I have sent a digital copy of Audre Lorde’s essay, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” to multiple people in my life. I doubt the link has ever been opened on their end, let alone considered, digested, invested in, discussed–
though I imagine reactive disgust to the topics at hand. To call a condensed spectrum a binary means identity erasure. A grab at the tiny, mighty pink end of a Ticonderoga to scrub the bi and wish it goodbye.
I am sitting here facing a diagnosis and wondering how illness rooted its way into my brain’s soft dirt and spawned a maze of limbs that grow faster than I shear. Did Audre Lorde’s trauma harvest her mind, the same one crafting A Burst of Light?
-making me catch my breath wondering how many women I’ve done a disservice to while cradling my compulsions and calling them pretty. If I leave anxiety on the doormat and depression in a trinket dish, can I say I always wear them? I drown out thunderstorms with headphones. I swallow pills with iced tea. I sleeve my feet in designer socks when the floor germs scare me. Am I even real, ill, beneath this veneer, and does the binary call me traitor when I cry hope into its cracks?
“shutup spoiled/lazy/brat/fat/ugly/weird/emo/awkward/stupid (bi)tch”
is a record in my head and, wait, was that when the seeds sprouted in my mind? A kid holding out her hands waiting for love to fall and catching language instead from binary’s purveyors– the someones she loved taught her so many lies.
What would you say, Audre, if you were here in the hell of now? Am I even entitled to wear your words tattooed on my skin or am I feeding the problem beast by saying, yes, me too? How do I weed a tangled mindscape by hand when I ache for a scythe
and how do I honor the spectrum of You?
//
Cardigan: Z Supply
Tulip Dress: Z Supply
Shoes: Toms
Earrings: FYIE, Independent Artist
Hair Clip: Natural Life (not pictured)
wallflower. 