Audre Lorde at the Threshold
A trigger tracker before the word existed, and what her Cancer Journals saw
Audre Lorde stands at the threshold of one of this book's later chapters. Her words open the door to the work of conscious response, and her insistence that we can stand in front of our own truth, however painful, sets the tone for that turn.
I've been reading a recent piece by Maria Popova on Lorde's Cancer Journals, written in 1978 in the shadow of her diagnosis. What Lorde wrote then, under threat of her own death, is one of the clearest descriptions I've encountered of the work Tracking Triggers calls integration. She walked the path before there was a vocabulary for tracking what triggers us. She arrived through her body and through her fight to live, and what she found there confirms what tracking has always known.
Lorde describes despair arriving like a cloud waiting to consume her. She had cancer. She had political enemies. She was Black, lesbian, a poet, a mother, fighting to stay alive. The despair was earned and the despair was real. What she discovered was that the only way out was through.
Here's the line that stopped me:
I must let this pain flow through me and pass on.
If she resisted it, she warned, it would detonate inside her, shatter her, scatter her against every wall and every person she touched.
That is, in plain language, what the book spends much of its time trying to name. The charge that won't complete becomes the charge that detonates. The resistance that tries to keep the pain at bay is the very thing that keeps it stuck. The way through is the practice of welcoming what's there, breathing into it, letting it move.
Lorde also names something the book spends real time on: the recognition that despair has two sources, one outside us and one within. Her greatest internal enemy, she wrote, was the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness. She refused to ignore the external forces, the barbarity, the structural violence. But she named that the war was also inside her, in the fear that fear itself produces, in the powerlessness that powerlessness compounds. Storied feelings, in the book's language, point in both directions. Lorde knew this in her body decades before NVC gave it a vocabulary.
And then she gives us something the book gestures toward but Lorde says outright. She refuses despair. Which is to say, she lets herself feel it and refuses to act from it. The distinction is everything. Feeling is integration's first half. The second half is acting anew. Not acting from the despair, which would be the detonation she names, but acting from what the feeling reveals: teaching, surviving, fighting, joy. Each chosen act is what the book calls a disconfirming experience. It tells the nervous system that despair does not have to dictate the next move. Feel what's there. Act anew. The acting anew, choosing differently from the pattern that would have you detonate, is what completes the integration.
What Lorde adds, what the tracking work can sometimes forget, is joy. She speaks of taking joy in the battle itself. She names the small beauties: dawn fishing on the river, the silence she finds there. She locates her own work within a continuum of women's work, beginning before her birth, continuing after her death. The tracker, she reminds us, is not alone on the trail. The tracker is one in a long line of trackers. The work is older than us and will outlast us, and there is joy in being part of it.
This is why Lorde stands at the threshold of one of the chapters ahead. Not because her words are decorative but because she walked the path of tracking her triggers before the book gave that practice a name. When you reach her quote there, you'll be greeting a kindred voice who knew, from her own body, that integration is what makes the looking possible.
Maria Popova's piece is the doorway, if you want to spend time with Lorde now.
The pain flows through. It does not detonate. And the work, when we let it, is part of something far larger than this one life.
Continue the Journey
Tracking Triggers is more than a book. It is a living exploration of how we move from reactivity to responsiveness.
The Inner Trackers are a small community walking this path together, receiving occasional reflections, new journal entries, and a first look at the work as it unfolds.
If this resonates with you, I'd be glad to have you join us.