autumnkalihall-blog

[autumnkalihall-blog]

Carefrontation

I saw a great post from my sweet, longtime compatriot in the city, Joey Garcia, about this today. We hit if off one night when I was there performing at a show at B St Theater she was also speaking at.  Over the last couple of years, but especially last year in particular, I was caught up in confrontations with people who were “let down” and “disappointed” that I was “not choosing to be kind” in my online conversations with people who posted sexist, racist or xenophobic things. I left the church when I was twenty-two, and since then the changeover has been filled with non-stop oddities. So many people I knew at the time I believed to be kind, but as I grew older and challenged myself to learn more about things, I stopped believing in that brand. Turning a blind eye to someone doing something that hurts another person, that’s not kind. Like Joey said in her quote posted today; that’s cowardess.  Telling someone who’s had said something sexist said to them that they must put up with it because they must be kind is simply using the social pressure to not take responsibility for fixing the situation and putting the responsibility on the affected, marginalized person. I’ve left whole groups of people because I called out things respectfully that needed to be addressed because they were toxic and harmful and had people tell me I was “causing drama” to gaslight and devalue my read of the situation. Doing the right thing, that’s not drama. Doing the right thing, that’s the right thing. 

You turn a blind eye so you can keep moving forward in your life without having to call your friends out when they hurt others, that’s complicity. You know the people around you are doing hurtful or evil things without speaking up, you’re giving them your non-verbal support and sign off by doing nothing. Especially since it would be you, their friend, who they would really listen to if you took the time to frame is respectfully with their well-being and positive future in mind. When you do nothing, they assume, hey, it’s not really a big deal.

As someone who spent a long time in cults of various kinds of Christianity, the one thing that ran through my whole experience was that fake kindness was paramount, and said fake kindness was used to gaslight people who had plenty of reason to be opinionated and vocal about being hurt. I am all about being kind, but my kind is not their fucking kind. If you truly love the people you work alongside, you’ll happily call those people over if something they do worries you. If they choose not to do anything, that’s their choice. But it IS unkind, and it IS not okay to choose not to do anything at all. Let’s all be real kind today, yeah?

[autumnkalihall-blog]

The Incredible Regenerating Halls

Lately, I’ve been having these far-out conversations with friends. In a tarot spread a friend did for me last year as I questioned what to do with my cloudy future, my friend told me I would need to teach myself to stop pursuing bigger crowds and surface, polite relationships for the people in my life I knew the best and was closest to. To invest in the people I already had.   I grew up homeschooled, and not around a huge amount of diverse crowds, so internally I’ve always felt like people could pick up on the fact that I was desperate to be loved and apart of a community. I don’t think people could accurately pick up on the real reason, but, whatever. Let’s get back to the main point. I needed to invest in my already-friends. I needed to invest in my already-family. To know me is to know my family. And I needed to stop putting off what I already knew in my soul I had to do: go home. Refocus back on our community and love. Celebrate the totally rare, diamond-like connection I had with my family. I know people who hate their families, and I was lucky. So I needed to get back and discover who I was as an adult with them. Another friend told me I should start writing about them and I. Maybe in a blog. Then, this weekend, our old family town; Paradise, CA, burned down completely, and something in me snapped. I need to write about them. I need to write about us. Before it’s gone and forgotten. Before I’m gone and forgotten. Before the whole world is gone and forgotten, hahaha. You know, us being in 2018 and all. To say we were kind of a legend is putting it lightly in our growing up.  My family have always been an accurate representation of standing at the edge of disaster, and trauma, and darkness, and evil, and sickness, and loss, and just saying no to going over.  I’m not legally able to disclose the disease that my dad has, and family has long dealt with, but suffice it to say my parents showed us all a documentary when I was about nine. It showed me the genetic reality of what we were at risk for, and it scared the shit out of me. It scared the shit out of all of us. It was like looking death straight in the face. I faced it again when I was twenty two and getting tested by a psychologist. I faced it again when my dad was diagnosed. I faced it again when my dad was admitted to a specialist center for the disease because he was having delusions that convinced him there wasn’t any food and he was starving himself. I faced it again when my family would call each other to begin drawing up a plan on how to care for each other if we got sick. I faced it every time I received a call from a sibling, stressed and depressed and crying, wondering if, every time they were sad, it meant they had it. But we never fucking gave in. We never will. I know a lot of people in my life who are actively scared of death. Who are nervous to talk about it. Nervous to experience it. Nervous to be around it. Nervous to think about it. I never feel this way, because I have been living beside death since I was little. I have been looking into its big eyes and sitting next to it at the dinner table and have grown resilient because of it. It has been near me at every step. It has been the reason for every decision to stay above ground, to love ferociously, to pursue passionately, to inhale life like a fucking cigarette until I can’t breath anymore.  I worked a lot in bereavement centers as a musician. Ten years for the same place and it felt just like home. The same doctors and nurses every time, the kindest people I’ve ever know, and different grieving families every time. I felt at home beside them. I came to terms with my life beside them. Like gods and goddesses of the limbo between life and the afterlife, they settled my soul with what I could and could not change. If I ever went fucking hard at anything, for anything, it was so my family could get to be around and alive and enjoy what I was doing. Before it was too late. I did a lot of things early and with some serious gusto because I wanted my dad to get to see me doing the damn thing, before his brain was too different. In case my siblings start to get sick, we’ll have these times together where we lived with everything we had. I experience joy not because I am naive to the darkness of the world, but because I have seen the darkness of the world, and frankly, to the darkness of the world I say: Fuck you. Here’s the story of my family: the darkness we say fuck you to, our legends, our stories, our grasping at lives well-lived; and I.