So, I know I haven’t posted in a while. And I know you’re probably expecting some sort of think piece or reflection on last week’s presidential election in the U.S. The truth is, I have a bunch of feelings—just not many I feel like sharing at the moment. What I will say is that this feeling—the disappointed-but-not-surprised, should-I-even-be-disappointed, do-I-have-the-right-to-be-disappointed?, do-I-have-the-right-to-exist-fully–as-me spiral—is all too familiar.
And that is piercing in its own way.
My first election voting was 2016, so for me, voting has always meant holding uncomfortable truths and trying (impossibly) to feel which one weighs heavier. It has always been feeling guilted into choosing what’s “best for most” while swallowing the bitter truth of what will never sit right with me—the disregard for Brown and Black lives and the erosion of the sovereignty of nations like the ones that my ancestors fought to build.
As a Black, first-generation American woman, I can’t imagine many elections would’ve felt different, even before 2016.
I am tired of negotiating my personhood. I am tired of juggling complicated truths with a smile. I am tired of anticipating ‘firsts’ that are destined to ring hollow if the only change they bring is to an outward-facing image. I am tired because I know how much even that slight shift might mean to so many people—what it would’ve meant to me twenty years ago, or any little Black girl who didn’t even know not being left out of the conversation was an option—a girl with a name no one can manage to pronounce, with parents who broke their worlds in half to raise her in some small American town that didn’t want them. To the great-granddaughter of a sharecropper. To a grandmother who marched in Selma for the right to vote and, six decades later, finally cast a ballot for someone who laughs like her sister n’em.
I am tired of knowing intimately the power and potential in all of that, but also holding a quiet knowing, deep inside, that it is not enough. What’s the point of difference if it doesn’t make a difference? Is symbolism enough?
I’m tired of not having a straight answer. Tired of translating. Tired of feeling destined to be disappointed. Tired of the part of me that hoped for that little girl to have a taste of that simple hope, even if it was hollow– a momentary distraction in the midst of the ever-present need to push for better. I am tired of feeling my truths are too complicated and too untidy to share. Of only being allowed to be different in the same way everyone else is.
I don’t even know if any of this makes sense to anyone but me—or if I care whether it does.
I am tired.
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