I am a Millennial. I am the creature that your local news station seems to be obsessed with. I prowl in the night, screaming at you, making sure you know exactly how hurt and bruised I am. I am victimhood at it’s best.
I work twelve hours a day, usually two or more jobs, just so I can afford to live and eat and do the actual job I want to do. If I am lucky, I have parents that help me out (but not without making me feel like shit for it every day). I don’t save my money because I spend it all on luxuries like shampoo, a roof over my head, and food.

I grew up with parents who told me to be whatever I wanted to be but didn’t tell me my dream came with a set of impossible conditions. One of those conditions includes developing debilitating mental illnesses and constantly trying to be the best in a class of over five-hundred students. Eventually, I go into massive debt to go to college and work towards a degree that’s essentially useless. And when I graduate I find that either I’m just not good enough or people just “aren’t looking right now.” I spend the rest of my life paying student loans that are designed to keep me in debt.

I sit around the Thanksgiving table and listen to the internalized racism fly out of the mouths of my family. I feel the sting of their yells whenever I decide to call them what they are: racist. I never bite my tongue. I constantly argue, despite their unwillingness to see my side. “People need to stop playing the victim, and get things done on their own.” I try to get them to understand that it’s not playing the victim, it’s asking to be treated with respect. They say, “then they should act right,” or “then they should stop killing their own.” Eventually, I leave the table, because they will never see anything past their own assumptions of the world.

I fight against my internalized hatred of femininity because in our generation we are only just now realizing how good it is. A lot of us think that to be feminine is to be weak because women and people like them are weak. Feminism is a naughty word, used to describe one type of woman, and that type of woman is not one that belongs in society.

I struggle to accept myself because everyone always told me that my gender is not something I can change. I go against my instincts of self-hatred because I am tired of being unhappy. I alienate the people around me because they do not like who I really am. I listen to people from both ends of the political spectrum politicize my identity and argue like they have that right.

I am fetishized by straight people, who get upset when I tell them to stop. I get yelled at when I tell them they are not part of my community. I tell them that they don’t get rewards for being decent people. I hear people cry because I tell them the “A” doesn’t stand for allies because allies don’t through our pain. Allies didn’t experience the AIDs epidemic, the death of Matthew Shepard, the shooting at Pulse, or the feeling of being scared to hug your lover in public.

I listen to everyone say I am the problem. My parents, my teachers, my politicians. I hear people say I think I am entitled to something, but I don’t know what. I hear people tell me I need to buck up and stop complaining, yet I can’t go one day without that same person crying over a goddamned gender-neutral bathroom. Double-standards spring up all around me, and I’m the problem for pointing them out. Maybe I do think I am entitled to something: equality.

I protest and fight to change things, but my protests are nothing more than whining and petty complaints to the “real world.” I demand to be heard because if I’m not then I might as well turn over and die. After all, that’s what most people would rather me do. I watch as my country falls to the wayside because the generation before me is too scared to let things change. I cry, because my future may not exist. My life is an inconvenience to people who won’t be on this world much longer and they punish me for that. They take away my education, my health, and my identity.

I am a Millennial. I am not a creature. I am a person. I cry in the night because you’re the one who hurts and bruises me. You say that my generation doesn’t know how life works anymore, despite being the generation that’s working hardest to live. I am survival at it’s best.

Thanks,
Shann Smith.