I didn’t forget

Strange that insistence on being taken seriously in your personal experience of the political is so unsettling.

You speak your pain, and people rush to soothe it, settle it, quiet it; but if you speak again, to say ‘That’s not quite right’, consternation seems to arise. Frustration: be a good girl and play quietly please the adults want to have a nice settled time.

Do you think I’m claiming victim status? Because I put the blame where it belongs? Because I try to show you that I didn’t invent this in my silly little head? That I insist on pointing back to the source of the pain (and I know I am not the only one who feels it, that is the point entirely) – shining my feeble penlight in the dark at the webs? Trying to remark on points of connectedness? Trying to articulate what I see, trying to keep moving without drowning, without being bound by what I feel sticking to me? Discussing the patterns I’ve noticed? Pointing them out since they’re there and others *must* have noticed…

Why do you think that admitting pain is the same as claiming a bereft sort of weakness. Whatever I am it isn’t weak. I am tall and strong, rangy and loud. I stand with my feet firmly planted and my tongue ready – this body is tired because it has been through more than enough for each of its years. But why should acknowledging that be read as being ‘weak’, claiming the ‘benifit’ of victimhood. Fuck. I survive, I flourish, I throw my head back and laugh. To feel pain is not weakness, to really feel it, to honestly grieve gives strength.

But you know, don’t you that it’s bigger than any of us? That I can be as strong as I want, “Strong like an Amazon” but nothing changes, the webs are still there? So why make it about *victim mentality*. Isn’t it easier to just look where I point, to acknowledge that you’ve seen it too? I’m not asking you to solve it. But stop pretending that I’m crazy, or ‘just angry’ or wallowing, or wanting ’special treatment’.

Does writing on what makes me angry reduce me in your eyes to only anger? Do people not see that I have joy? Can they not see that through my writing? In the barbs, and the twists of words? In the tongue in cheek puns? In the sheer ferocity of my writing? It isn’t clean, pure, polished writing, it is writing that pours forth, I try not to hold it back, it shouts, it roars, it pours forth like a stream, it contradicts itself, it splits and fractures and it LAUGHS. It isn’t writing that will change the world…but I have found my voice and I will always speak, shout, laugh and sing.

What I say will change, will flow, will split and morph, will fold back upon itself and gush forward again. I refuse the linear narrative path set out for me, I reject it (even as it has already constituted me), I say no to jumping for class approval, I spit in the face of The Canon and I laugh when I sin against The Holy Church of Grammar. I embrace the insult hurled at women…we prattle, we waffle, we drift. Yeah? Take a face full of prattle then and see how it feels. No I am not One of The Greats, but I am great. Me, all of me.

Arrogance? No, joy. I have love and rage and deep bellowing lungs, long limbs, and teeth that flash like knives though we both know I don’t bite to draw blood (very often). And at night I remember that strength lets me lie like a baby and croon to my lover.I enjoy the strength in being bare and vulnerable, happy and warm. I love to love.

I didn’t forget any of this when I spoke of what the world does to women. I know who I am, who I am becoming, I know I am bigger than this, that this will pass…but I am smaller than it also, a cog, a unit, a flea in a system that does not care, and that thrives on silence, acquiesance and politeness.

Hence the blog name, hence the posts. Do I think I’m a revolutionary? No. But I think if we all talked more – really really talked, talked without fear of being laughed at, spoke the things we thought were crazy, told of the things we hid away, it could be an explosion of sorts.