Today we’d like to introduce you to Chaney Williams.
Hi Chaney, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m a doula, writer, ritualist, pleasure activist, and beginner herbalist. For years, I had a hard time navigating all my identities and figuring out how they all intersected. I spent most of my life ignoring my own desires, wants, and needs as someone who is a natural caretaker, has CPTSD and PTSD, and my descent into doing the inner work for myself was initiated after experiencing sexual trauma in 2015. I began to know myself in a way that honored all parts of me because I had to or otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to continue on because I was on which was a path of self-sabotage where I was constantly afraid to take up space. Through my creative practice, finding a community I felt true belonging with, therapy, and my ritual practice, I began the work to listen and honor my inner knowing. I offer full spectrum doula work, ritual work for honoring different portals and thresholds, and have a strong creative practice that helps me to make sense of the world I exist in. I am rooted and grounded the most while in any body of water, while tending my medicinal herb garden, through my writing, breathwork, quilting, and yoga. These are the places I come back home to myself and find so much joy in the midst of the grief that exists in the world.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In 2021, my life changed in an abrupt and devastating way due to a car accident where a semi-truck hit my car and another vehicle and fled the scene. The accident totaled my car and left me with chronic neck/ back pain. My trajectory of becoming a certified professional midwife was completely halted and being a midwife is no longer a sustainable career for me. The combination of living in a body that experiences chronic pain and the grief that I will always navigate of no longer being able to become a midwife which I had always saw as my calling, let me into a deep depression. Sitting with the uncomfortable feeling of grief has been a lesson for me the past 3 years since my car accident. Being patient and compassionate with myself by letting grief and joy coexist and letting pleasure come through even when the grief swallows me whole. Even when I feel guilty for feeling joy or when I’m in so much pain I can’t even fathom the future or living with chronic pain for the rest of my life, I dive into the glimmers of pleasure and hope that exist amongst the grief. In a lot of ways, my accident that was out of my control in every way opened a portal to myself. A portal that did not need to happen in the way it abruptly did but a portal nonetheless where I truly know the meaning of community, belonging deeply to myself, and letting myself feel even when I’m enraged or sad, feelings I had always repressed up until now because I had to so I could fully know myself. This awakening process that happened without my consent has led me to the work I’m offering now.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My work navigates all my identities: someone who is chronically ill and disabled, non-binary, queer, biracial, an intersectional feminist, witch, and a Southerner. My identities shape who I am because there is no way that they can’t. In my offerings, creative practice, and in my own daily life I explore all these identities. I truly believe that as Audre Lorde says, “the personal is political” and I am constantly exploring that in all the work I do. My creative practice consists of quilting, writing specifically a memoir about ancestral grief and joy that I have been writing since 2022, and textile arts such as sewing, slow stitching, embroidery, natural dye, and weaving. Whether it be quilting, poetry, tarot, full spectrum doula work, rituals, or non-fiction essays, the more I dive deep into forming an authentic sense of self, the closer I get to making my body a home I want to exist in. It also brings me closer to my ancestors, community, and the collective. I do this inner work for a better relationship to myself but also to my community because by caring for myself and honoring my voice, I am best able to serve others through my offerings and creative practice by honoring and embracing all my identities.
What matters most to you?
That through honoring all of life’s thresholds whether it be the grief that can exist from a pregnancy loss, the joy of celebrating a gender transition, ancestral grief, or starting a new lifestyle such as non-monogamy, each new portal deserves to be honored through a mark of the passage through ritual. So often in our society, people are forced to rush through thresholds, repress the feelings that come up with them, and because of this are not able to celebrate or grieve experiences in their lives that are not normalized in the mainstream. Everyone in the collective has unique experiences and they deserve the right for space to be held for whatever transition that may be. No matter how little or small it seems to other people, the person experiencing gets to feel the wide spectrum of feelings that may come up for them. Through my creative practice specifically my writing, my full spectrum doula work, and now my ritual offerings, it’s important to me to hold space for those moments and explore those emotions that come up through ritual. As I write my own memoir and dive deeper into my own underworld journey where I am expressing the full range of my emotions after years of dissociation from trauma, a big concept I’ve been exploring is how pleasure, grief, and joy can coexist.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.waxingdreamscapes.org/
- Instagram: chaneyelizabethora