Living in Our Skin
How do we live in our skin as racialized people?
How can we reimagine mental wellness, dismantle racial trauma, advance equity and heal, empower and connect?
Use the Living in our Skin toolkit as a creative guide to facilitate community art projects, as a source of inspiration in impossible or difficult times, as a guide to conversations around mental health, and as a tool for community or self care when mental health systems fail to address the unique experiences we face as racialized people.
The Living in Our Skin toolkit was conceptualized as part of my Artist as Changemaker residency with Action Dignity and supported by Calgary Arts Development and Trico Changemakers Studio. This toolkit is the culmination of two years of observation, collaboration, reflection and participation in Action Dignity programming and events. Over the course of my residency, I distilled my observations on the needs of BIPOC mental health into the pillars of BIPOC mental wellness – reimagine wellness, advance equity, dismantle racial trauma, heal, empower, connect. These pillars were identified as being of the utmost concern and highest priorities for racialized communities and our white allies.
This toolkit is an artistic approach to systems change and uses creativity as a way to leverage change at various points in a system. Each card has a further explanation of a unique area of BIPOC mental health for those who would like more information or encouragement. However, the cards themselves are creative tools and prompts in their own right.
Suggested Uses
- Assign a participant or group of participants one of the pillars of BIPOC wellness to create an artistic work about. Artistic works can include, but are not limited to, a spoken word poem, a short film, a dance piece, a song, a painting
- Use an individual card in the toolkit as a basis for an artistic project
- Pick one of the pillars of BIPOC wellness to create a direct response to an issue facing your community
- Create a spoken word piece that responds to one of the questions on the individual cards
- If you are experiencing some mental distress, pick a creative action from the topic that most closely aligns with the issue you are feeling distress around
- Randomly pick a card as a team building exercise or activity
- Use one of the pillars of BIPOC mental wellness to host a film night, community discussion or panel around. Find local artists, changemakers, community leaders and builders to participate in your event
Pillars of BIPOC mental wellness
To get started, click on a topic for a unique poetic prompt and creative actions
The body is a contested site when it comes to racialized peoples. Our bodies are fetishized, appropriated for financial and social gain, weaponized in ongoing neocolonial wars, and demonized to justify the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
Often times we do not stop to think about our lived, subjective experience within our own bodies – what does it feel like to actually live in our skin? What is it like to live in our brown, melanated skin? What would our cells communicate to us about our health, our experiences, our joys, our traumas if they could? What is it like to be us, down to our very core?
Suggestions for creative actions
1. Create a poem celebrating the unique colour of your skin. As an added challenge, try not to describe your skin colour using food metaphors.
2. Take five minutes to look at your skin. Really look. What shade of brown are you? What scars dot your flesh? Is there anything you noticed about yourself that you didn’t before? Write a poem about how you felt
3. Find a piece of clothing or fabric that matches your skin colour and wear it out in public. How did that make you feel? Create a visual metaphor from cutout images to express your experience
The ability to tell our own stories from our own perspectives is a powerful tool of agency, advocacy and empowerment for BIPOC communities and equity deserving peoples broadly.
Often, our voices have been silenced and the narratives told about us have been used to justify all manner of violence, oppression and atrocities against us.
Using narrative, we become the authors of our own story and we refuse to be victims of circumstance or the limiting visions others may hold of us. Narrative is a powerful tool for reclaiming our mental health by building and restoring our agency.
Suggested creative activity
1. Learn more about narrative therapy as a tool to discover your voice here
2. Think of a time a story was told about you that was damaging or hurtful. How would you rewrite that story? Write that piece now.
The stem cells in our bone marrow are the literal sites of regeneration in our bodies. Our bones are a powerful metaphor for resilience, as they carry us through this world.
Bones are also often conceptualized as the seat of our deepest feelings and convictions. How many times have you heard the expression, I feel it in my bones?
Using our bones as a metaphor, think of what you are made of. What convictions do you feel deep down, all the way to your bones?
Suggested creative actions
1. What metaphors for resilience can you think of? Take a picture of the metaphor of resilience that resonated most with you
2. Take five minutes to imagine what resilience feels like in your body. With whatever creative tools you have available to you, paint, sketch or draw that feeling using only abstract images. Think lines, movement, fluidity. You are not aiming for representation, only expression
Our senses are our gateway to understanding the world. When we think of home, we think of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes.
Food is a powerful form of connection for many racialized communities and a way to keep us rooted in our values and relationships. Food can also carry a lot of shame for racialized people and memories of being othered or ridiculed for having different foods is all too common.
Suggested creative action
1. Immerse yourself in the scents of home. Cook a meal that reminds you of a time you felt most loved and at ease with yourself and the world. How can you incorporate a comforting meal in your life more often?
2. Think of a texture that brings your comfort. Recreate that texture with materials you have available around your home or wherever you feel the most safe.
3. Think of a time when you were shamed for your cultural foods. Record a video of yourself responding to the person who shamed you – what would you say to that person right now?
Blood is a powerful metaphor for ancestry and the ways we are connected to our communities. The beliefs we hold about how we are connected to one another shape our understanding of society and inform how we advocate for ourselves and our rights.
Are your ancestors a source of strength? How do you call upon your ancestors in times of suffering?
Suggestions for creative action
1. What are some beliefs that your community holds around ancestry? How has this been a source of resistance for you? Or, have these beliefs held you back? Reach out to someone in your community and discuss
2. Paint a canvas entirely in red. Then, using your nail, a pencil, a knife, remove the paint to create an image of how you relate to those who are of your blood
How we see ourselves is a product of our self image and the messages we receive from the society and culture we were raised in. As racialized people, our self-image is often distorted by racist, one-dimensional or stereotypical depictions of ourselves and our cultures.
The negative depictions of racialized people in the media can lead us to internalize these toxic images, causing great harm to our mental health.
Our self-image is also shaped by those around us. Maybe you see yourself as the brave one, the shy one, the spiritual one. Maybe the image you hold of yourself is not one you ever thought about deeply or chose yourself.
What would it feel like to let go of the image we hold of ourselves?
Suggestions for creative action
1. Using a plate, mirror or other object that can be easily broken, draw or write that image or yourself. Carefully break the object with the image on it. How did it feel to break free of that image of yourself? Even if only for a moment.
You can also write or draw that image on a piece of paper and crumple it up or tear it into pieces. How did it feel to let go?
Immigration and displacement are the experience of many racialized people in our society, whether we are immigrants ourselves, are the child of immigrants or having immigrants in our family. Immigration implies a “choice” to move from one’s homeland.
Yet in spite of that, the feeling of being uprooted from home can remain particularly strong and disabling for some immigrants.
Suggestions for creative action
1. Create a map of your family’s resilience. Where did your family learn to be tough? What are the highlights of your journey? The points of struggle? Did your family learn specific skills in specific places?
2. What is the journey of your people on this land? Use pieces of fabric, cutout images or words to weave your story together. Separate each part or the journey and connect them together in a meaningful way
In order to challenge oppressive systems in a strategic way, we need to understand how we think about complex ideas and how can use our understanding of complexity to make change within a system.
Suggestions for creative action
1. Think about a time you were forced to change your mind about something. What was it? Why did you have to change your mind? Did you have any support in changing your mind? If so, what was that support
2. Reflecting on the above question, create a visual road map for how you changed your mind; from the moment you were first challenged in your belief to how you adopted a new one.
3. Make a list of your five most closely held beliefs and why you have them, writing each belief on a post it note or strip or paper. Put those beliefs into a jar.
Now, without looking, draw ONE of those beliefs from the jar. Now, you will think of the opposing view of your belief and argue passionately against your cherished belief.
How did that make you feel? Share your response with someone you trust. Bonus points if they share the opposing view to your cherished one.
Individual racial trauma occurs when we have personal experiences with racism, such as violence, discrimination, hostility, stereotyping, othering, etc.
Systemic racial trauma occurs when we suffer the consequences of being subjected to living in a society where racism is part of the social structure.
Suggestions for creative action
1. Write a letter to your younger self comforting you after experiencing a racist incident. What would you want your younger self to know? What hope do you want to express to your younger self?
2. Create a racial trauma action plan. This is a plan you will turn to when you are experiencing racial trauma. Make sure to include in this plan trusted people you can reach out to when an incident occurs, at least one action for self-care and one tool for self-regulation.
Need some ideas about self care tools? Click here
Intergenerational Trauma refers to traumatic experiences that are passed down from our ancestors due to historical and enduring forms of racism. One example of this is the enduring legacy of slavery for the descendants of enslaved African populations. Another example is the enduring impact of Indian residential schools on the family and social systems of Indigenous communities across Turtle Island.
1. Create a ritual for breaking generational curses. Get creative – think of specific actions you will perform to address particular traumas in your family and community, prayers, meditations or incantations you will invoke, and any materials you’d like to use.
2. What is one word to describe how breaking intergenerational trauma will feel like? Take a picture to express the word you chose.
Direct traumatic stressors refer to both the direct, individual experiences of racism and the impacts of living within a system of societal racism.
Examples can include, but are not limited to, being heavily policed, the uptick in anti-Asian racism following the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, the disproportionate rates of violence in Indigenous communities and state violence directed at undocumented people.
Suggestions for creative action
1. Using images alone, illustrate the history of your people on this land (or wherever you reside). What gives you pride about the history of your people on this land? What gives you hope for the future of your people on this land?
2. Direct experiences of racism can be highly emotionally charged and can make it difficult for us to regulate ourselves. Use this grounding exercise to bring you back into your body whenever you need to.
Ground exercise – Five Senses
Take a deep breath where you are. You are going to use your senses to come back into your body and where you are.
1 – something you can taste in the space
2- two things you can smell in the space
3 – three things you can hear in the space
4 – four things you can see in the space
5 – five things you can touch in the space
Return to your breathing
Vicarious trauma refers to the trauma we experience when we witness or see traumatic racial incidents. For example, experiencing symptoms of distress after watching videos of the killing of George Floyd (especially for Black people).
Vicarious trauma occurs because we see ourselves in the victim(s) and can imagine the incident occurring to ourselves or someone we care about. The symptoms we experience witnessing traumatic racial incidents are real and impact our well-being even though we may not have experienced them directly.
Suggestions for creative action
1. Host a film screening in your community on the subject of racial justice. Are there local filmmakers you can reach out to who may have created work on the subject already? Can you use this film screening as a fundraiser for racial justice in your community?
2. Moving through racism. How does racism make you feel in your body? Make a pose with your whole body and hold it for two full breaths
How does the idea of justice make you feel in your body? Make a pose and hold it for two full breaths
Move for one minute in a way that makes you feel free and liberated
With the urgency we often feel in our communities as racialized people as we organize for justice or simply focus on our everyday survival, it can be challenging to simply pause and take a breath.
Sometimes urgency can actually blind us to more creative and resilient solutions to the most pressing problems in our communities. Sometimes our best course of action is to pause and be in the moment.
Suggestions for creative action
1. What is one way you will intentionally slow down today? Will you eat a meal mindfully, savouring every bite? Will you talk home from work or an engagement, so you can pay attention to your surroundings and be out in nature?
2. Saying no. What is one thing you can say no to today? Now that you’ve said no to something today, what is one way you can say yes to yourself?
Living authentically as racialized people can be particularly challenging. We face pressure from this society to suppress parts of ourselves in order to advance our careers or advance socially. We have traumas around being discriminated against which can make us hyper vigilant and hide important parts ourselves for our safety.
As racialized people, we owe it to ourselves to embrace ourselves fully – in honour of ourselves and our ancestors, who sacrificed and survived so much in order for us to live and thrive
Suggestions for creative action
1. Connect with culture. What is a cultural event that you hold near and dear but maybe haven’t made time to participate in recently? Make a plan to either attend, participate in or create an opportunity to share a cultural event in the next three months and do it.
While violence, war, colonization, genocide and other social ills threaten the collective safety and security of people around our world, racialized people bear a disproportionate brunt of the impact of these societal ills. It can be easy to lose sight of the divine and the experiences that make living worthwhile in all the chaos of our world today.
It is imperative for us as racialized people to find ways to connect with a power outside of ourselves, whether that power is religious, spiritual or a cause that is greater than ourselves for our mental well-being.
Suggestions for creative action
1. How do we honour those who have already gone before us? Do we honour them in song, dance, poetry, photography, film?
Take 10 minutes today to honour a loved one or loved one who has passed. Write or talk about the experience after
Religion and spirituality is an important aspect in the lives of many racialized people. Religion and spirituality may be where we turn to in our darkest moments and can be a salve for us in the most trying times of our lives
Suggestions for creative action
1. Using the prompt as a guide, reflect on how it is that you have faith to carry on each and every day. How might you share this faith that you will survive and thrive each day in a creative way?
Commit to creating a creative work and sharing it with someone close to you in your life
See the entire card deck below
