Retracing Footsteps

On erasure, appropriation, and beginning my journey to reconnect with my lineage

I remember the first time I really thought about my heritage. I was in elementary school and I remember being curious about an old wooden trunk that had always sat in a nook of our house. My dad explained that that trunk belonged to his side of the family who had come over from Sweden to the United States in the 1800s. The trunk was weathered but not beaten, with shiny gold latches and a leather tab that held it closed. It had that old smell to it, the kind of smell that transports you back to an imaginary memory. 

I’ve always loved old places. Any place with old wood, that old smell of mildew and dust embedded in walls and floors. I can stand in any old house or church or building and imagine life as it might have been during that time. I feel at home in spaces where I can time travel.

As a young girl, I loved going to the arboretum near our house in Texas where I grew up because they had replicas of buildings from old homestead. Even though they weren’t authentic, I could walk inside and feel connected. Connected to the past, the people who lived before me and their ways of life. It felt like it filled a hole in my body and spirit that I didn’t consciously realize I had. 

I suppose that this deep connection to old spaces was maybe my first indication of my intuition, that first taste of what it means to be an old soul who picks up feelings and energies across time and space. But it wasn’t until almost 15 years later that I really began my journey into my intuition and into the web that is the sacredness and interconnectedness of life.

When I was in high school I began struggling with anorexia. From then until freshman year of college I went through a dark time where I lost sight of my body, my feelings, and my spirit. It was a time of suppression, repression, of a constant grind towards a body and soul who wasn’t me. Who wasn’t Stephanie. A constant push on the frontier of my body that isolated me from the very molecules of my own being. Whose processes locked me in the confines of my own head and erased any sense of past or future self until all there was left was my present self who was a shell. And with no inner guidance, I became a cog in the machine of my own making. I subjected myself to the grind of life, of making things happen out of sheer will that arose from some part of me who no longer identified with me. 

After four years of this simultaneously mindless numbness and internal terror and grief, I sat one day on a lounge chair in the sun room of my aunt's house and had an awakening. I could either continue down this path and run my body into death or I could choose to live again. 

That day as I sat on the lounge chair, I remember watching the sunlight pour into the room and onto my body and feeling like that sunlight reached into me and gave me my soul back. That day I made the choice to reclaim myself. 

That journey of reclamation was a tortuous one. Every day was a battle between the will of life and joy and the pressure cooker of the mind that wanted to simply let go of what it meant to be human and be a shell. I cried over cake. I cried at the mirror. I laughed at the mirror. I watched life return to my body. I raged. I cried. I smiled. I was afraid. And that fear was there every day. Every time I choose rest instead of movement. Every time I ate a piece of bread or a pancake. That fear was always there. Until one day it wasn't. Until one day I woke up and started reclaiming my joy. 

After long periods of drought the Earth awakens slowly and then all at once. A parched landscape turned oasis after a single rainstorm. She goes from cracked and parched to blooming with life. I do not know if this process is a painful breaking open from the constriction of desolation or a process of joyful awakening. Perhaps some mix of both. 

Besides the story of the trunk that floated about my house growing up, I knew almost nothing of my lineage. My Mom’s side of the family probably came from somewhere in Europe, my grandfather's family came from Sweden to the US in the 1800s and my Dad’s mom’s family came to the US from Mexico at some point in time. But all my life these lineages were never part of conversations. Besides some broken Spanish from my Dad, we didn’t practice any traditions or rituals or speak any other languages other than English. Somewhere along the line we just became “white”. 

The word erasure is what comes to mind when I think about all those years I struggled with anorexia. Erasure of memory, holes like Swiss cheese of those years. Erasure of connection as I drew into myself. Erasure of feeling as I deprived my body of the energy to do the feeling. Erasure as I lost touch with my true self in the process of trying to run away from grief, pain, lack of control.

Erasure is what happens when we are afraid. When we are afraid to turn and face the pain. Face the hurt, the noise, the feelings. Or when we don’t want to take responsibility for harm. Erasure is what happens to our minds when we forgo life for "ease" or when self is forced into hiding by outside forces. Erasure is what happens to our bodies when we choose control over intuition and love. 

At some point along the way in the history of humans, the richness of people with European heritage got diluted into “whiteness”. There was an erasure of life ways, rituals, language, ways of being, traditions. There came a point where it became easier to erase the past and fit into some mold the world laid out than hold onto the true self. 

In a situation where a person takes on the role of a bully, neither the bully nor the victim can ever win. To become the bully, the person must erase part of their true self. The part of them that resonates from the heart. The part of ourselves that knows how to treat others with kindness and respect. That erasure might feel necessary or important to that person in that moment because the person in the role of bully was hurt in some way by opening that true self to the world. So as protection, the person in the role of bully chooses to seek power outside of themselves by harming someone else. The space created by their own self- erasure gets filled with the satisfaction of feeling power over the victim.  The victim in turn experiences forced self erasure because they are no longer safe expressing some true part of themselves in order to protect themselves from the bully. The result is that neither party feels safe to own their true self. Both parties experience erasure- at their own hands or at the hands of another.

The role of the bully is what happens when the person playing the bully cannot take responsibility for their own feelings and thoughts and forces the victim to carry that grief and pain for them. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. And energy not processed by one person either gathers in bone and lineage or must be processed by another. 

This is the world we are faced with now where whiteness has played the role of bully. Where in avoiding our own pain of erasure, white people so often project that pain onto people of color. Where we have perpetuated pain, suffering, and death, erasure and then appropriation of cultures. 

I will admit that I didn’t fully understand the implications of cultural appropriation in spiritual practices until I started thinking about how I lacked an understanding of my own heritage and thinking about white people’s role as bully. The thing about being in the role of bully is that the cycle of pain and appropriation only stops when the bully chooses to accept responsibility for the pain and grief we hold within ourselves and choose to stop projecting that onto others. As white people this is the role we have played but we have the choice to stop playing it. 

I see so many parallels between erasure of thoughts and feelings during my eating disorder as ways to avoid feeling things, and the erasure and subsequent appropriation of so many traditions from people of color. With my eating disorder, erasure started to repair with reconnection. When I showed up every single day with the goal of listening to my body and my feelings. When I showed up for my pain and allowed myself to really see it and feel it. Only then could I begin to see my true self and stop looking for things outside of me to feel in control and to get me through the day. 

I have been on a spiritual journey for about six years, a little more than the time I struggled with anorexia. During this time I feel I have been somewhat ignorant to the true mechanisms of spirituality and have sought comfort in the feelings of connection I have found through other cultures practices and ways of practicing connection. But as I enter this new chapter with Earth Song, I feel something is missing. And that is my connection to my own lineage and heritage. What have I erased? What harm have I perpetuated? What hole have I created that I have been trying to fill by working with other cultures rituals of connection? Who were my grandmothers and mothers past? How did they connect? What wisdom do they carry? I think deep down what drives us as humans is love and connection. Without these things we will continue to seek them whether those ways are healthy or not. I feel like I have been trying to fill a void with things that are not mine to hold. 

Now it’s time to take responsibility, own my own connections, to journey into my lineage, through whatever pain or grief or joy lies there. I am ready to travel, as I did six years ago as I was recovering from my eating disorder, through the web of life back to the truth of my lineage. I am ready to reconnect. 

I am starting with a DNA test and from there I will explore both my mother and father’s lineage back in time and take a journey to find a more loving, ancestral connection to people, land, and purpose. 

Thank you for being here with me! Join me by following along on this blog.