identity is how I want and need others to acknowledge me. I use several identities to navigate community. I am a counselor, a programmer, and an artist. I am also in pain. The list goes on. I have studied the nature of healing for years now. I have studied the roots of civil wellness. I have taken the time to research what it takes to be a healthy citizen. I transcended the barriers to paradoxical beliefs. My spiritual exercises have taught me to minimize my dualistic mindset, allowing me to see how most significant concepts are rarely black or white. This affords me the opportunities and potentials to benefit from perceptions and choices that can be informed with a complex both and view. I learned this from my earliest days, Christ is both and, God and human, here and crucified. I wonder like most people who are invested in some human growth, what about the opposite. What about the neither or?
If "both and" is seeing paradox then I need to also find a way to see God in the "neither or". There are a good amount of New Mexicans who hang on to the Spanish identity. My guess is that it might be a hope for being seen as civilized, prestigious, or proper. There was, likely is, a prejudice for Mexicanos in my New Mexican communities, despite sharing origins. These same dividing and distinguishing peoples have grown or transferred their loyalty to the new American empire. It surprises me when I think how the Anglo often lumps, us, the descendants from a collapsed Spanish colonization, into one Hispanic bucket, often excluding us from having to own our ancestral brutality. Or maybe the brutality is continued in the space or safe haven found in aligning with the next winning, conquering, team.
I find this desperate attachment to a historical identity crisis, riddled with dysfunction, futile. This clinging to historic grandiosity is a distraction from the fact that in the moment we are "Neither Or". This helps me see that the divisions between people doesn't end with heritage, ethnicity, or locality, it seems to permeate in the imperialism or fanaticism of being on the winning side, convenient side, comfortable side, popular side, or the right side. So for me it helps my confusion to consider that "neither or" is useful when believing there is a complicated side, a paradoxical side, a responsible side, or defeated side. I am not Spanish, New Mexican, American or any other identity, for the first time in my existence I see how futile it is to identify, and still this divides me.
In the moment I am best described as a burst of organized energy that is simply expending a strategic amount of energy to grow and survive. I am in a mindset of electronegativity versus cultural allegiance. I pay more attention to how I am impulsively coerced by my fears to promote self serving thoughts and actions. I am learning to recognize how I am drawn to convenience and comfort. I am disappointed by how freely I donate my resources to allegiances by defaults like ethnicity, locale, or stereotype. Allegiances I can only see as toxic remnants from a pedagogy of purposeless competition. I have been inveigled into being on some team. The people that surround me in the Albuquerque community invite me to be on their Burque team, patriotic people guilt me into being on an American team, and the orthodox people entice me into dogmatic loyalty usually to promote their agenda. So this is why I find it important to be "Neither Or" at times, and while also being "Both And".
