Fuel: Joy & Rage
“Joy & Pain” by Frankie Beverly & Maze
Get mengay’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My feelings are as intense as the full moon. I find joy when I can express myself freely, but it comes at a cost when I’m here (at my parents’). I almost came out to my mom twice today because making fun of queer people is making fun of your daughter. I don’t understand why they find it so wrong about a person’s sheer existence, other than it makes them uncomfortable, like, as if we are a people meant to harm everyone purposefully; everything feels so backwards to me, and this was by design.
I like that my brain was attached to the things that interested me, but the amount of unlearning and rewiring I’ve been doing for the last few years brings both clarity and reason to why I’m exhausted. I get clarity that this country was built without me in mind, with silence as a programmed tool for normality, paired with the “not my problem” mentality of it all. My excitement to read books by marginalized folx is being met with an old version of myself who never thought once she would be queer, and the exhausting thing is having the capacity to do this work while also working a full-time job. Typing this out sounds pathetic because it makes me sound “lazy,” but I refuse to say that about myself either, it’s because, truly, I am damn tired. I’m tired of the masking, not allowing myself the creative freedom to express myself through what I wear, through my special interest in t-shirts with a message. Without it, I feel like a shell of myself. Repeating these acts to “keep the peace” here does not sit well with me, it just raises my body temperature, tenses my shoulders, my teeth start to clench, my mouth closes — the ultimate shutdown and complete dismissal of my own experience.
