Where Do New Yorkers Go To Scream?

Screaming, crying in public, bell hooks and thoughts on getting emotionally free. Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

“Do you ever wonder where New Yorkers go to scream?”

Continuing on the message of yearning from last newsletter, I received this text from a friend who is also quarantined with COVID this week. Without digging for specifics, I could certainly surmise why she was asking because…*gestures broadly*.

As the year closes in two weeks and we enter year 3 of our pandemic-altered life, screaming seems to be the only thing left to do. Everything else - setting rigid goals that are likely to be thwarted by the unexpected, making pacts to end the year strong, pretending like anything we’ve been doing for the last three years is okay or normal - seems kind of delusional at best and futile at worst. Why aren’t we all just fucking screaming?

I’ve been in quarantine recovering from COVID for nearly 2 weeks now in complete rage about the many invisible monsters that lurk around corners outside, driving me further and further away from community - the only entity where we find protection. If I can’t be around my people fully for three entire years, then what exactly is driving my existence? If it’s not violence against black folks, if it’s not violence against women, if it’s not violence against the poor, it’s all three served in a sundae dish with a sprinkle of medical warfare on top. I can’t journal and meditate away my devastation any longer, and if some New Age Spiritualist asshole (myself included) tells me to do so, I will lose my shit.

And where does a person go to make their emotional world uncrowded? Where does a person go when their big feelings are banging at the barricade of their skin demanding to claim more space? Where can we go to witness our anger, rage, and grief become just as legitimate, loud and encompassing outside of our bodies as they’ve been while festering inside?

“Into a pillow,” I responded to my friend’s inquiry. And I would know because I had put my face in a pillow and screamed my head off just a few hours prior. And that coincidence became the point of this newsletter, because I believe the universe sent me this message twice for a reason.

Earlier in the day, I had therapy bright and early on a Monday morning, really giving my week a sobering start. They say that Monday is ruled by the astrological sign of Cancer - “Moon day” - so the hour of tears during and following my sessions seems validated by the cosmos.

For 45 minutes, I divulged the extent of my efforts to cast away old pains. How frustrated I was that the cord cutting ritual I’d done the night before just barely skimmed the surface of healing. The old freezing spell where you write an unwanted person’s name on a piece of paper, suspend it in a bag of water, and push it behind your freezer-burned hash browns just wasn’t promising that closure would come any time soon. I’d done it all, I said. And yet, I still feel like there is a metal box lodged right between my heart and my throat, blocking all pathways to express my true feelings and all I really want to do is scream.

But my neighbors with whom I share a wall would probably call the police, and I couldn’t blame them.

“Why don’t you grab a pillow,” my therapist Pam said. So I did. I looked at her for two seconds, she gave me a permissive nod, and I wailed into a pillow for 2 minutes straight. What came out of me was almost unrecognizable, not an octave I’d hit before, not a voice that sounded like mine.

On the second and third wail, I pictured the screeches escaping from my body to be the shame and rejection placed on me by the person whose name I’d written on the piece of paper in my freezer. I pictured the grief I held for not having been able to protect myself from the person whose name I carved into a candle for my cord cutting ritual. I pictured the sonic waves casting away everything that made me feel like I would never get me back. That made me feel like I may never claw my way out of torment. When the final note left my lungs, it all left me. And I felt cleansed.

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On one of my silly little midday anxiety walks, I stopped into Cafe Con Libros to buy a book I most certainly would not read for several weeks. I also picked up Black Food by Bryant Terry (okay, so two books), which surprisingly contained the work of a dear friend of mine, Kia Damon. I didn’t realize it before it became my life, but the most grand dream I’ve ever had was to be surrounded by the creations of people I love and who love me. Here I am - with my friend’s art on my walls and ceramics on my table and books on my shelf and I pray the joy it brings me never wears off.

Anyway, as I stepped out of the bookstore, a young woman was sitting at the cafe table, hunched over, legs between her knees, uncontrollably sobbing. Considering minding my business, I walked by her and then my conscience tugged at the soles of my feet and I started to backtrack.

“I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m so sorry you’re having a bad day. Are you okay with being touched?,” I asked. Before even fully seeing me, she shook her head in consent. I put my hand on her back.

“I just saw my ex-boyfriend with another girl so I ran away and hid in the store before he saw me, and we just broke up on Sunday.” By the time she got to “Sunday,” she was back to sobbing. I took a moment to consider how long ago Sunday was. Two days. That fucker!! And so I said “That fucker!!” I asked her what her name was. Sophia.

“Well, Sophia, what did he mean to you?”

He was her first boyfriend, and they were together for less than a year, but she wanted to spend her life with him and he wanted to break up with her before but she convinced him otherwise. She thought they had broken up on common understanding, but now she felt like he had deceived her.

Ahhh, I said. Because it was the only thing that came to mind and the only thing I really wanted anyone to say to me in heartbreak, I told her that love would most certainly come again and that it would most certainly be better. I told her to stop hiding. I told her that, and I felt this mattered more than anything, heartbreak would not be her love story. And I just sat with her and listened.

As I walked away, I noticed what sat on the table in front of her while she crumbled in public as I have so many times: Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist. Absolutely classic move. Soon, Sophia would realize that this is how it works. She walks away from this breakup with her heart in her palms and immediately searches for the sacred text, some oracle somewhere that will tell her how to put it back in her body. He will fuck someone else, a few someone else’s because he think he’ll find his heart there instead.

Sophia will be better off, because she will attempt to make meaning of grief. She will dig for something to remind her that heartbreak is not just happening to her, that heartbreak is a universal ailment and not an intrinsic part of her individual existence. She’ll try to be a person of higher perspective, the kind of person she thinks doesn’t get their heart broken at all because they have the power of insight.

Soon, she will adopt language for what describes her escape from hurt best - something she read in The Alchemist, Attached, The Body Keeps Score, What Happened to You?, and every Brene Brown book on the shelf, and eventually she will understand none of the words can quite scratch the itch. No lasting relief.

Eventually, Sophia will realize that there is no way to intellectualize her way out of being really fucking angry, and then really fucking sad, and settle on the reality that her first response - to sob in front of a bookstore in public and accept the grace of a stranger who knows where she’s been - was the most honest she’s ever been with herself. That grief was where she started and where she’ll find love again.

Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll get her hands on the recently transitioned bell hooks and realize what she accepted in her first relationship was never truly love, but what she gave was and it was pure and whole and can’t be destroyed and so very little has been lost.

I first started reading bell hooks’s All About Love when I was still most comfortable in delusion, so I didn’t get beyond the second chapter. The words were poignant, but not penetrative. Then, I found it on my bookshelf roughly a year later while in a paralysis of the heart, unable to admit my addiction to the unavailable. I was awakened to my own humanness through tormented love which I would soon discover wasn’t love at all. The words bell hooks assigned to emotions I’ve felt my entire existence and was drowning in at the time kept me up at night. I felt like a veil had been lifted, and I could finally admit to myself that there was something better for me. The worst thing to happen to me was not grief, but what I was willing to tolerate in order to avoid it.

bell hooks in New York City (1992), shot by James Keyser

People would tell me they loved me and wouldn’t know they were lying, but I would know and that would be enough. I wouldn’t need to blame them for it to move on. I wouldn’t need to blame myself for a failed agreement neither of us had a framework to fulfill.

“To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” - bell hooks

Through bell’s words, I found deliverance - a reality where sitting in the yearning for love without cruelty and peace’s sacrifice was a richer heartache than tolerating a loveless place. We’ve all been where Sophia (my weepy friend outside of the bookstore) was, hoping you hit the jackpot and made it right the first time in love only to be crushed to find out that you have to be vulnerable and risk losing all over again. But we know love and grief are where we transform. Even if we don’t know, we know. So we jump into love over and over, which makes us masochists, foolish, courageous, or perhaps all of the above.

Becoming a practitioner of love is to be reborn. Nothing can be the same as it once was. Love becomes infuriatingly simple, and its simplicity is not the intoxication you’ve become accustomed to in the rollercoaster of future-faking, love-bombing, game-playing of love’s past.

Because love is an action, a dedicated practice, we can’t learn to love or be loved by reading The Alchemist, or following therapists on Instagram, or listening to Esther Perel’s podcast. These are helpful resources to rewire our brains, but the only way to put our bodies in sync with love is to do it. To love. To extend ourselves to people over and over and walk away when we know love is not being served and accept grief is better than eating a plate of shit because someone who wants our company tells us it’s good for our health.

bell hook’s pen didn’t leave us dependent on it, but encouraged us to find out for ourselves through community care. With cases of COVID rising rapidly and the looming reality of harsher social restrictions and need to distance from the folks we care for again, we have to fight the myth of isolation. Let out a good scream somewhere so I hear you and know you feel what I feel.

p.s. rest in peace bell hooks, love’s salvation.