my stor(ies) of disconnection

*trigger warning: this is a story centered on my experiences of disconnection and suffering; includes mention of religious trauma. 

My name is Justina. I was born in the United States. My parents were born in The Republic of Panama. Before that, my ancestors were likely from Sierra Leone and some other country with a rich culture I’ll never exactly know. My ancestors were enslaved and taken to Barbados and Jamaica before choosing to move to Panama for a better life. 

I was born a sensitive child to a gifted, loving, and emotionally unexpressive family, that was devoutly fundamentalist Christian and members of an almost-all-white Southern Baptist church. I experienced trauma, terror, and doom at an early age (in the form of a fear of death/hell) and didn’t know it at all.   I remember lying awake at night in the dark terrified of dying and terrified of the hell that my fundamentalist, white Southern Baptist church convinced me was my fate. I was afraid and at the same time I suffered alone – never voicing to my parents that I was afraid and needed reassurance. I prayed incessantly for God to save me.  

My fears were mostly around expressing myself. Overwhelmed by my own emotions, I could not share my fears or express myself fully – in my family, in school and pretty much all of the social groups I was a part of. 

Until I found dance. After I moved to NYC for graduate school at 22, my very cute white boyfriend from college broke up with me. Feeling alone in a new city, new home, and now losing my relationship, I spiraled into a depression. I remember walking outside thinking the world was doomed and we’re all gonna die. So I decided to dream big to encourage my happiness, to choose a dream that I had as a kid – and it was to be a dancer. At 22, I began dancing obsessively and started to feel more connected, more hopeful, more able to express myself. The problem was, I still didn’t feel safe. I was spending probably $10K of my grad school stipend on dance classes per year and, while I felt freer in my dancing, I felt out of place at most of the classes I took. 

At 27, I got into the STREB Extreme Action company and felt exhilarated to be chosen. On a daily basis, I confronted my fears of heights and fear of death, jumping from 20ft platforms and I truly was an action hero. Despite being chosen to be in the company and despite their efforts to include me and understand me, I felt I never fit in. I couldn’t feel comfortable with their extreme levels of self-expression, and it was just uncomfortable for me most of the time. Even with the death-defying stunts, my biggest fear was of the other people around me. My biggest fear was being misunderstood, just as it was in childhood. Key moments from my time in that company include: that time i got voted straightest STREB company member (“wtf, I’m queer!” is what i was thinking, but i was not out at the time), that time company members surprise raided my room on tour in the middle of the night, waking me up in the middle of the night obviously not knowing about my childhood trauma experienced in the dark, and that time I first met the company and literally didn’t say one word the entire day of meeting them. Looking back, I can see how I was exactly like all the other company members and how they made so many efforts to make me feel more comfortable, but I just didn’t have (internally or externally) what I needed to feel comfortable. And yet, our collective-risk-taking, being included in this superhuman group of queer and neurodivergent and quirky and flamboyant humans owning their self-expression, expressing our strength regardless of gender, forever imbued me with a sense of power – even if I didn’t, at the time, feel a sense of true belonging.

Anyways, after getting let go from that company, ironically because the higher-ups were afraid of my safety, I started experiencing a dance space, Kristin Sudeikis’s dance class and company, that was so uplifting – like I was never doing anything wrong. I remember being on stage with the other company dancers and it literally felt like I was in boundless loving energy. There was no time or space, just love; it was magical. It made me realize some of what I had been missing in other spaces. 

And then I started studying my body/nervous system and discovered practices of deep connection that my body truly needed to feel safe & started consistently practicing meeting my needs.  I finally understood that I needed a new type of environment in order to feel safe. I realized I needed to leave certain spaces, completely change others, and either find or create new spaces in order to meet my needs. I understood how certain spaces were no good for me and that I needed to create a new one. I began to learn how being in tune with our needs is a clear gateway to creating what we desire. I began to realize that there was never anything wrong with me – but with the environments that were not meeting my needs. I dove further into the discovery of my needs – based on my “neurotype”, based on health conditions, based on numerology, astrology, human design – based on who I am and how I am. And I began to dive deeper into the understanding that there was nothing wrong with me by reading the work of my lineage of artist-activist-spiritual-educator humans (e.g., Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Rev. Angel kyodo Williams, etc.) who call us to deconstruct systems of conditioning and oppression in the process of liberation. I learned this process of deconstruction is a central process for me to uncover where my own patterns of disconnecting from myself and others truly came from.

I require spaces of deep connection. I require spaces that actively cultivate a sense of safety, home, family. I require spaces that embrace every part of me that once had me feel like an outsider: my deep-thinking-ness, my mystifiedness, my awe, my intense feelings, my truth-telling, my rebellion, my disruption. I require spaces that tell the truth and allow me to tell the truth about how I have been harmed by and constrained by racism, heterosexism, sexism neurotypicalism, ableism, the list goes on – and enables me to actively create spaces that move beyond the harm created by these systems. I require spaces that center my needs, the needs that I have because of who I am and how I was born.

I am here doing this work because I know that there are others out there who are also on this path of creating their deep connection, their ground, their home, their safety for themselves, as they build spaces that are in line with their needs – in line with who they are. For those of us on this journey, may we find each other and create the spaces we seek. Raw Movement is my offering to myself, to you, to the world, to our descendants – drawn from all that I have learned from my own suffering and disconnection – and from the practices of those who have come before us. May we create our home(s).

to those who see themselves in me

i honor you, mystic child

may you wonder, and wonder free

i honor you, mystic child

may you wander, and wander free

may you ask questions,

that receive no answers

may you see the wisdom in your unknowing

may you see the sagacity in your disbelief

may you see that not knowing is your answer

know nothing, mystic child

ground yourself in your own knowing,

of nothing,

of,

the unknown

If you’re still reading and want to get to know me more, here’s how!