A Black Girl’s COVID Confessions
Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash.
By Doriana Diaz
Writer Doriana Diaz shares her perspectives on the ways the Black community can respond to the disproportional impact of COVID-19 on our lives.
As an adoptee, I felt surprisingly prepared for the outbreak of COVID-19. It took some time for reflection but there are really profound parallels in the circumstances. As an adoptee you are relinquished, you leave a life you would have had if you were kept and you enter into a new one.
With COVID-19, we were forced into this new way of living. With such a sudden and abrupt transition, one out of our control, forcing us to discover a new path, a new life––one that might even be better for our hearts––I felt triggers of familiarity. I felt like I had lived this before and for a brief moment, I recoiled into my childhood rebelliousness, which seeped out of me with subtle stenches of anger and rage at all that felt unfair and cruel. As a child, I knew I was a victim of something traumatic: a victim to a choice that my birth mother made. She made her choice without considering the loss I suffered by being without her. All my life, I searched for certainty and the presence of my birth mother in every weary face I saw. I felt comfort in the idea of still belonging to her.
“One morning in March, we woke up and we could no longer abide by the rules we have always known, those that were set in place to force us to succumb to the wreckage.”
As I matured, she became almost like an angel, a vessel, and an empty void that seemed so far out of my reach, something untouchable but nevertheless sacred. When I was 18-years old, I found her. She was still living in Puerto Rico but had a new life with a new child and a new husband. When I went to see her I wanted her to look me in the eyes my father gave me and say “you are mine, and you are made out of everything I am made of.” The loss of her and the loss of the life I could have lived in her arms, made me resilient and prepared me for this––it made me prepared for COVID-19. It was grief that led me to silence and silence gave me stillness and stillness told me to surrender.
My experience with adoption in a single lifetime is a testament to the multitude of centuries lived by Black people. It is an exact reflection of the losses we all have felt, deep within the marrow, lungs, ribs, and hearts. Many of us have dealt with this since the day this pandemic began. One morning in March, we woke up and we could no longer abide by the rules we have always known, those that were set in place to force us to succumb to the wreckage. We had to readjust to working from home––or not at all––and our children could no longer enter classrooms or cafeterias. They were ripped from their routines, and their friends without a goodbye or a see you later.
“We know what it feels like to be pulled from what we knew for ourselves, for our community, for our children, and placed in a new way of being, one that threatens our livelihoods and safety.”
We are still scrapping at the seams through this time of crisis, all of us scattered in uncertain circumstances and stability. We have walked through the ruins, every single day. I know that from the wreckage we continue to rebuild. We have sheltered our children, taught them from inside the walls of our own homes, risked our blood and bones to serve the public, stack the shelves, and treat the patients. We have stretched our bodies across oceans and drylands and suffered the losses of our grandmothers, aunties, sisters, brothers, and sons. Our old ways of being were taken from our hands, without our approval.
As Black people, we know this. We have been victims of this cruelty simmering in the same stench my childhood rebellion did. Traces of it seep out of us, sometimes in anger and rage. We know what it feels like to be pulled from what we knew for ourselves, for our community, for our children, and placed in a new way of being, one that threatens our livelihoods and safety. There is so much to be done and undone, and we are seeing this now, with profound clarity. What we might have believed in before, we may no longer. We have to create a new space in our bodies and minds to restore trust in ourselves and one another.
As Black people, we are the most proficient in the act of resilience––a kind of resilience that carries us into the night when we lay still with ourselves. We can hear it––it's the thing that makes our skin pulse. We were born on the water, we have always ebbed and flowed with the currents of our freedom. In every life we have lived, we have explored our confines and constraints and broken out of them in shimmering glory. This new life is no different. As Black people, trauma is also our heaviest burden. We have been picked apart, with our heads left on the chopping block more times than they care to take any accountability for.
“As Black people, we are the most proficient in the act of resilience––a kind of resilience that carries us into the night when we lay still with ourselves. We can hear it––it’s the thing that makes our skin pulse.”
At this moment, we get to choose which one we will feed to our children, which one we will pass down through our bloodlines. Will we pick our trauma or our resilience? God, I hope we make the second choice. I know that with the help from the ancestors and the spirits perched on our shoulders, we will make room for resilience. I know we will revitalize ourselves in the wake of such tragedy. We have always been called to do so, even when the stakes are stacked against us and they have taken everything we are, everything we have built, and everything we know to be ours. We always find a way to crawl through the trenches, no matter the wreckage. We have never been made to settle––if we were we would have been wiped out and extinct a long time ago. I hope, as it did for me, that this grief leads us to silence, and silence gives us stillness and stillness tells us to surrender to what our bodies were made for, which is to give life to something precious, on top of where all the hurt happened.
Doriana Diaz is a Philadelphia creative entrepreneur and curator of The Diaz Collections LLC. Her artistry and LLC explore cultural agency through healing vessels and archival documentations of multigenerational black narratives. You can find more of her work here.