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Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.
You know, when you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them. We’ve been stripped clean of social protocol. There’s an understanding that everyone is trying to survive and who is going to get in the way of that?
There is an emotional abandonment that comes with poverty and being Black. The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anything else. You just believe you’re the leftovers.
Once again more secrets. Layers upon layers of deep, dark ones. Trauma, shit, piss, and mortar mixed with memories that have been filtered, edited for survival, and entangled with generational secrets. Somewhere buried underneath all that waste lives me, the me fighting to breathe, the me wanting so badly to feel alive. But this is the journey! The only weapon I have to blast through it all is forgiveness. It’s giving up all hope of a different past.
The only sign that something had shifted in her was her uneaten toast.
When I look back at what I’ve seen, my only thoughts are that it’s amazing how much a human body can endure.
As an actor, you become a soul searcher. A thief. After the curtain call, you are left with you.
Something inside me, however, must have had different ideas, because I fell deep and hard into a major sadness. It was a depression about trading in my dream.
I asked God for a boyfriend, professional acting status, and the experience of traveling overseas. But I didn’t ask for wisdom. I didn’t ask for self-love. And it showed.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.
