A Super Soul Of Creation: Elexis Gibson
Read below to discover the awakening of the womxn, as we embark on this adventure and build a community of womxn like us, who see the world before us and vow to shatter the glass ceiling that’s held us back. We’re super souls, realizing who we are and reimagining the space we inhabit at large. Take your leap.
WOMXN (noun): superior beings in the context of emotional intelligence, for they are love and life itself, vital to the existence of mortal creatures as we know them; persons that multiply everything they touch, unreal in nature, powerful in exteriority.
“There is no one better at
cultivating emotion,
creating emotion,
conveying emotion than a
womxn.
We are caretakers, we're nurturers;
we bring things to life. If you think about the
power of a womxn, we're able to do
what men do, while also doing
what we do. We’re the
ultimate beings.”
— Elexis Gibson
We’ve been suppressing our souls, us womxn, drifting in the middle passage. We feel our skin prickle with the heat of a violent past, one where we’ve struggled to keep communities together. We hide our fragility, instead finding strength in our ability to care for others and continue birthing creations. Whether they be children or ideas, these creations are vital to the future of humanity.
They told us we were the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Angry Black Woman. We showed them we were the universal life force, super souls of creation.
“Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise”
— Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems
She sounds like yellow when she answers the phone—not like sunshine, but rather like a lemon. Ripe with flavor, she encases herself with a thick skin, and when peeled back for slicing, can be placated with the sprinkling of sugar over the fragrant, citrus juices. Her name is Elexis Gibson, and she is radiant.
Gibson dances her way through life, touring the country as she ebbs between the powerful pop of hip-hop and graceful vulnerability of ballet. When her sweat’s not trickling in a slow descent to the gym floor, she’s promoting social media for the dance company Hiplet Ballerinas, a hip-hop ballet company. The company is an oxymoron in name but complimentary coalescing in reality, showcasing the duality of womxn and their creative endeavors in the arts.
After a nine-year break from dancing, Gibson hustled right back in. While it was a definite culture shock, as her 27-year-old body required definite adjustment to the liberties it can take in motion, she exudes confidence. She knows her body, for it is not separate from her makeup. Rather, her body is an integral component of her psyche, a part of her spirit that exhibits puissant energy.
Part of that mindset comes from her service in and out of the military. Gibson was a military police officer in the United States Air Force for a year before she was discharged in 2013 to take care of her sick father in his remaining months on this earth. Her father was quadriplegic after enduring several strokes in prison, resulting in loss of function in all his extremities and the ability to speak. When Gibson arrived back home to care for him, he passed away three months later.
“I do not like to give up,” Gibson said. “I do not like to quit. I try to train myself to be a machine, honestly. Most things are mind over matter, but it's definitely hard when you're straddling that line between pushing through the pain or on the precipice of injuring yourself because you're going too hard.”
Gibson possesses an acute self-awareness and is one of the strongest womxn I’ve encountered, not just in physical strength, but in mental perseverance as she battles anxiety and depression, turning the negatives of her life into art through dance.
Gibson grew up on the South Side of Chicago on 109th and Halsted. She still lives there now with her mother. Two years ago, she endured an emotional thunderstorm that wreaked havoc on her mental state and social relationships. Her surroundings only served to make her feel more depressed when she looked out the window to see poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and kids walking around aimlessly to escape whatever it is that awaits them at home.
“There is no inspiration in the hood. There is nothing that we can cling on to for hope,” Gibson said.
Everything she learned to do, she’s learned on her own or by seeking out the wisdom and advice of others who were in similar predicaments. She hungers for independence and knowledge, and she wants to gift the neighborhood she struggled to live in with a recreation center for kids to go to after school and on the weekends.
“I would love to create a space where kids, preteens, and young adults can be taught how to navigate the world,” Gibson said. “If we can also show a little more compassion toward one another, I really feel like the world would be a much better and safer place. People lash out, because they feel like no one cares about them. So, I just want to create the space to show that I care about my people. I want to call it The Village.”
As black womxn, we’ve so often been told to shove our emotions away for the plight of our people and advancement of humanity. But we are human, because we feel. The world was built on the backs of black womxn. We are the foundation that holds this world upright, but in the process, we’ve been forced to suppress womxn’s natural instinct to feel. It’s where creativity comes from, where art comes from as our emotions spill out through the flick of a wrist, the dilation of an eyeball, or the shuffling of feet in intricate steps of progression.
“We have been depressed,” Gibson said. “We have been suppressing our soul. Historically, we've had to suppress that because our parents, our mothers, had to survive. They didn’t have time to feel down on themselves.”
“I turned my pain and my sadness into art for whatever I was feeling at the time”
It’s a sentiment and perception of a shared black history that I understand well. I saw my mother and grandmother work until their black skin crack, red seeping through their fingertips, the white meat showing. They scrubbed at the floors of other people’s houses, carried other people’s children, worked up to three jobs a day just to put food in their own kid’s mouth as hunger ate away at their own stomach lining. They had to get it done, though. They had to work. They still do.v
Now, we're in a place where we might actually be able to sit down and have those conversations with ourselves—to unpack the trauma we've grown up with and went through ourselves. We can use our suffering in mind, body, soul, and spirit for art. That's what Gibson did. Before this year, Gibson repressed her emotions, her sensitivity and empathy bubbling beneath the surface of her epidermis. In this new awakening of her life, she has come to embrace it, trusting her instinctive womxnness to lead her into greatness.
“I turned my pain and my sadness into art for whatever I was feeling at the time,” Gibson said. “Any piece of art that I put out is related to my experiences. I manifest whatever I’m feeling into the physical. It really healed me. Art and dance are definitely therapeutic for me, and they always kind of have been. I just really commit. And when I get done, I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. I don't know what the weight was, but I just feel lighter.”
She feels like a teammate of my own, as I used to be a gymnast and competitive cheerleader that traveled the country as well. I understand pushing yourself to limits unknown, teetering on the edge of insanity and pure ecstasy as you commit everything you have into your craft, your performance.
As we grow, we come to realize this devotion comes from a place of wanting to belong but also creating a space for yourself that didn’t exist before—one just for you. In her journey, she’s come to understand that happiness is just an emotion like sadness, despair, or regret. Thus, instead of searching for happiness, she searches for fulfillment.
“You can't always control who you're around or your surroundings or whatever it is,” Gibson said. “So, you really just kind of have to create a space within yourself that you can trust and that affirm your actions and behavior.”
Last year, Gibson was in a drastically different place and headspace, dealing with trauma, anxiety, and depression, fighting not to lose herself in the process of navigating her daily life. Now, Gibson is appreciative of the anxiety she gets about tasks and expectations thrust upon her, because she didn’t have those problems before. It’s a chaotic gratitude.
For so long she felt as though she had to hide her emotions from others to show others she was strong, to repel people from hurting and taking advantage of her, like so many black womxn before her have done. They’ve soldiered on in the face of heartbreak, abuse, and discrimination. They had to. Everyone was counting on them.
Inside, though, womxn clawed at the façade they wore. They chipped away at the mask of themselves, splitting it open to reveal the beautiful strength they possess in vulnerability and emotional intelligence as womxn.
“With the type of art that I wanted to put out, I didn't think that what I had to say was important. But, there's a lot of other women that have been through what I've been through. They've had heartbreak, grown up in broken households, and had experiences with failure,” Gibson said. “So, it’s important to know that you have something to say, and you can change people’s lives by making them feel less lonely.”
It’s the emotional intelligence—an exceptional skill where one is able to understand and express one’s own emotions individually and in interpersonal relationships—that affects change in the essential understanding of others. It’s this understanding that resolves conflicts and progress progress in a shared human interest. It’s a realization that you needed help which you didn’t have at the time, so you will now be that help for someone else.
So, while Gibson may struggle to leave the sheets of her bed in the morning, as we all do when the fabric clings to sweat-slicked skin in the wee hours of the morning, she turns into a machine once her feet hit the ground.
“It takes a lot for me to get out of bed. I'm not gonna lie. I've had a lot of experience with failure or just regret—like all of the bad emotions and that headspace that it puts you in,” Gibson said. “You have to push through because life goes on.”
Americans have been trained to live for money—or rather an image that can only be obtained through drainage of their finances. Black Americans are no stranger to this mindset, with their devotion to fly sneakers and sew-in weaves. This is not an attack—I love the power I gain through the autonomous choices I can make on how I want to present myself to the world. However, it would be naïve to ignore the history of conditioning we’ve endured to ascribe to white standards of beauty and success.
Black Americans have been told that our naturality and existing living conditions were unacceptable and “ghetto,” ugly blemishes on an otherwise pristine display of America. Gibson believes the conditioning of black people to live for money is why black people are so unhappy. She suggests it’s the plight to always be something they’re not, to ascribe by white standards and designer label images that ruin our originality and strip away any semblance of authenticity, until we don’t even recognize ourselves.
“I really feel like we could be on top if we would just cultivate our gifts and our natural abilities and our talent, instead of focusing on this stuff that isn't even real,” Gibson said. “I quit my job, just because it wasn't worth it. I would rather be broke and happy doing what makes my soul happy than just live for money.”
Gibson’s path is not like her peers or most of her friends. They all graduated high school and college and secured jobs. Gibson lives with her mom and is in between jobs. She’s a legitimate starving artist. But she’s happy where she is, because she’s gone through all the other paths that weren’t hers and found herself in the process. She’s arrived at the beginning of her destination, and she’s thrilled to be there and get started on this new chapter of her awakened life.
Sounding like yellow in a citrus existence, this new chapter is one that screams:
“No one else's success diminishes yours.”
—Elexis Gibson
