INHERITANCE/WEEK 9 of 17
Interlude: THE AUDACITY OF STILL BEING HERE
Interlude: THE AUDACITY OF STILL BEING HERE
I have died a thousand times.
In the silence of rooms where I learned to make myself smaller.
In the hands of men who only held me in the dark.
In the mirror, where I spent years trying to love something I was taught to hate.
I have buried myself in the spaces between other people's comfort.
Lowered my voice so they wouldn't flinch.
Made my body easy to leave so no one had to carry the weight of me.
I have been a funeral no one attended.
And yet—
I wake up.
Every day, I wake up.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Move through a world that never made space for me,
but take up space anyway.
I am not supposed to be here.
I was supposed to break,
supposed to fold,
supposed to be a name they only whispered in past tense.
But here I am.
A mouth that still speaks.
A body that still moves.
A breath that still fills the room.
I have died a thousand times.
And still—
I am here.
And ain't that something?
Tomorrow, August 17th at 8am CST
THE AUDACITY OF STILL BEING HERE
The full essay that digs deep into what it means to survive when the world calculated your destruction. Four movements exploring the machinery of erasure, the cost of visibility, and the revolutionary act of continuing to breathe when they never expected you to last this long.
Preview:
"Because I am dangerous. I am everything they tried to erase, still standing. I am the disruption of every neat narrative they told themselves about what happens to people like me. I am proof that their systems of elimination are not as efficient as they believed."
Let that be enough—for now.