Nothing about this Bodymind is Accidental

Our bodies, much like the land, were mapped like territory—disciplined, measured, and separated. This has always been the foundation of coloniality: to control and dominate by creating hierarchies, drawing borders, enforcing binaries, and severing relationships. The same logic that carved up bodies of land and water transformed our bodies into battlegrounds, mapping danger, deviance, and disposability onto those who were marked as “other.” This is the reality of living under cartographies of control.

Colonial domination thrives through classification, erasing the histories of place or reducing our lives to singular narratives that can be distorted and manipulated. The ability to decide how and where life can exist or who is worthy of dignity and self- determination is a form of containment. As if borders are fixed or bodies are meant to be occupied. These ideologies dictate whose bodies are pathologized or seen as “disordered,” whose movements are criminalized or viewed as a threat to the state, and whose presence is deemed dangerous or “illegal” even on stolen lands. These are not accidental misunderstandings, but deliberate acts of power designed to humiliate and subjugate.

To live under these labels is to have your existence scrutinized and your stories told in a way that robs you of your agency and dignity. The fullness of life collapsed into a sanitized version of objective “truth” that erases complexity and emergence. Over time, the realities of who we are and where we come from become more difficult to recognize, even to ourselves. This is the subtle form of erasure that stems from the violence of classification, in which we internalize the very systems that diminish and harm us. And yet, our bodyminds persist. We are not empty vessels carved by the infrastructures of violence around us. We carry our own geographies and histories within us—blueprints of survival, languages of liberation, practices of healing, and rituals of remembrance.

We often talk about trauma, how it lingers on and extends across generations. But so does our ability to persist and rebel, our capacity to love and resist. Our bodyminds do not forget; they carry the memories of our ancestors, the dreams of our future kin, and the rhythms of worlds we have not yet created. When borders are imposed on us or lines are drawn through our flesh, we must remember to re-cast them as an act of refusal and reclamation. To break free from the captivity of empire. To liberate ourselves from the horrors of colonial violence. To reconnect with our imaginations and rekindle our disenfranchised relationships. We do not always choose what this world maps onto our bodyminds, but we hold power over what we write in return as a form of counter-mapping.

There is rebellion in loving your bodymind without apology, in remembering that your grief and rage, too, are sacred and neither can be tamed. In these moments of defiance, we are not debating the terms of our existence but rightfully taking back our sovereignty.

In doing so, we are creating our own blueprints and maps that are alive, layered, and messy. That refuse to distort the complexity the state tried to erase, that reject the legitimacy of borders drawn to displace us from our kin, that remember our bodyminds are living archives.

As Gloria Anzaldúa (a queer Chicana poet, writer, and feminist theorist – Poetry Foundation) expresses poetically: “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails…”

We have always been more than what can be contained or measured. Our be(com)ing moves in ways that their borders and timelines cannot fathom. Through joy that nurtures from within the cracks of precarity, through pleasure that insists on connecting with the divine, through rage that refuses to die and fade away. The wisdom we hold in our bodyminds does not merely keep us alive, but it has the potential to transform us into something unruly, someone ungovernable. And even in the spaces that try to confine us, we stretch beyond the borders—charting futures that cannot be sanctioned.

Nothing about this bodymind is accidental. Not its capacity to love, nor its desire to defy. Not its longing for joy, nor its memory for pleasure. It is made of too many ancestors, too many uprisings, and too many stolen moments of tenderness. Yet, we must never forget it is a kind of prophecy waiting to be fulfilled, a revolution in motion.