This week, I’ve been in New Jersey visiting some friends I made in Qatar, and we went to Atlantic City overnight. It was actually my first time ever going to Atlantic City, and I liked it. I had nothing but lovely interactions with people. I even won a few bucks at roulette (fuck the slots though).
One of the most remarkable things about Atlantic City was the way the people treated me. While at the (indoor) pool of our hotel, a member of what I think was someone’s bridal party invited me to join them for some wine (I turned them down, but I appreciated the gesture). The next morning, while my friends and I were finishing up our breakfast, an older lady in a white sweater came up to me and told me it was a shame I was so sad since I had such a nice laugh. I was blown away. For someone as depressed as I am, I laugh a lot, so I have no idea how a lady from across the room gauged my sadness.
Later that afternoon, my friends and I went to Tanger Outlets and I saw a psychic shop. I love getting my palm read or my tarot done, so I went in. The reader, Noelle, told me that although I use laughter and humor to heal myself, internally I’m so angry and so sad.
And it got me thinking. Because I know that the level of depression and hopelessness I can experience is disproportionate to the actual status of my life. Everyone has problems, but on any given day I’m safe, comfortable, with people I love, well fed, well rested and even well dressed. But I also know that I am fucking raging inside, and I don’t know how to let it go.
For one thing, it is some motherfucking bullshit that I as a black woman in the USA live in the only possible period in time where I could be so educated and outspoken and free, but it also happens to be the period in time when climate change is bout to drastically alter our quality of life for the worse. I am boiling inside that for all the years when Earth’s habitability wasn’t even a factor, if I’d existed as I am today I probably would have been executed for being interested in nature, well read, sexual, opinionated, ambitious, outspoken, I mean you name it. I wouldn’t have made it to 20; they would have breeded me and left me to die.
Now though, nearly every door in the world is open to me……..for the next ten years or so. I would have loved to be a biological mother in this life (I think), but I don’t think it’s responsible for me to make a new human given the way things with climate change are going. I’m furious for all the opportunities I’ve been robbed by living in this time and in this place and in this skin.
I’m furious at the myriad problems with everything that are simply beyond my control. I’m furious that I live in a time when so much information is available, but so many people don’t know how to think or empathize anymore because people who I never chose gutted the public school system of arts and civics. I’m fucking raging that the guy who made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans ran for president with a campaign promise of reducing student debt then got into office and said you know what, I just really fucking hate poor students. Ol let them eat cake ass Uncle Joe.
I’m furious that Trump will be reelected in 2024 because Biden will absolutely NOT be reelected and that this is more-or-less a foregone conclusion. I cannot believe that we debate the truth and argue against (certain) people’s rights to survive an encounter with the police yet defend a “right” to carry assault rifles even when they’re used to massacare young children in their classrooms. I’m absolutely boiling inside that people consider their “right” to go unmasked as an issue of freedom, but not their children’s rights to safety in schools, malls, movie theaters, and places of worship. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
I’m utterly furious that the darkest part of our incredibly dark timeline is the only one where people like me (brown, women, queer) are allowed to live with a modicum of freedom and dignity in this country. I fucking hate it here.
And I’m so fucking angry that I’ve had to do so much of my life alone. I have had to scrape and crawl over blood and broken glass and intergenerational trauma to teach myself how to be a kind and emotionally intelligent person. I’ve been blamed and gaslit time and time again. I’ve had to handle so many big situations since I was probably six years old, and I was never taught how to do it, only punished when I did it wrong.
And I’m absolutely boiling inside that after surviving everything I’ve survived, I still have had to live most of my 35 years devoid of safe intimate touch. It is so unfair.
When I was younger, I would berate myself nonstop for not being woman enough to keep a man. And to have him pay my bills and send me flowers and whatever other misogynistic, patriarchal nonsense I’d internalized. I always knew that I was too smart to be attractive. And that I was too emotional, and too “crazy.” I thought I was pretty, so the only reason my dad left and my mom resented me and the boys rejected me had to be my personality and spirit. I never knew what exactly was wrong with me, just that it was something real bad.
I chased guys who couldn’t give anyone a safe intimate relationship, talk less of me, and then I used those failed intimate relationships as confirmation of bias. And I would get so depressed, and then I would turn on myself for getting depressed because I was too smart and talented to need the validation of men so badly.
I wished I was dead nearly all of the time, probably starting from when I was 15 to when I left the States at 26 and that makes me fucking seethe. And don’t even get me started on men and religion. When I wasn’t begging god to save me, I was apoplectic at him for abandoning me at the hands of wolves.
And I’m utterly livid that the ones I wanted so desperately to save me (men) were the same ones who perpetuated so much violence toward the women I love and depended on in front of me. It’s. Not. Fucking. Fair.
I have definitely developed my sense of humor as a kind of armor that I wear through the world. My life experience has taught me that you want to tell someone the truth, make them laugh while you do it. But if you believe in reincarnation, then I’ve been reincarnated a lot already and I’m tired. I’m an old soul and I feel like I’ve been at this work of trying to clean up people’s internal messes/the messes of the world/my own internal world for a very long time and getting nowhere. You would not believe how lonely this work is, especially when you have literally no one in your life to lie down with, or to give you a back rub.
Life is hard for everyone, I know. And I know that there are some hardships that we must endure to cultivate our souls. But those aren’t the ones I can’t make my peace with. The things I can’t let go of are the plethora of utterly horrendous problems in this world with solutions that do exist that people just stand around wringing their hands about. And the disproportionate mental and emotional anguish that I’ve had to carry alone in this life.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
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