Self Portrait. 🤍

self-respect has made me vulgar, and this is the end of an ending.

three months ago, a false narrative was created about me. in a time of incomprehensible depression, when i needed certain people to reaffirm my personhood, i was humbled by their emotional dissonance. what guttered me was that this wasn’t an unreasonable desire. it also wasn’t difficult to recognise. not when someone decimates your sense of being like that. all it took, was a quiet declaration that i’m seen; that in lieu of the person i was made out to be, a trying heart remained. that was all i needed, all i wanted. to be remembered and from those memories, for my personhood to be affirmed. we talk a lot about the impact of our actions, but not enough about the lack thereof and how this has a way of saying far more than we think it does.

i heard everything. and with each vapid word, the knife lodged itself deeper in my sternum. this great lack, also revealed that any promises of being neutral, were immediately stained by contemplation. because contemplation implies that there isn’t an exact neutrality to things. after all, we are humans and subject to meditation and that was precisely the other problem. i did not ask for allegiance to my cause, because i did not have a cause. i was not fighting a battle, only veering away from someone who wanted to. there was never a reason to ask for someone to actively ‘choose’ me. but those that did, did and that said far more than anything else i’d seen from the others. at this point, the jokes were writing themselves and hypocrisy was playing a juvenile game. to say this was a humbling realisation would be an understatement.

the moment i refused to be a fictional character in that person’s altruistic reckoning, it seemed as though i’d cemented a place in hell. i was made to feel like there was no good reason to hold my own in that refusal. people were also dictating how else i should find healing. it often ran in the tone of ‘you need to talk things out, we all need to talk things out because the “he says she says” are not good at all’. the irony of such a statement was that when i was talking, nobody was listening. i don’t mean listening but understanding. i spoke until the words ran out, until my tongue could feel itself eroding at the floor of my mouth. until i was voiceless and on the edge of death. there aren’t a lot of ways to describe being suffocated. worse yet, i finally understood that sometimes, people would sacrifice emotional presence for political correctness. of course, this wasn’t out of malice, but clearly an overestimated belief that they could manage both at once.

as i recognised this, my decent into anger sunk deeper into the rabbit hole of grime and shame. i didn’t lose myself; i lost the world within me. rage became a steady pacifier. it was the lighthouse, reminding me that i have valid reasons to be upset. it made up for the great lack and affirmed my personhood, almost to a fault. i’ve quoted her before, but Franny Choi said it best: ‘there is a version of me that isn’t neck-deep in her invented filth’ and here that version of me was, paying the price for digging us out of toxic shame. i actively refused to submit to an image of a person i wasn’t and participate in the naval gazing of an unhealed person, who felt entitled to me at any and all capacities. and this decision came with a weighted cost of being isolated. of which, this isolation taught me how simple my initial need to be affirmed actually was.

all this to say, i’ve come to accept that someone liberated themselves at the expense of my character. and that people proceeded to disappoint me in a way that profoundly shifted how i expect things from others. i’ve grown comfortable with walking away from situations that are made intentionally complicated too. i’m also happy to admit that i have no desire to defend myself anymore. nor reason to explain more than i already have. it is all meaningless, not because my story doesn’t matter, but because i will not argue with a tree that bears no fruit. i just can’t pledge allegiance to things that are void of love. and this means accepting that i will always be perceived in ways that will never sit right with me. but if this is the price i must pay for my sanity, for my life, for an assured return to self, then i am willing. i’d like to part with a couplet from the brilliant Ada Limón’s poem, Notes on the Below: ‘I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.’ right you are, Ada. i’m ready to crawl out of this cave that does not belong to me.

Thando. x

poem links:

Notes on the Below by Ada Limón - Poems | Academy of American Poets: Notes on the Below

I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame by Franny Choi | The Offing: I Guess By Now I Thought I'd Be Done With Shame

🎵:

You Missed My Heart by Phoebe Bridgers

Motherland by Julia Jacklin

Chainsaw The Door by The Garden