My Government Means to Kill Me

by Rasheed Newson

My whole life, I’d been viewed as a sissy. Some people found my effeminate mannerisms disgusting; others found them alluring. I came to believe that I had been stamped a certain way, and that the stamp was immutable. This is not to say that I was rebuking my effeminate side; this wasn’t about subtraction but addition. On the train to and from Queens, I discovered I was capable of expansion. We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children—too young to recognize the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we’d never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.