As a child I would write short stories of mysterious magic and sassy, know-it-all female characters. I liked trios, often putting sisters, triplets, or three best friends as the protagonists. My less sincere work was largely influenced by whatever I was consuming in the living room alongside my mother; the first and only comic I ever made was titled “Real Mousewives of New York.”
I began writing to satisfy my treacherously vivid imagination which was both nourishing and debilitating to my anxious existence. I wrote stories about punishing villains because my nightmares were full of rapists and murderers. I gave my characters sisters because I have brothers. I wrote for the same reason I read: to be convinced that another world, without fear or complexity, existed.
My brother read The Giver for his middle school English class. After listening to our mother and his conversations about each chapter, – she read his books with him as an accountability strategy – I decided to read it too. I must have been in fourth or fifth grade. My mom downloaded it on my Nook, and my descent into the lifelong hole of violently heavy emotions began.
How terrifying it was to imagine life as Jonas, ‘The Receiver of Memory.’ Though in some ways I knew that I was already living as him. It was around this age that my consciousness shifted its focus from imaginative stories and the beauty of words to indescribable feelings and the tragedy of reality.
I had an impressive vocabulary growing up and it has just as impressively shrunk as I’ve gotten older. After multiple rounds of competitive testing throughout the fifth grade, I was selected to participate in our regional spelling bee. I purposely spelled my second word (column) wrong, even after the judges gave me a second chance and a generous hint, because I simply did not want to be there anymore. I was no longer interested in proving how well I could spell. I had real things to worry about.
Midway through high school I overcame that distaste for reading that so many kids undergo caused by academic demand. During that bleak Time In Between I wrote minimally, and it was mostly poorly executed fiction produced from boredom and internet brain rot. Despite being in a deep depression, I was not awarded the privilege of writing from a more noble state of desperation. Like so many of us did, I expressed my angst through black screened snapchat posts and cryptic meme dumps on my spam account.
My turn to the genre of self-help, the genre that saved me from the black hole of academic fatigue, however, was out of a desperation; to understand myself, the world, the memories I was receiving, and the futures of which I was dreaming.
I don’t actually remember when I returned to writing because it now feels as it feels to breathe: inevitably and infinitely a part of my past, present and future. But I do remember the manic bursts of a beg-full need to put the turbulence of my gut into words, or to get someone somewhere to understand that one insatiable desire that pumps from my heart to a tucked-away corner in my brain. I was ravenous. had fallen ill with purpose.
The relationship between a writer and her readers is dangerously powerful and, if all bodes well, intimately private. To write is to refine the details of my life down to the atoms of its living. For you to read this, with such compassion and authenticity as you do, is to meet me on the spiritual plane that is the relationship between you and I, writer and reader. I sit in the booth beside you, ready for confession. I pray that you forgive me. Not God, you. I pray that you will understand me. My words are my confessions.
My writing demands satisfaction and pleasure. I have no control over who, what, where, why, or how my writing loves or doesn’t love. As much as I am my writing, I am also its vessel, limited by the physical world. My writing does not know such limits.
Writing sensual and sensitive (see Audre Lorde and Sylvia Plath).
Writing must be provoked by and conducted with introspection and commitment (See Toni Morrison).
Writing must be motivated by a patient urgency (See James Baldwin).
Writing must know its song (See The Odyssey).
Writing must engage with, be open to, and take note from ancestral guidance (See Maryse Condé and Saidiya Hartman).
Writing must have fun (See Andrea Lawlor).
Language can liberate as effectively as it can incarcerate minds within The Power’s jail cell. I mourn the loss of intention behind language as much as I encourage playing with it. I am a writer full of contradictions, and so are my words. I don’t intend to work this out anytime soon nor do I pressure you to. But, I do urge you to take the time to learn how language functions within you, outside of you, and recognize the contradictions and similarities between the two. Be aware of language so that you can use it how it means to be used, how you wish to use it, and how it wishes to use you, me, and us.
The Mousewives of NY - so dope!