Antonyms of Abandonment
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
What did you see in the dark?
THE PAINTED LADY
I saw the world explode into flames of black flesh.
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
Where was God?
THE PAINTED LADY
God was nearby but idle—resolute in his conviction that he had already given me everything I needed for the end of that life and the beginning of this one.
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
Were you afraid?
THE PAINTED LADY
I lost my mind. Fear no longer had a home.
Transcribed from an interview with a thistle butterfly, also known as The Painted Lady, on August 7, 2024.
FATIMA SWARAY
How do you bring yourself back to your body after moments of detachment?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
When tending to the complex tapestry that is my ‘self,’ I have routinely abandoned my body. The funny thing about a body is that despite neglect, it will do everything within its capacity to keep you alive. My body has improvised—learning how to sustain itself with the few nutrients it comes across, contorting and adjusting to the crooked shapes it frequently finds itself in, tucking away secrets or suppressed emotions in various hiding places so that I don’t have to deal with them if I’m not ready to... All of this to keep my ‘self’ moving at the pace of organized abandonment—which is to say, keeping tempo with capitalism's death knell.
I was conceived, born, and raised to this rhythm—unreasonably familiar with watching my mother put on a uniform while I put on a nightgown or being one of the last uncollected children in elementary school aftercare. But play was a portal for me when I was a child. In that acrobatic space–where I could be anything, try anything, squeeze as much laughter out of my body as possible, cycle from joy to frustration to anger to sadness to relief and back to joy again in the span of 10 minutes–I alchemized almost all the emotional, physical, and spiritual accouterments of organized neglect into something I could creatively engage. Play didn't save me from my circumstances, but I came to my 'self' through it by engaging and being attentive to the fullest possibilities of my body, mind, and soul.
I haven't played in six years. There have been discrete moments of play here and there–long nights out dancing with my girlfriends, biking through city streets without a destination, golden hours playing tag with the Atlantic on the coast of Accra–but as a quotidian practice, play has been off the table for a while. Because of that, a sustained devotion to my body has been abandoned.
At this particular moment, I'm searching for the places my body stored neglected pain, grief, anger and stress while it was doing its best to meet my needs and push itself to the unreasonable limits capitalism and I placed on it. I'm giving a lot of attention to my lower back, my G.I. tract, and my eyes. But I'm mostly looking forward to playing again. In that space, I think I will return to a deeper collaboration with my body.
POPPY LIVINGSTONE
This week, what touched you? What did you touch?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
This week I touched a fuzzy yellow caterpillar, hundreds of flowers, a Super 8 camera, a yellow bicycle, a dull machete, a river, a bowl of yellow lentil soup, a bottle of tea tree oil, peacock and quail feathers, cowrie shells, a book called The Dead Emcee Scrolls, and E6000 fabric glue.
In turn, a cat named Nipsey, a song by The Isley Brothers, a conversation about shame, a low-hanging branch, a makeup artist's brush, bug spray, my fingers, the hands of many new friends, a dance, and sunlight touched me this week.
MEGANE BANTEFA
What do you hold onto when you're spiraling in your own mind?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
My mental spirals typically move in two directions: toward the past and the future. Once they arrive in these remote places, they tornado around a specific moment. If that moment is somewhere in the past, I'm usually spiraling around something I regret or wish I did differently. If the moment is in the future, I'm probably agonizing over what I or other people will do or say and how I can avoid as much pain, conflict or discomfort as possible.
Much like a spiral optical illusion, these mental departures are hypnotic; they lull me into a surreal speculative space that I confuse with reality. I begin to believe it's possible to go back and say something I wish I said three years ago or engineer the future toward my advantage by staging and manipulating the present in a particular way. These things, of course, are impossible to do, but I suspect that their impossibility is what keeps me in the loop. I can stay in the spiral for hours or even days on end because it's the space where I can imagine and exist in a version of reality that feels most comforting or ideal. What I'm really doing is delaying a confrontation with my present self—the one who exists because of all those past moments she may regret and the one who needs to be attentive to the emergency of life in order to get anything done for her future self. So when I find myself at the edge of an impending spiral toward a moment I no longer, or possibly never will, exist in–or if it's too late and I'm already in the eye of the hurricane–I try to hold onto my present.
MIRIAM ABRHA
Are you ever in communication with past versions of yourself? Is there anything you can see or foretell about the future that you're excited about?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
Your questions have reminded me of a temporal paradigm I was introduced to last fall called the everywhen. While studying the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre, an Anmatyerr artist whose work frequently documents and performs Indigenous Australian sacred histories, I learned that the everywhen describes a cyclical temporality where the past, present and future collide and leave residue on each other. Petyarre frequently cited the everywhen as a place her work exists in and invokes.
The everywhen enchants me because it completely rejects Western constructs of linear time by proposing that our past and future selves are always nearby, co-conspiring on (or sometimes against!) our behalf. I suspect that I'm always in conversation with my past and future. I think all of us are. The things we call 'intuition' or 'fear' are just private exchanges between our selves in different times. Their limited or widened sight prompts them to shepherd us toward particular actions in our present. And here I'd like to expand the notion of the 'self’ to include the ancestor and the descendant because I would not be my ‘self’ without my predecessors, and my future kin will carry a piece of me forward.
So perhaps when my 10-year-old self intuited that it would be a mistake to get braces even though she was deeply insecure about her smile, she was listening to my 50-year-old self softly say, "One day you'll love your gap." And I wonder if every time a pit in my stomach opens up, my grandmother is whispering a warning. Of course, at times it’s difficult to recognize the messenger of spiritual counsel, and sometimes the messages aren't always in my best interest. (My younger self swears up and down that I should avoid confrontation at all costs. I've been gently telling her otherwise.) But with discernment, I continue to trust in the promise of the everywhen: that my selves in other tenses and forms are here and now, doing what they perceive to be their best to protect and guide me along.
NIARA SIMONE HIGHTOWER
How do you feel about being a girl? How do you feel about God?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
If my consciousness was a lava cake, girlhood would be my molten center. To the extent that “girl” implies “child” and youth in general, girlhood is where my giddiness about life–my wonder, my curiosity, my goofiness, my squeals, my make-believing, my most speculative and hopeful self–is concentrated. It's the space where the propensity for chaos is expected, allowed, and encouraged; where the dreams are indistinguishable from reality because they're lived in more often; where my spirit is still resisting the hardening effect of cynicism and skeptic despair. But "girl" also triggers particular memories of rituals that initiated me into my social realm as a girl-gendered child. Retraversing this minefield of memories and taking stock of the gender lessons that were lodged into my core proves complicated and alarming. Although girls and women–particularly Black girls and women–are expected to perform and embody care, compassion, generosity, respect, and love in their highest registers, they seldom see other people extend and practice these forms of relation toward them.
In girlhood, I learned and perfected people-pleasing pliability—the ability to be malleable to the desires of others before acquainting yourself with your own needs. I rarely saw, practiced, or experienced love as an intertwining. I made peace with being a solo contortionist and never realized how distant love was from that arrangement; how everyone I was performing for was sorely failing me. I also internalized that I was divinely mandated to "be good"; a personal belief that seems benign enough, but when explored further, has deep, noxious roots in six years of Missionettes schooling from the ages of four to ten. In this religious space, I learned how to kettle my sense of self into my church's gendered image of feminine servility, self-sacrifice and purity—internalizing that a love of God and other people is primarily measured by my own emotional, spiritual and sexual discipline. In my failures to be ‘the perfect girl,’ because I was just a child after all, shame became a frequent inhabitant in this liquid dimension of my consciousness.
I am saying that being constructed into a girl for a patriarchal family and religious community violently impeded my development into a self-possessed, complex person. And I am suggesting that the traits that I pride myself on–my love and patience for others, my relentless conviction to “be a good person” and treat others how I’d want to be treated, my generous spirit–are entangled with the fabrication of my girlness. And yet, before I was fabricated, I was made. What does it look like to remember my maker and tenderly unbraid God/Love from patriarchy’s investment in controlling women and girls? Is it possible?
Because how I feel about God/Love tends to reflect the register of "girl" I'm operating at on any given day. Am I the fabricated girl? The one that has impurity, contamination, and waywardness to be wary of and avoid because my elders and the church said so? If so, God is that looming figure in the recesses of my mind that I am scared to face, to talk to, to be my full, honest self with. But if I'm the wonderfully made girl–if I’m “girl” in the sense that dreams are real–then God is Possibility and as expansive as the deep universe under, above, and around the dark light of non/Being. On any given day you can find me at one register, the other, or awkwardly tangled between the two. And—
BETSY AGYEMAN
How does God reveal Himself in your life? How do you know you are loved?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
In a way, these questions live on opposite sides of the same coin. God reveals Himself in my life through you. I know I am divinely loved in part because he placed you in my life very early on. One of the first memories I can recall from my childhood includes you—when we met in the stairwell leading to the basement my mom was renting from your parents. I am convinced that because God knew I was going to be an only child, he gave me a surrogate sister at the nascency of my memory so I would never recall what it feels like to be alone.
Because of you, the loneliness that usually accompanies only children is less familiar to me. Our friendship feels like a miracle. We borrow each other's hearts and minds. The breadth of our shared perspectives and passions in this lifetime continuously shocks me. You know me in ways that no one else really can. Your existence has been the most consistent revelation of God's love for me.
GEORGINA YEBOAH
Are there times when you feel you are hard to love and how do you navigate that feeling?
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
I've been thinking about your question for weeks, waffling between a hesitant "yes" and a resounding "no" throughout any given day. I would start at "yes" with an acute awareness of my imperfections and a Toni Morrison quote that plays on loop in my head: "goodness is more interesting, more complicated, more demanding, less predictable, more adventuresome than its opposite [evil]." I believe we concoct 'goodness' through loving actions, so although the word "love" is absent from the quote, it's indexed in the message. Love "is more complicated, more demanding, less predictable"—hard, perhaps. But then I would think of how easily love has found and stayed beside me in the past year, and it would feel awkward to see "hard" and "love" share space in the same sentence. So I'd end up at "no" for a little while before remembering my flaws and Toni all over again.
Finally, this morning, I stumbled upon another quote; this one from Jada-Amina Harvey, this time directly naming the word "love." She writes, "I've always said, 'I love you' is something you dance into; you don't just say it. It's something you live into, and you build into." I feel like in order to be at peace with your question I'd discard the word "hard" and embrace "rigorous" instead. Loving me is a rigorous practice, yes. And difficulty may accompany rigor, but so does patience, creativity, fairness, passion, and euphoria. My shortcomings are abundant, but their existence reminds me that love is magic. Miraculously, people are finding ways to show up and love me regardless of all the reasons one could find to abandon me. They are leaning into the improvisational, tectonic ruckus of love—rigorously dancing into 'I love you' each and every day. In return, I am kicking up 'I love you more' with my twirling feet.
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
If you were making a playlist of love songs for yourself, what are nine songs you'd put in it？
BEX NOELL THOMPSON
