Duality Read online

  However, I am not afraid of public speaking. If I was,

  this career would be a strange form of self-torture.

  I get the usual small nerves that most people do, but I

  do not have a deep-seeded terror of standing in front of

  a microphone or rows of chairs.

  I can connect with people, sharing and showing,

  presenting information and myself at the same time.

  So why does my voice tell a different story?

  Better yet, why is it not doing so when I speak verses,

  when I’m speaking in front of a group about the most

  vulnerable parts of myself?

  How come when I stand to give a presentation on

  pedagogy and educational research

  I sound like my throat is trapped in a river of tears,

  But when I am speaking my truth in poetic form

  The words flow like an ocean, taking down the mud

  banks of that river of tears that likes to disguise my confidence.

  Why is it

  That when I share my heart through poetry my words

  are strong and sweet and dangerous all at once

  But when I stand to explain a text I know inside and

  out, my words turn outside in, my voice shaking like a

  tree in a storm.

  I’d like to believe….

  that when I speak my poetry

  It is not my voice doing the talking.

  But it is the fire

  that has been in my veins since I first grasped a pen

  And that is the difference

  My voice finds.

  There’s an odd difference between a PowerPoint

  presentation in front of colleagues

  And presenting my bloodied, battered heart

  On a table in front of strangers.

  One should be natural and the other an obstacle course

  But I have never been conventional when it comes to

  obstacles.

  I have always been good at sharing my emotions.

  No one would dare call me mysterious because I wear

  every feeling on my face

  Not on my sleeve

  But in my eyes and brows and twitching corners of my

  mouth.

  So perhaps it is time to let go of this insecurity,

  This fear that the up-and-down breathy noises from my

  vocal chords

  Should dictate my authority,

  Instead of the wrinkle of my brow,

  The lifting of my hands

  And the poems spilling from my mouth faster than the

  poison of doubt and insecurity.

  Perhaps it is time I embrace that shakiness is my

  appearance

  But strength is my nature.

  These dreams are mountains I can’t physically climb.

  Pretty to look upon from afar, almost impossible to truly conquer.

  I’ll take that ‘almost' and loop it through a hook.

  Use it as my stronghold to scale the mountain.

  Dodge the boulders of doubt and fear and exhaustion,

  Dig footholds into the earth where no path has formed.

  I know I’ll cut my palms and scrape my knees on the way.

  Tumble back down into the valley of ‘not-good-enough’

  and look to the top that may kill me on my way up.

  But I hear the view is a lot better up there.

  I hate decorating my home.

  What is a color scheme anyway?

  I like all of the colors.

  I like all of them together.

  I like all of them clashing and combining and creating new ones

  And I don’t care if it’s not what it’s “supposed” to be.

  I’m supposed to hang pictures at different levels

  Cover the white spaces with other white spaces

  Or greys and blacks with pops of colors.

  How boring is that?

  Maybe it is because I don’t understand,

  But I find it odd that groups of people educated in

  Different ways than me

  Have decided what makes something visually appealing.

  How can you decide for the masses what is appeal to them all?

  It is all a manufactured elegance, a false naturalism, shabby chic.

  Something created to look disheveled makes no sense to me.

  Maybe I’ll just decorate my entire living room in shades of black,

  My bedroom every hue of the rainbow.

  My bathroom will be a white blank canvas,

  My kitchen with pops of color from the food I cook.

  All of this is simply to say,

  I am no longer wasting my time trying to live my life

  In a way someone else has decided that I should.

  A living, breathing being cannot exist in ink and paper, they say.

  I say,

  Ink runs through our veins,

  And our skin is just like the paper you shame.

  Who are you to say that we are not

  Living, breathing poems ourselves?

  Don’t call me baby unless you want me to be yours.

  Because I’m inches away from falling off this cliff you’ve raised me up on

  And the breath from that one word

  Will send me toppling over.

  You deserve

  Every

  Single

  Good thing

  That has happened in your life

  And absolutely

  none

  of the wrong you’ve been dealt.

  One upon a time

  My monsters chased me down

  And broke my bones and my mind.

  And I fought my way through the mud

  And their games

  And their lies

  And came out a little worse for wear

  But so much better than before.

  I’ve been in the dark for so long

  That the first light felt like poison, wrong.

  The thing I’d wanted for so long,

  To heal,

  Was so foreign that I mistook it

  For another attack and I attempted to run

  Until my eyes finally adjusted to its warm glow.

  Rise up from the grave of the past.

  Resurrect yourself from the pain and death of before

  And commit to stepping out of the darkness that previously buried you alive.

  You may still be bleeding

  But your heart is still beating.

  And nothing is more powerful

  Than a soul that knows it is not done living.

  You got through this.

  This year,

  This pain,

  This trauma,

  This horror.

  If you were able to get through this,

  Then nothing will

  Ever, ever

  Be able to stop you again.

  Farewell 2020. You were the deepest, shittiest, shared horror.

  The most toxic thing we can do is tell people who are hurting that

  “No one will love you until you love yourself.”

  For people like me,

  With depression and anxiety,

  We will never truly love ourselves,

  And by that logic we are unworthy of love.

  However,

  That has been God’s greatest gift to me.

  The fact that unconditional love

  Does not require self-love first.

  Grace is loving the unlovable

  And the souls that feel they will never be enough.

  What a mind-bending,

  Unbelievable

  Concept

  To be loved without truly loving yourself

  And to be able to ask for help

  Accepting a love that seems so impossible

  Because you always thought that was too good to be true.

  It’s never over.

/>   It will never be truly over,

  But I can live amidst its existence.

  Some things never truly end

  Because their effect lingers for years after the event,

  After the feeling.

  “Over” is overrated,

  Perhaps because it does not always exist.

  It is a hope for the future

  But maybe we never truly move on from traumatic events.

  We learn to live amidst the pain that they left within us.

  Things are never truly over

  But they can be overcome.

  Gentle Power

  As a child I was fascinated by mermaids.

  Mythical creatures who were both beautiful and powerful,

  Containing the music of the ocean and the intensity of the feminine all in one.

  Beings that spurred from the Greek sirens, even more powerful than their modern counterparts.

  Women who could lure men to their death with just their voices and were feared and respected.

  So unlike how I felt when I stood in the face of others and let them define me.

  I was never comfortable with being labeled by others,

  So rather than allowing them to put a moniker on my existence,

  I decided to create my own, harsh labels in response.

  I was not gentle or fragile.

  I desired to be strong and courageous.

  But somewhere along the way I forgot that gentle is not a negative term.

  In my desire to harness the power within myself

  I crushed the other aspects of my heart that nurture creativity and friendship.

  I went from outspoken to abrasive, honest to unkind

  And I stopped believing in love around the same time that I lost it.

  And instead of taking that situation and seeing the beauty in it, I turned cold.

  Like the icy waves of the ocean that surround the sirens that I had once idolized

  But those idols were really just isolated, and darkened not fully human.

  Using their shallow strengths in an attempt to harness power.

  As a child I wasn’t capable of understanding such deep metaphors

  But now as an adult, a woman,

  A woman with complex feelings, hopes, dreams, desires,

  I see that mermaids and sirens are fairytales for a reason

  And that the ocean they lived in is what I should strive to be instead.

  Because there is a way to be powerful without abandoning grace.

  The same ocean that crashes against sand, eroding boulders the size of skyscrapers,

  And produces hurricanes that can tear apart anything man could possibly make,

  That same ocean also ripples and flows and kisses the shore that bare feet run across.

  The moon and the tides pull and push, a steady rhythm that ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows,

  Reminding us that there is beauty in the monotony if only we look close enough.

  When a child bends down to look at the sands on the shore,

  Their world is small.

  They count grains of sand and pink seashells while the water tickles their toes

  And there is beauty in this massive, powerful force.

  There is balance, a mixture of courage and tenderness.

  And unlike the mythical women who are shadows of personalities

  Representing only a man’s negative perception of the “evilness” of the female gender,

  I will pride myself on the strong and the small.

  I will not resort to shallow shadows of strengths

  But instead will pour out both spouts of my character,

  The rebel, the instigator, the one hungry for change and tough conversations

  The side of me that flames strongly and can run wild if I neglect my other half.

  The half of me that I tried to bury so long, thinking that kindness means weakness,

  And gentleness, inferiority.

  The side of me that loves deeply,

  But was so hurt in the past that it pretended love didn’t even exist.

  The side of me that had to have its wall dismantled slowly.

  These clichés can make the deepest pains seem as relevant

  As the pop songs that can capture a singer’s voice,

  But not the melody of a broken heart.

  Or one that is piecing itself back together.

  These sides of us are often smothered.

  We’re told they are too much,

  That we must have an equal balance of softness and strength.

  But who is ever perfectly balanced?

  I’m convinced they must be the most boring person in the world because when my flames run wild,

  I need my friends who lean towards softness to cushion my rebel heart.

  And when my gentleness takes charge,

  I find the beauty in the souls of others that is unknown without recognizing your own.

  These fairytale creatures are marvels to look at, to read about,

  But what I’ve learned while chasing fairytales

  Is that sometimes the true happy ending is the one you make right where you are.

  Grocery shopping, studying, cursing the traffic lights…

  To search endlessly for happiness guarantees that you will never find it.

  But instead, to ebb and flow with the waves of this life,

  To not give up but give out,

  Love and bravery equally,

  That is where happiness lies.

  Contentment. To be washed by the water and cleansed by the sea

  And to recognize your power and your gentleness can be the exact same thing.

  PART FIVE

  GOLDEN

  Grace is a funny thing.

  No matter how many times I return to it on my knees,

  Crying and stumbling and empty promises to do better,

  A guarantee that I will leave as soon as I came,

  It still welcomes me back with open arms.

  I am done with the motivational quotes,

  The inspiring captions, the thoughts and self-help and get-it-together lectures.

  I am through will the well-intended help from people

  Who need the real saving just as I do.

  I’m thankful for it,

  but I am so done with advice,

  False modesty,

  And acts of well-intended but shallow kindness.

  I am done with puddles of picture-perfect character.

  I’m ready to drown in the depth of brokenness.

  Closure does not truly exist.

  When we say we want “closure,” we want to be told we are justified,

  We are right.

  But when we seek closure from broken people

  The wounds do not heal,

  They rip back open.

  If you’re seeking closure,

  Then you want the wrongs that have been done to you

  Righted by those who committed them.

  But honey,

  If they truly wanted to give you closure,

  They would never have hurt you in the first place.

  Make your own closure.

  Let go.

  How silly was I

  To think that I should challenge a strong woman

  Or think myself better than her.

  At odds we were ready to destroy the world,

  But together we could have ruled it.

  Maybe I paint my lips bright red,

  Let the echoes of my heels announce my presence,

  And let my skirts swing across my hips

  To let your own assumptions be your end.

  Because nothing feels better than proving someone wrong

  Who underestimated you based on appearance

  When they should have feared your character.

  Beautiful one,

  When will you realize that all along

  you weren’t only the flower growing

  But the sun helpin
g others blossom

  As well?

  None of this self-care stuff matters if I’m not caring for my soul.

  I can read a million self-help books,

  Take bubble baths the color of cotton candy

  And pledge to cut out the toxic people in my life,

  But none of it matters if I don’t attack my pain at its source.

  That sort of separation from the word of God

  And the one who is supposed to be guiding me if I would

  Just

  Let

  Him.

  Some people are too small to hold all of you.

  Your brilliance will blossom out of their hands.

  Your skills will slip through their fingers.

  Your power pouring out of their palms.

  What you need is not someone who can hold you in the palms of their hands.

  You need someone to hold only your own hand

  Instead of your entire being

  And stand by your side as your flourish and thrive.

  If I am wrong, and this world is all there is with nothing