Episode 1: Being a Black Woman Is a Sentence with No Commute.

Don’t mind me while I rant.

How do you learn to tune out the world when its chatter is endless, and nothing it says about you is true? Why can’t I be me and you be you, without them inflicting on us their version of “truth,” all of their hatreds they blame on me and you? I’d never do the things they say. If you’ve found yourself here, the same must be true for you.

Last night, I heard my grandmother’s voice telling me to be strong and pray.

Yet today, I still cracked. Still thinking about yesterday.

Every day, it feels like.

Maybe if I prayed more, like Grandmom did, I’d be farther ahead in my life.

She never wanted me to rush things, telling me, “Practice in your 20’s, figure yourself out in your 30’s, pick up speed in your 40’s,” she’d seize every chance to say. “You’ll know you’ve made a difference when you reach the end. All you have to do is carry through,” Grandmom said.

And then, about him, the most important man in my life, she said:

“He is hurting you. But you are not hurting him. You are only hurting yourself.”

“What he cannot deny or ignore, or what he refuses to confront, he will simply blame on you. His faults will always pale compared to yours, even after he’s spent a lifetime neglecting and disrespecting you. His unrealistic expectations are too red-pill leaning; he can’t forgive you. You are not a priority in his life. It is easier to be angry than to forgive or have empathy for the truth. He doesn’t even believe the gender wage gap exists.

“He is a gaslighting piece of shit who has no respect for you. You needed to see this. He’s misogynistic, emotionally unavailable, and emotionally immature. He promised you the world and then changed his mind without even telling you, leading you on long before you knew what it was.”

If we’re honest, men were our ideal. We saw ourselves through them and as their extensions. Ribs. Vessels. Instruments. Our identities were defined by reflecting their perspectives and uses for us. We wanted them to desire us. What kind of woman wouldn’t want the attention of a man.

When nobody wants you, you have to live your life in insufferable denial. You deny the fact that to other humans, you essentially don’t exist. You are so detestable to people everywhere within every society that you occupy the same mental space that dead people do. Except, you take up more space. Much more space. Eventually, your self-concept and your reality–or, the existence to which you have become accustomed–are not objectively real, at least not in a way that would make them physical. Nothing you know is real.

Your identity and your life exist only to you. You’re the only one who can feel it, the only one who understands the subtle and nuanced effects of all its experiences, the unique fears and joys that make you, you.

You’ve almost gone blind from watering the darkness with your tears; from hoping that, eventually, you’d cry enough for a river to form so that one night you could finally escape.

And when the river did form, you’d wade into it up your armpits, and for as far and as long as you could, swim miles more than you’d already walked in this relationship so make sure you’d never again make this mistake. Yet the more you swim, the more it occurs to you: if you get tired or need to take a break, things are not okay. Nobody is waiting for you to arrive. NO body cares that you are gone. Where you’re going, there is no one waiting for you.

Though, you’re free to go wherever you can make it to.

But there will there never be any rivers for you to wade into. You’re invisible. How could something invisible be carried away?

Because no one sees you, you are nothing but a word. You live solely as what other people express you to be, when you exist only in a word.

You are nothing more than a concept, a mashup of other peoples’ perspectives. Your identity is fleeting. You could be here today and be gone tomorrow.

As a black woman, you’re a thought of your own self-creation. Each day you try to think enough thoughts that make you feel real, never realizing, of course, that you will always embody — and therefore define, what other people say real is not.

What makes a woman, aside from what she says?

 

And do you, as a woman, get to define what makes a man a man?  Define what makes him a good or bad one?

Is a man what he says he is? Or is he the words you call him, and what you give meaning to?

Whatever the case, you should behave accordingly, I remember my grandmom telling me. She left shortly after that.

I failed to create the family I thought I was raising, and to nurture the one I came from in a way that meant more than what made sense to me at the time. I accomplished nothing more certain than our survival, and as a result, my daughter made it much farther than where I began. I’ve dedicated my life to righting wrongs and still ended up being wrong. A failure of a mother, a daughter, and of a wife.

I am so spent from this.

Practice in your 20’s, figure yourself out in your 30’s, pick up speed in your 40’s and beyond.

You’ll know you’ve made it when you reach the end.