Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a ‘travesia’, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape “knowing,” I won’t be moving. Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. “Knowing” is painful because after “it happens” I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before.
-- Gloria Anzaldua
This applies to my daily life in many ways. I am constantly reading, growing, discussing inequalities, victories, theories. I change from day to day, my identity expands, my self-definition and self love transforms. My heart grows big with excitement because I constantly discover literature meant to empower and free those formerly silenced and rendered dead, but then my soul also aches with the added pain that consciousness always brings. I cry for more people, I cry more easily, and cry for the parts of myself that are just now beginning to surface.
But it is necessary? There is never a final level of consciousness that we meet, a level that declares us officially ‘grown up’, unable to process anymore knowledge, or unable to move to a ‘higher plain’ because we have reached it. We never stop moving, shifting, growing. Sometimes we wish we could hold still and be in a single place forever because it is safe. But that place of safety will never bring about revolution whether internal revolution or external nothing will happen if we become immobile.
I get excited for tomorrow, yet somewhat afraid of it. But, as I stay afraid, sometimes alone, sometimes confused, I do so while moving forward. It is through conscious movement that freedom occurs; no one ever found liberation through inactivity.
