I was letting fear hold me back

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https://play.ht/articles/545d620ed448I get my best ideas in the shower. Today I got the worst. I caught myself in a loop, thinking about the same question in many versions. What would happen if my coworkers read my articles? What would they think of me? Would they think less of me? Make fun? Shame me? I held my razor in my right hand and let the water rinse the shaving cream I just slathered on my legs. It was a paralyzing thought.

My writing grew during the quarantine, and I feel guilty for admitting it. But it took a virus and a forced homecation to realize I needed to stop listening to that voice. But this was not an easy feat. It is still a work in progress, and I think it may be this way forever and always. With its domineering tone, it forces me to listen to its scary warning. It’s sneaky, too. When I least expected, it seeps inside my head. Like today, while in the zone shaving a month’s worth of hair growth.

It’s always a warning. Urgent, too. Forcing me to stop and pay attention.

“Perhaps this is not a good idea,” it would say.

Or “What would your family think of this?” It would remind me.

Last year I wrote about a teenager in love with her best friend. The voice was not there during the drafting, but when I opened the left side of my brain to edit, it shouted. “What if your friends ask if you are gay?”

When I passed the invisible line to danger, it would warn me, and I would step back. I didn’t want to step on a landmine, and it kept me safe. But safe writing is boring writing, and no one reads boring writing unless it’s required reading.

I embodied white women when I read books in High School. Sometimes white men. I could see parts of my personality in them, but never my body. Nonetheless, I wore the ill-fitting costume long enough to finish the story. The books in the library weren’t any better, and the outfit itched just as much, and it was tight too, but I needed the books, and I wore it long enough to escape my reality in them.

The women in these stories didn’t have curly hair like mine. Not the kind you can’t comb once it’s dry, and without product would morph into a brown halo. They didn’t have my misaligned eyes; theirs weren’t even brown half the time. They were blue or green. The paler, the more beautiful it seemed. None of them had my hairy arms. Theirs would be smooth and light. When they disrobed, their nipples were not dark like mine. Rosy pink was beautiful, it seemed. But I read and traveled away in my head, all the while thinking beauty was something that did not reflect in my mirror.

Growing up, I always thought angels were beautiful. I would see pictures of them in my grandma’s walls and candles with offers of copper pennies in front of them. With long locks and big swords, the combination of feminine and masculine made them a sight to behold. Every time I passed them, I looked. They were beautiful, I thought, and strong. I wanted to be like them, I’ve always had.

Is it so hard to believe that, like them, we look at the soul when we fall in love? That perhaps our bodies embody much more than the biological sex, and our hearts are much more complex and less straightforward than we think?

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

But I didn’t ask myself those questions then, and I wrote a story with fear hovering over my shoulder. In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So finally, I would write one true sentence and go from there.”

I hadn’t written one true sentence. Not until a virus put me inside my home and forced me to face my thoughts. While others are dying, fearing uncertainty and struggling economically, I am deep inside my head, battling the safest of my voices to identify my own. And I feel guilty and conflicted, and sometimes I win, and sometimes I lose.

I once kicked a lover from my bed when he said my labia and nipples looked dirty because they were brown. He’d never seen them in my color, he said. I became defensive, covered my breast, and kicked him out. But deep in my heart, I feared he was right. Maybe I was dirty and not beautiful. After all, I hadn’t read the words dark and beautiful in close proximity unless to do with hair dye.

I once had a friend tell me my son would grow up gay because I was raising him without a male figure in the home. I was 24 then, and I didn’t know what I know now. He asked me if I would kick my son out when I find out he was gay. In all my ignorance, and with little thought, I said no. He laughed and said I would kick him out. I mulled over his words, but they didn’t ring true. I didn’t know about love is love, but I knew my love for my son was unconditional, and nothing could take it away.

Before, my writing was barely making a ripple in the water. Yet my experiences punctured deep cuts, sometimes touching bone. I know now if it doesn’t bleed, it’s not true.

The first manuscript I wrote, with the friends that fell for each other, I filled it with bandages. It bled, and I covered it up. Even Victor Frankenstein could recognize some of him in his monster. I couldn’t. What came out of me was not of me. I let the voice take over my hands and write words that were not true with my own keyboard. Not anymore.

It took a virus for me to see that I don’t live in a monochrome world. I live in a world of many colors and pain and love. Where every human is broken, and each day they struggle, but each day they try to find the tiniest spot with light.

I can’t write about pale nipples when I don’t have a pair. I can’t write about a black and white world when I see in color. I can only write my truth.

To think of it, the voice was not scary. I was scared, and it seemed safe. It gave me a safety net, and I took it because I didn’t want to scrape my knees in the fall.

Today I caught it and stopped it before it went on a tangent with the incessant what-ifs, and I shrugged my figurative shoulders and said: “I don’t care.”

I don’t care, and I repeat it till it’s true, and I write the truest of sentences and go from there. I know they are true because my heart raises, and scars hurt. But I don’t stop to put a bandage, I continue to write, and let it bleed on the keyboard. And my words are beautiful, and they are strong. And I remember the angels with their long locks and big swords, and I write about my broken world. And I’m not afraid anymore.