try to ground the butterflies but don’t count us out, yet.

For years the twinge or ache in a forearm or wrist or my forehead is common. Diagnosing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder according to the DSM-5, needs to meet necessary criterium A-H, with the possibility of two specifications: dissociative specification and delayed specification. You got that? I ask myself. Logging out of office notes, I review ‘episodes of care’ for clients. It’s a handy way of referencing care coupled with healing and goals a colleague came up with.

I am tired, whether waking up or going to sleep. Mariposa floats in, reminding me of brighter days. Her butterfly wings, designed. Her flight, elegant. Bright colors painted to flutter like flags.

The clock ticks closer to 8 p.m. My eyes automatically fade into their respective eyelids. It is the imagination of closing my mind that gives comfort.

Shhhh, be quiet, I order my body.

Delicious carne asada waits for me. I inhale smells of veggies, and grilled meats. Boiled yellow corn, and spicy salsa accompany our main dish: tacos. The corn tortillas aren’t home made, but where in the heck can I buy those in ‘Little Norway?’ This will do.

The headlines, threats, silence. The questions. Betrayals.

Our table is a mess of food platters, disposable plates, random silverware.

Lively teenagers argue over who eats first. They throw jokes at one another, then take back minor insults in exchange for giggles. Their noise, glorious. I cannot imagine shoving their voice – their laughter – their brilliance down the hole of invisibility.

So, I don’t.

Mariposa, a wonder – flight, versus “dissociative specification,” DSM – 5.

We don’t fly, though. Not in Poulsbo. We don’t search for healing, medicine, or allies. Instead, a thick fog of hostility, from centuries of whiteness settled across this land, generates its poison amongst even us Latinxs.

We are born with it now, somewhat inoculated. Entirely capable of passing its DNA markers to future generations. Like trauma, we forget how to speak of what our bodies experience. We tell others the stories of ways we forget. The ways we know what we know aren’t as interesting to the world. The joys and delights, nicely captured. Black and colorful squares, up for exhibit in therapy worlds of white women or men, who teach theory; and, how to heal when all we really long to do is fly.

“Mom! I really need my piano theory book. Please, we need to order it today.” He interrupts my theorizing.

It’s constant – to the point where I don’t know if its sadness, depression, or the cost of assimilation. I sit here, beauty surrounds, to process memory. I won’t speak for hours.

“Yes, let’s do that right now.” I speak.

A sister jabs him for forgetting to buy his theory book until mid-week, “ It’s almost lesson day!” She grins.

I giggle. Lighthearted play envelopes us.

Frustration bubbles beneath my light olive skin. Do I have to say what’s inside-out? In speaking, feelings are trapped inside. I hate this, yet it’s what I do.

However, my own personal work is to ground that butterfly. She is dangerous, angers the healing community. Her eyes are permanently red. Her wings, permanently pale, the nightmare of operating from the ground, almost always suffocates me.

I won’t teach my children to disown themselves for the love of the majority. It is never worth it.

Both the mariposa and friend checking in on me receive silence. In the body’s shakes, clings, stiffness, words written, spoken to powerful systems with their suffocating rulers, we have said too much.

The most I hope for is to remember her flight.

“A somatic experience of being separated from the body, where trauma has caused a chasm in the brain and the split results in a form of survival, a brilliant form some would say, but it is a split none the less, from trauma, which allows one part of the mind to survive and then another part of the mind to activate and then engage the traumatic circumstance or trigger….” stated a colleague.

Is this really how it starts? I whisper.

This lecture series is brought to you by the decolonizing world of mental health therapy. Reasons beyond and present know engaging the world in a less-West framework is threatening, but more mystical. It’s more vague and more specific, terrifying evidence-based theories which win grants, monies, or resources.

If the powerful dominant healers grasp our epistemological secrets, then white folk healers will drain her, again. I will lose her, again.

Fly we do and she does. Through the jungle, past the seas, to the places she is needed – the places she dreams of, to the edges of where I can imagine. Here she sits, still. Her mind moving between time. I try, too. I match her flight. Taking off, I return before I’ve gone.

“Wait!” She yells! I focus. Everyone is settled, stuffing their mouths, content.

Conditioned against healing the systems oppressing us, I sit here, too. The spice hits my tongue. I love its hotness, the dare of trying more on the next taco.

Unwavering in my tiredness, delight, anger, angst. The bigness of feelings, embraced. Familiarity with oppression is normalized, to where I am chastised for any attempt to bring relief to mi gente by asking those in power to remove their heavy feet off our necks. But we keep asking, demanding, resisting, and flying.

Just you wait. Don’t count us out. Not yet.

The views expressed in this blog are the sole views of the author. The author and host of the blog are not offering any sort of replacement for mental health therapy or other professional services by reading this blog.