the divorce is final and i don’t have to pay alimony

break up letters by wastedrita

I recently made the very adult decision to break up with my best friend. Well, we broke up six years ago but we have been in each other’s lives in one way or another for eight years. He took care of me when I couldn’t get out of bed. I did my best to take care of him whenever he allowed me to.  But the time has come and we are no longer growing together…we have grown apart.

I thought it would be harder than this but it’s kinda like getting a haircut. At first it’s weird and you don’t know if you like the person reflected back at you but then a few days pass and life goes on and hair grows back or it doesn’t or it does.

WHATEVER.

I think he loved me in his own way but he never loved me the way I needed him to and that’s ultimately why I am choosing to leave. I am choosing to close the chapter on our life together in order to love myself more completely and not shoulder the guilt of years of toxic love.

I should have known a white dude from the Northwest suburbs and I couldn’t be best friends for life. But I tried anyway because that’s the only way you learn. And my god, did I learn.

It is not his fault he is willfully ignorant and selfish and insensitive but at the same time, it is his fault. Because I had every opportunity to remain ignorant and selfish and insensitive but I chose life. I chose to open my heart up to the world and get hurt and learn and love people the best way I can.

I know a lot of you are probably wide-eyed as you read this scathing review but I honestly, truly, legitimately do not give a flying fuck.

Because when I was fifteen my sister looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You are a waste of god given talent.”

And I never forgot those words. I never, ever, ever let those words go.

Because I would rather have a serpent in my home that I can talk to than a fucking panda bear that lies all the time.

I firmly believe that the things which are the most difficult to hear are the things which need to be repeated over and over and over. Only then can we live authentically. Only then can we move forward and make America……………………………great?

Yeah, I did that.

WHATEVER.

So I am moving on with my life. I have decades left and I haven’t the energy to waste it on people who add nothing to my experience. It’s as plain and as simple as that.

Who wants to be my new best friend?

Nah, I’ll be my own best friend.

home is where my heart is

Six by Polly Nor

I only recently realized that all of these years I was looking for a home. I was looking for a place to say, “That’s where I’m from.” But home has always been right here inbetween by rib cage and my spinal cord. Home has always been right up behind my ruined face. Home has been home has been home has been home.

I was wandering and searching and flailing about but I just had to sit still and see that I was already right where I needed to be.

I love how Facebook gives you snippets of your memories from the year before or years ago. I look at those pictures and I see that I was always whole. I was always the person I was meant to be. It just took some time to love Mwongeli. It took some time to look in the mirror and see that I was complete and loved and real.

I always wondered how some people are so authentically themselves. How some people are so comfortable in their skin. And now I know how. People come to a place of self-love after years of self-loathing. After years of heartbreak and brokenness and sadness and loss.

I am almost certain I will be heartbroken again (how else do we grow?) but at least the next time my heart breaks I will have myself to cry with. I will be my own support and cheerleader and teammate.

God, how beautiful is that?

 

you are allowed to be crazy so long as you read the fine print

art by lora mathis

Last night I took an inordinate amount of shrooms and I suddenly found myself feeling every repressed feeling surrounding my father’s passing. I was just out with a friend and then BOOM! I was pressed down by the immensity of the love and loss I quieted nearly six years ago. And obviously because I am the most irrational rational human this side of the Mason-Dixon line then I decided I needed to go see my dad.

Naturally.

I wanted to be where my dad was. I wanted to fly directly to Kenya and sit with him for the first time since the pallbearers lowered his casket into the red soil of the village. I wanted to feel his presence one more time by any means necessary.

I regret now that I tried to share my experience with various family members and friends. I regret that I was vulnerable and naked and I showed the part of myself I worked so hard to hide from the world all these years.

And the emotions I felt were not limited to my father’s passing. I was also feeling the entire weight of years of repressing my emotions and ideas in order to make other people feel comfortable. I quieted my own heart song in order to allow other people to feel more at ease.

I wanted to go to Kenya because that is where it all began and daily I wonder who I would be had my parents not decided for me at such a young age that I had to grow up in America. That I had to be oppressed and silenced and broken down because of the color of my skin or a difference in chromosomes.

So I went to the airport. I made the decision to purchase a one way ticket and just go home. I just wanted to go home and be next to my father. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to just give the big ole middle finger to this American dream and go back to where my dreams all began.

I made the mistake of calling my mom and one of my best friends to tell them where I was and where I was going and of course they attempted to intervene. Christ, I have had so many interventions that I could probably start sitting in on them and guiding people as to the correct and incorrect modus operandi.

I was met by a delightful young man named Rod who worked for United Airlines and he told me he didn’t think I really wanted to go to Kenya with just a backpack and two books. He kept telling me what I wanted as if I wasn’t fully present and fully capable of discerning what going to Kenya on a whim meant.

But I did understand and I still understand. And when two paramedics showed up with six police officers I fully understood that what I wanted was irrelevant. I understood that it didn’t matter if I recited Dante’s Inferno in its original language and told you all of Anna Karenina’s family members names or what Sylvia Plath was wearing when she died.

None of that mattered because everyone else saw what they wanted to see even though I was trying to show them what I was seeing. I was seeing my truth. I was seeing things more clearly than I had ever seen them before.

I am back in Logan Square after signing an AMA form for the paramedics and rolling my eyes at the people in blue. Because I might be crazy but I am free from the chains and weight of other people’s expectations. And next time I’ll just smoke a joint and buy my boarding pass before going to O’Hare and I certainly will not call my mom or my best friend.

I am a smart, strong, and genuine individual and gone are the days of asking permission to be who I am. Gone are the days of feeling as if I am stepping on someone’s toes by experiencing the world the way I experience it. I have spent time being psychoanalyzed. I have taken the countless medications. I have talked to multitudes of people and no one has ever offered me something even close to insight as to why I got the brain that I did.

Why some days are technicolor and other days are grayscale and other days are a mix of the two.

Honestly, I don’t even care what color my days are anymore. I’m just happy I’m alive to see the entire rainbow and then some.

 

i am someone not everyone knows how to love (and that’s j fine)

this is not romantic by lora mathis

Bukowski said that, “there is a place in the heart that can never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space”. I feel as though my whole life has been spent waiting, hoping, wishing that maybe somehow someone would be able to partially fill the emptiness. I have loved ones who fulfill me and who support me but I can’t shake the idea of romantic love. I can’t shake the idea of spending the rest of my life with someone and never tiring of them and even if I did, we would still power through, and grow together.

My parents were each other’s soulmates. I know that for a fact. And after my dad passed away my mom seemed a bit smaller somehow (don’t get me wrong, she’s still a firecracker) and you could just sense that something was missing.

I don’t believe that people need others in order to feel complete but I understand the longing, the wanting, the desire for partnership. I understand the desire to have just one person every day that you can count on. To have just one person you can glance over at and they know everything without a single word being uttered.

I think people hold themselves back from experiencing this sort of connection because it is scary and people change and people can leave or die or whatever. But I want to take that chance.

I spent so much of the last decade being selfish and growing and trying to figure out what I wanted and needed in order to thrive as the individual I am becoming. And I can say with absolute certainty that I have it pretty good, even when things were bad, and I do want to share my life with one person. I want that so intensely.

I hate this loneliness. I hate this emptiness that persists even when I have filled my life with so much joy and magical humans.

I sit here in this room on a sunny midsummer day and I am sad and confused as to when I will stop feeling this way, or if I ever will stop feeling like this. Perhaps I am not meant to be with anyone and perhaps that is the final piece of the puzzle that I need to sort out in order to gain some peace of mind.

you’re the dealer and the stoner with the sweetest kiss I’ve ever known

from The Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems

If I had a choice I wonder if I would choose to be a black woman from the beginning. I wonder if I would choose to be an immigrant, an artist, a marginalized part of society. I have learned so much walking around in this shell of blood and DNA and madness. I have learned so much and become more empathetic as a result of my experiences.

But I have also learned that people don’t want me to ask questions, to speak up for myself, or to exist confidently. People preferred when I was insecure (I still am) and I was crippled by the uncertainty of my existence and the world around me.

I have been called more terrible things by people now that I am living authentically. Now that I won the war inside my own head I am now stuck in a war against the world.

But you know? I am not worried about it. I am prepared to learn and fight and grow in whatever way the universe needs me to. I am not phased by the haters. I am not worried about people who want to tear me down because I have worked hard to build myself up from a very dark place.

I expect to still have darkness come creeping in. I know there will be some days where I will cry nonstop and the world will be unkind and try to make me participate in its insanity but for once I don’t need to let it into life.

There are a lot of people who have incredibly awful things to say about me. And I have made my mistakes, sure, but I am more than the sum of my parts. I know that. No, actually I believe it with every fiber of my being.

I won the war in my mind (for now) and I am at peace with myself.

The rest is just white noise.

grieve so that you are free to do something else

art by Jenny Holzer

I remember the night my father died and the doctors let us in to sit with his still warm corpse. It was only hours before he and my mother had returned from vacation in Kenya. I came home to see them and celebrate the holidays at a family friends house. I remember coming home from the friend’s house and my dad going into the garage and leaning up against the tool shelf.

He was clutching his chest and he told me he had to go to the emergency room.

And then a few hours later he was gone. We all sat around his corpse in the sickeningly bright room as my mom wailed over and over as she pressed her face into my dads still chest. I remember I was so embarrassed at how deep and tangible her pain was. I wanted her to stop crying, for my dad to get up, and for us all to return home like every other time my dad had a heart attack.

But this time he wasn’t coming home and we were not returning to the home that we knew before. My sisters eventually showed up from their respective parts of the city and suddenly all of us were in that room with the grief and the pain and the discomfort and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves except continue on with what remained of our lives even though the biggest part of it was being prepared for burial in a morgue.

I listened to my dads voicemail for weeks after he died until my boyfriend told me it wasn’t healthy. Until the university turned off my father’s voicemail and gave his office number to someone else as if he hadn’t worked there and lived there and loved there as he taught preschool teachers.

And when we went to Kenya and we were met by my Uncle Gideon and a whole crowd of friends and relatives at the airport, I was still embarrassed. I was embarrassed that my pain was now on display and that people were taking time away from their lives to grieve my father. I was ashamed of my grief.

I remember being so hot out in the village standing in the house waiting for people to pay their condolences and pretending like I remembered any of my hundreds of relatives. I remember grimacing when people said that my father’s death was for the best and that he was in a better place now.

A better place than with his wife and daughters?

And as they lowered his casket into the grave and people shared their countless memories of my father’s beautiful life I swayed a little in the heat and I felt my heart close in on itself.

My aunts held my mom up as she collapsed under the weight of the grief. And I looked to each of my sisters hoping one of them would show me how to behave. How to move forward when a piece of my heart was being lowered into the ground and covered with dirt and cement.

I still don’t know how to move forward. Some days I think that I have made a little progress but then other days I go to my mom’s one bedroom apartment and I am reminded of what we all lost.

I look at my niece and think about how my dad would be so in love with her and show her picture to all his friends whenever he got the chance.

I look in the mirror and I relax my face and I see my father looking back at me.

I laugh and my eyes crinkle the same way his did.

I am still grieving and I know that I will never be done doing so but at least finally, I am using that grief to do something else. Something my father would be so, so proud of.

Grieve.

Wail.

Break.

And then get up and do something else.

get you a girl who can do both

art by lora mathis

I suppose it would have been easier to sit quietly and maintain what little peace of mind I have left. It would have been easier to change the channel or turn the page rather than bombarding my psyche with all the violence that rains down upon black bodies. It would have been so much easier to post a music video with lyrics under the guise of sharing my feelings through the words of another artist.

But I have a voice. I have something I been dying to say for quite some time. I have something inside of me that is aching to escape.

And before I would have held myself back and not tried to stir the pot in an effort to make people see what a sham this entire existence is but then I only ended up doing myself a disservice in those instances because I internalized my trauma and it compounded my mental health issues.

I realize doing what I did in an effort to open a few people’s eyes was quite risky. It was quite the gamble on my personal well-being and my relationships with various people.

But I have said it before and I can only continue to say it again until I can no longer utter a sentence: If you are silent about your pain they will kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that decades ago and it is the only sentence I play over and over and over in my mind when the world comes stampeding onto my heart.

Was I hurt yesterday? Of course. Did I consider getting drunk to just overcome the sadness? Did I consider causing myself harm in order to escape the pain?

Of course. How could I not?

I am only human.

But I chose a few weeks ago to take care of myself. I chose to start running again, cutting down on alcohol and instead opting to be lucid for whatever this world has to throw my way.

It hasn’t been an easy journey but I am finally strong enough to handle the experience. I am finally strong enough not to be broken by broken people.

I know who I am and what I stand for and that is all I need to make it from sunrise to sunset. Well, that and the love and support of countless friends and family.

Everything else that attempts to hold me back is merely that, it’s just “attempting” to extinguish my fire and flame. I am the one who determines how I feel and what I allow to come into my mind and heart.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

 

 

 

i hope you know i tried even if you refused to see it

art by lora mathis

people are so odd. i could spend the rest of my life trying to understand and i would just be lowered down into my grave as confused as the first day i discovered the universe.

before i learned to take care of myself i internalized a lot of negative energy from the people around me. i often wonder if i am even truly depressed or i’m just awake. perhaps it is a combination of both.

but i have been working hard on accepting the world and my eventual role in it as a storyteller and artist and human.

and i am saddened by the reality of this existence but i am not disheartened as soundly as the first time i realized the truth.

i am on the more indifferent end of the sadness spectrum if that makes sense.

and i am trying not to let that indifference make me shut out people who are trying to navigate the world in much the same way that i am. people are trying and failing and breaking and laughing and loving like i am trying to do.

i am trying not to let the hate so completely engulf my soul that i don’t create and express myself after years of editing myself and being sidelined because of the color of my skin and the chromosomes i had no control over.

i am trying.

i am trying.

 

you accumulate garbage and it makes you beautiful

art by lora mathis

i’ve been feelin’ brand new lately, feelin’ A1, feelin’…myself. i don’t know when everything shifted but i am eternally grateful that they have. for the longest time i would read books and poems and prose and wonder when i was going to make it through the proverbial storm. i would be anxious and worried that the status quo was indeed the status quo and i was doomed to be a thotpiece forever and ever.

but somewhere between the vomiting and the depression and the drugs and the insane manic episodes everything fell into place.

the stars aligned and my shoulders began to feel a little lighter. my heart wasn’t as empty and cold and my eyes could finally see something besides the paralyzing sadness.

i have been nonchalantly joking that it’s only a matter of time before a meteor crashes down and ends this bliss. and honestly that would be totally fine. totally.

but i hope it waits a little. i hope i get a few more years before i am burned to death while covered in coconut oil.

i spent so many years hoping i would be happy. that i would be less depressed. less drunk. but i realized that happiness isn’t a feasible goal. yes everything is A1 but also i am sad. i am sad and angry and overwhelmed by this entire human existence.

and that is what humbles me. that is why i know i am finally ready for whatever comes next because truly, how strange, how goddamn strange it is to be anything…at all.

so i will keep one eye out for that meteor but i also fully intend to enjoy it while i got it. whatever it is, it is truly, undeniably, absolutely strange and wonderful and broken and real.

that’s real.

 

i lost my mind and gained a little peace of mind (funny how that works)

 

lisa frank nihilist

I tried for years to fit within the parameters society and my family set for me but I have come to accept that I have failed them all gloriously and that is just absolutely, completely fine by me. Because finally, for once, for a brief moment in this dreadful existence I like who I am. I am okay in my skin. Yes, of course I want to die. I don’t actually care if I die later tonight, if I’m being completely honest, but for once I would prefer if I didn’t. I would like to see what happens tomorrow for me, my friends, my family. I want to know if perhaps my life has some meaning (I am almost certain it doesn’t).

But either way, that’s okay? I am just riding this wave…the good, the bad, the manic, the semi-sane moments I can manage to hold onto.

My father always responded to any inquiry with, “Because of many becauses.”

Because of many becauses.

Because.

Why am I still alive? Because.

Why are you still alive? Because.

Because because because.

It’s been almost three years now since the first time I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Weird. I always knew I would end up there. I guess you could call it a sixth sense. I remember watching Girl, Interrupted and knowing those were my people. And similarly when I read for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbo is enuf I knew. I knew deep down in my heart of hearts that my kooky mind would probably land me in a psychiatric ward.

I am not ashamed to admit that now. It is a part of who I am. Just like my exes, and the drugs, and the booze, and the questionable life choices.

Ah, it’s all beautiful and sad and real and…me.

I can say with absolute certainty that I paid my dues. I have done the heart work and I intend to continue doing more of it as my life continues on. I am excited about it even.

Weird, huh?

This could go on but I want to go do other things (there is so much life out there, I gotta go see it my dear!) so I will leave you with this last anecdote: every so often I am riding the CTA and I see one or two of the folks I was in the psychiatric hospital with and we talk briefly. I am often saddened because a lot of them have returned to John Madden Mental Health Center (it is a real place and it is real, real scary and underfunded and exactly what you would imagine a shitty BARELY state funded mental health facility to be like) since our stay but also a lot of the folks are happy and healthy and doing the same heart work that I am currently doing.

And that’s real. That’s what we’re all trying to do.

I am doing some real heart work and I am real proud of myself. And I love myself.

Truly. I love who I am. Who I was. And who I have yet to become.

Because of many, many becauses.