A Meditation On The Black Condition: No Need For Rhyme Or Reason For Melancholy
“Getting help is for mental health is not enough. We live in a world where people don’t want to live in it anymore. We need to change the world.”
I don’t need any justification for the ways in which I am here—the ways in which I experience shit—though, I ruminate on the suspicion that these feelings are a culmination of instances that have affected me overtime that have led up to this point in my life—where I meander through these virtually inescapable encounters with negligence—with being. This thought was in the back of my mind, but after seldom revisiting it, I have reason to feel that I was not deliberately brought onto this earth on purpose—but rather, I was perhaps a happy mistake. At first I didn’t take a liking to the connotative meaning of the word ‘mistake’, but words—semantics—are polysemic—they’re multifaceted—almost indeterminable. Folks can never pin down what one is saying unless they break it down themselves.
“I never thought the United States was the best country in the world”. I’m Black.”
My parents and my aunts and uncles—hardheaded insistences that I was someone to be fixed—passed off as another Black person who was misdiagnosed(?) with schizoaffective disorder. The cognitive therapy-psychiatric complex is sutured on the foundation of negligence. In and out of these institutions to talk out issues that have ultimately been part of a bigger problem—always feeling this compulsory, illusory obligation to “talk things out” and elaborate on how I feel when my elaboration will be the wasted equivalent of ten dissertations—wasted energy—wasted breath—suicidality unmentioned—compensation given.
“Such negligence is the essence of professionalization where it turns out professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its mode of politics in the United States.” — Fred Moten & Stefano Harney — The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
The cycle repeats itself but beware!
The therapist, psychiatrist and nurse are deputized as the fascist police. If suicidality droops beneath my sullen eyes and reaches my unmoved lips, then they will be authorized to institutionalize me not because it is morally just, but because it is within their policy to do so. Therefore, it is run on negligence.
“empathy has a color line and dark black skin makes you last to receive it”
A lot of what I’ve said is why I feel ambivalent about shit that I experience. Ambivalence, for me, has not been my “go to feeling.” It’s my baseline temperament. There is much that I have felt—being in my thirties, that I haven’t yet put words to and I feel it’s been because I was afraid.
petrified of being forgotten
I see it’s why I may do much to overextend, throwing the evil of the settler on the earth on my back—afraid of leaving this world—having done nothing of value for people to remember me by.
It is out in the open.
I have had friends tell me that I am already of intrinsic value, and I don’t discount that on some days, but why is it that when people seem to be in their final hours—whether it’s through struggling to crowdfund because they are without means or they look to suicidality, that is when people seem to attribute the most value to them? For a time, I couldn’t understand that—
nonconsensually being made a commodity and still forgotten in the vacuum of necrocapitalism—
How can anyone promise that this won’t happen? The so-called American Left talks a lot about dismantling capitalism, but what of necrocapitalism?
We have seen billionaires, both settler and Black alike, play with the idea of AI when they malformed 2Pac as if he were merely a goddamn ad commercial at the Coachella Live performance in 2012.
Many may have been fooled by the Dream™, as I was, but you cannot fool us—no one can be mislead with the elusiveness of promise any longer.
Now this fear wasn’t just stemming from my present self, but my inner child. I’ve reached a point in my life where I have accepted that I’m a child at heart, but in the grander context of what I am up against in the sociopolitical climate within this settler colony, I feel I’ve been more dreadfully than happily reminded, that I’m not a child anymore. When I think about this shit, I can’t help but think about Slim Kid Tre of The Pharcyde on their song Runnin’ where he says:
There comes a time in every man’s life
When he’s gotta handle shit up on his own
Can’t depend on friends to help you in a squeeze
Please, they got problems of their own
Down for the count on seven chickenshits don’t get to heaven
Til they faced these fears in these fear zones
There. I listen to these words and feel as though I’m at a crossroads. There’s so much folks can do but what happens when you can’t help yourself? I usually hope for the best for everyone else, say nothing, and in the event that I die of COVID or am killed by a white supremacist or pig, that everything I stood for isn’t co-opted by the imperialist white supremacist colonial establishment.
I didn’t get to where I was had it not been for chosen family, genuine relatives, my ancestors, genuine community—but I also feel, as the group beautifully sings in their chorus . . . [I] can’t keep running away. The people around me won’t be there forever and vice versa. Perhaps this is patriarchal thinking in itself, but there is truth that in the passing of time—people part ways—pursue their own life goals—discover life trajectories. I digress.
I’m not a child anymore
Those words cut me like a knife because I didn’t get that chance to really be a child. All I can recall is the few pictures of me cheesing—because I have a fragmented memory of everything else that happened after that. Those words cut me like a knife because here I am, disillusioned—stumped, still surprised that I wouldn’t make it to live past my thirties I guess.
“Black boys, more than other group of male children in this society, are asked to surrender their childhoods in order to pursue an elusive patriarchal masculinity” — bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Having been on my sobriety journey for a little over a year now, I also think about what it means to face my demons of yesterday without the want to smoke three to five blunts at a time and remain in a state of being high—to escape the brunt of the absurd.
I can say at the very least, while I have felt melancholic—fatigued over the past couple days—(unsure of whether or not it’s a result of lack of sleep, symptoms of COVID reeinfections in the past, or not enough movement, or all three), I feel less off balance. Every day of waking up, the question becomes less of what of I’m “doing” here and more of what I am to be of here. At the end of the day, I’m the only one who can figure it out.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
