Jamil A. Bee
Jul 23, 2017 · 51 min read

CW: assault, domestic violence, child abuse, race and gender based trauma, suicidal thoughts.

Other People’s Heartbeats

In my first week at the evergreen state college I watched as a white man took the stage at our mandatory convocation event to say something of little importance to me, followed quickly by another white man eager to share some equally uninteresting information. As the later of the two white men ended his speech and was beginning the introduction of a white woman who had written a book, about our environmental responsibilities, that we had all been heavily encouraged to read. A book few of us had even opened. A book that had failed to make room for race or any intersectionality within the important conversation of the earth’s vulnerable state. Before the white woman could be fully introduced, out of heaven, hell, or the back of the room two people cut into the unimportant display happening on the stage in the front. We, those held in white folding chairs waiting to be told what our time at evergreen could promise, watched as AR and Lawrence, two Black Trans Femmes claimed space at the front of the room. We watched as they held up signs that stated, “evergreen cashes in diversity checks while ignoring Black lives”. We watched as our school’s president, George Bridges, attempted to silence the very clear demonstration happening in the middle of this student orientation event. We watched as George Bridges, the second man who had unimportant things to say, tried his very best to put AR and Lawrence back in their place. The event continued with the third white person on the schedule answering half hearted questions about her book, AR and Lawrence kept on trying to be heard, and the school cameras avoided showing the truth in Black Trans anger. I had spent the last few years preparing myself for this battle and wars to come. I had spent a life time training myself to be someone who would stick up for myself and people being wronged. I had spent the last 20 minutes trying to find strength within myself to stand the fuck up, and stand the fuck up I did. In blushing and bashful uncertainty I walked over to the Black women I had been making eye contact with throughout the disruption and with equal uncertainty we marched together to the front to stand beside the two people holding signs that demanded that we were human. George told us we had to wait to tell the room that we mattered. We waited as that third white person finished and we waited as a fourth white person attempted to teach the amassed students the school song. The song of a school that had just told its most silenced students to wait and be silent. A song that mattered more in those moments than Black lives. When the rhythmless jumble of words ended George permitted us to speak, permitted himself to leave, and anybody who did not want to engage with our pain to leave as well.

It was AR and Lawrence who did the work to orientate me, did the work to demand what I deserve as a student from the school. This labor of being the bell that sounds the alarm of injustice has historically fallen to Trans Women/Femmes of Color. It will always be those who are the most vulnerable who notice the signs of danger the quickest. It is also us who are given the least resources to change our environment. This is why we see Trans Women/Femmes forced into sex work, drug dealing, and other dangerous professions. These are too often the only places we can find work and they are also not jobs that are protected by the state. We are not protected by anyone. We are isolated from not only resources but also community. White supremacy stole mothers from us, fathers, siblings, family, home, langauge, body anatomy, and self respect. White supremacy left us to those who howl in the night with no armor and told us not to fight or cry when we see teeth.

“We must destroy in order to rebuild, Wake up, you might as well. Oh are you oh are you satisfied? Oh are you satisfied? Rebel oh rebel”, lyrics from Lauryn Hill’s song “I Find it Hard to Say” that reflect the call of AR and Lawrence’s protests. The song suggests that any level of self satisfaction while others are in danger needs to be questioned and any attempts at reform does not address the needs of the most marginalized. When the systems are harming us and they only give us the tools that will prioritize the needs of the institution over the needs of the people, we have no choice but to rebel. And abolish. A large portion of the student protests of spring 2017 centered around the institutions targeting of AR and Lawrence through a report filed against them by school officials that led to a hearing process. There were very clear ableist, transphobic, and anti-Black connotations of the allegations against them. The student body did not get involved until it became clear that this attack on AR and Lawrence was actually an attack on student protests. I watched people who did not and do not care about them take up AR and Lawrence’s name because it now suited their agenda. I watched those same people push AR and Lawrence to the side so they could be heard better. I watched those same people throw AR and Lawrence to the wind when they no longer felt that they could be controlled. When are these people going to “say her name” for the Trans Women that die on the daily? The school successfully made itself a space that AR and Lawrence could not exist and they will not be returning to the school in the fall. Two of most visible Trans Black Femmes have now been iced out and left to face the dangers of our realities without the protections that the school should be seeking to provide. This community refused to do what was necessary to serve them. Now I am left to continue what they did, and I cannot help but to feel alone. Black Trans Femmes also have the most to lose when the institution retaliates. We have accepted that, it is apart of the legacy we inherited.

After the bulk of the events of the spring at the evergreen state college I left on a road trip to California before the school year ended. The events that inspired this decision included but are not limited to, police aggression and bias based targeting, escalating displays of anti-Blackness, several student protests, doxing and releasing of private information, threats of shootings and white supremacist being invited and welcomed by the actions and inactions of the institution, rumored FBI involvement, physical violence by fellow students, meetings more meetings and endless meetings. After losing clumps of hair, dropping ten pounds in one week, eating rarely, sleeping never, missing class, attempting suicide, having countless anxiety and panic attacks, organizing through all of the night and all of the day, after running around blindly putting out fires here and advocating for someone else over there, after fearing for the safety of myself and the people I care for, after weeks of self neglect, after all of this I was advised to get out of Olympia for my own health. I admit that the ceaseless pit of doom in my stomach made the option of fleeing sound attractive. I also knew that other people were in danger and that a lot of them would not have left if I did not. The decision to leave had to be made quickly but was a decision that felt painful and almost impossible. Who would be left to advocate for AR and Lawrence was my main concern and if I had felt better supported in Olympia I would not have left. But we did, like Maria and the Von Trapps as they fled nazi held Austria, we gathered ourselves into the shadows and drove out into the night. Upon my return I got a snapchat from a Black man and fellow student that said that I need to get out of Olympia and get to a place that feels like home….. Ah. Home? That is what this has all been about. What places, people, and ideas have refused to be a home for people like me? Have refused to be held accountable for their failings? What trauma and history has made home so important and so unreachable? Who gets access to it and who does not? What happens in a home? When I am forced to think of home I am forced to think about concepts like family, culture, and houses with walls I am forced to re-witness the systems that took them away from me. With the restrictions of blood I would say my family includes my grandmother, my mother, and my siblings, and rarely do I actually include my mother in this list. The rest of the people who are blood relations of mine are people I never knew past their relationship to my mother and her mother. An example is that I call the person who is technically my paternal grandfather, my mother’s father or my grandmother’s abuser. I have never met him except in the haunted looks on my nana’s face. There is not much data to look at when hunting for a family culture within my life. I do not get Africa because slavery. I do not get African American because academia did what it was supposed to do, it added another degree of separation between generations of Black. My mother and grandmother were the ones who “made it”, evidenced with trips to Italy and white lovers. I do not get womanhood because my genitalia. Every generation I know has had to start over and create for themselves fueled by a hatred for, and desire to, separate themselves from what came before them. I do get Black because what is more Black than a hatred for the circumstances that created us? What is more Black than trying to create home and hold space? What is more Black than trying to be loved when every tells us it is so hard to do? Though my mother, grandmother, and I have little in common, little that’s been passed between us, we all share being visually minded, a love for period dramas, Audrey Hepburn, and Lauryn Hill. These are the commonalities within the three generations of. that stand out to me. My main goal in writing this essay was to begin a healing process, to find a home. I tried writing every detail in order, I wanted to type myself back to life, but that is an overwhelming task so I was stuck with 18 pages and nothing was being said. One place that feels like home for me would be the music of the artist Lauryn Hill so maybe she can help guide the way.

“Black rage is founded on draining and draining. Threatening your freedom to stop your complaining. Poisoning your water while they say it’s raining. Then call you mad for complaining, complaining”, from the Lauryn Hill song ”Black Rage” about the emotional response of Black people within the current state of police violence. There are people who maintain that Black anger is an overreaction to recent events. They have forgotten that we are the caretakers for our trauma, we know best what our oppression looks like. Hill’s repetition of the word ‘draining’ exposes that this is just a continuation of a process that started before us. We are in fact under reacting. Recently a Black person was expressing to me how hurt they were by how much white people want to kill us, hunt us down. There is no doubt in my mind that there are white people who want to bleach us off the surface of earth, but I think whiteness, the colonizing power, is more invested in keeping us alive, but only when we are under its control. I reckon whiteness as a concept, like the patriarchy, is separate from the people who benefit most from it. This does not absolve white people from the accountability for the persistence of whiteness. They said that they freed us, but I think few of us feel free with a racist legal system, capitalism breathing down our necks, the pressures of production and consumption that has replaced dogs and chains. Now a person with a badge is cracking the whip. What was once a war focused on our bodies has just transferred its focus to our minds, and both parts of us are losing. Hill reflects on the way threatening our freedoms can silence us. Whiteness had to tell us we were free in order to have something to take away. We are enslaved by the idea that they can take our freedom away. Punish us for protest. Lock us in jails. Bury us. They “educated” some of us so that some of us could be uneducated. They gave us “good” english so some of us could be hard to understand. They gave us western morality so that some of us could be bad people. They defined civility and respect so that we would be easy to demonize. We continue to be fooled into thinking that we have anything to prove to them when they have everything to prove to us. When whiteness kills a Black person it is to put Blackness back in its place. When whiteness makes the president Black it is to distract us and split the blame. When Brown people step on us it is to do the work of whiteness. When Black people hate ourselves we are doing the work of whiteness, we are doing what we are told to do. My mother told me from young age, beware the police, a phrase many a Black mother had told many a Black child. I ignored her. Back then I held every word that fell from my mother’s mouth as though its was a well of gold. But this could not be true because forces more powerful than my mother were telling me is was not. I was born to a teenage mother in 1993 the year after the LA riots. I gained access to language well after the country had moved on from the Black rage of the time, but I gained access to language just in time to hear my kindergarten teacher remind us that the police are here to serve and to protect. She forgot to mention the exceptions. She forgot to mention how few of us the word ‘us’ includes. I truly believed for many years that if I was just nice, if I was well behaved, if I was respectful and pleasant I would never experience the sharp teeth of racism, the cutting grip of hate. Then Trayvon Martin was shot. A 17 year old flawed and beautiful Black child was murdered on no stronger bases than the skin color that ties him and I together. Black america wept, Black america threw its head back and wailed. We were told to hush up and get back to work by white america. How very cliche it is that a Black childs murder is what it took for me to open my eyes and see myself. See how I had prioritized white women over my grandmother and my mother. How I had prioritized respecting white men even when it meant dishonoring myself. There is no better mirror than someone’s else’s death. I often daydream about how much others will self reflect upon my death. I have a lot to make up for. Like a white feminist or a cis gay white man and many other oppressed and privileged identities, I sought to fit myself neatly into the mold of the great white patriarchy. That is the trap. That is how they get you. They make you feel powerless to make you crave power. Then they wrap themselves in mighty shrouds and you try to cuddle close so you can be free. Why do we seek equality? Why would we want to be equal with those who have oppressed us? I dismiss the neoliberal model, I banish all reason, and revel in madness. June Jordan, the Queer and Black poet writes in, “Poem about My Rights”, “Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about”. (lines 36–38) Jordan is reiterating what is clear to so many Black people, this was not meant for us, this model does not work, we were removed from home and told to complain about it softly. There is no rhyme, no reason to the negroes circumstance in this land and our resistance will not be reasonable. All the people who claim to stand with us must drown in their guilt and then move into action. The labor of undoing must no longer fall on our worn tree bark backs.

Black Trans Women/Femmes are more familiar than anyone with the reasons why cis Black folk fear us, ignore us, or target us. We are not daft. I have done the labor to try to forgive Black men. More labor than they’ve ever done to be forgiven by me. I’m quite aware of the pressures presented to Black men.We know that this system has taken so much from them and they view us, Black Trannies, as a symbol of what more might be taken. I see the way Black men flinch at my touch, my attention. AR and Lawrence and I see this, we know this, but we also know that it means we are left to hold ourselves. I do not have enough arms to hold myself, warn everyone of the danger to come, and fight off those who attempt to consume me. Far too often I let cis Black men off the hook for their transphobia and by that I mean I avoid them and they ignore me for the most part. This orbiting model has many flaws, particularly when it excuses cis Black men from their responsibilities to me and to other Trans Black Women/Femmes. While I feel pressure to show up for and plan demonstrations maintaining that they have lives that matter, they rarely can be found when I need them to do the same for my life. And it is deeper than that. There are some Black men who do show up to the marches but never talk to me, never look at me, or hold me. That is the missing piece, it is the acknowledgement. This pattern extends to most men of Color. It is no coincidence that most social circles I am apart of include, Women and Femmes, Non-Binary and Queer folk, and white men. No cis men of Color. I acknowledge the cultural pressures that have brought about this divide, but it is growing increasingly tiresome to feel the pressure to bring the community together and reach across the cavern. If I can push my fear aside and say hi, hello, you are beautiful, why can they not do the same? If men of Color, Black men, cannot make the effort to hold us Trannies, to wrap up our liberation into theirs I am not certain we will make it. When the protests began at Evergreen the cis Black men showed up sometimes, but were rarely there for the planning meetings. The labor fell on Black Women and Femmes as it always does.

AR once described the bulk of the cis Black Womens treatment of us Trans Black Femmes as trans exclusionary radical feminism in blackface. I had to sit with that one for a long time because I felt guilty for how accurate that felt in my heart. It is that guilt that has colored so much of my interactions with Black Women. Within my first week at Evergreen I developed a crush on a white man. Sad, artsy, and into nature, following the description of most of my many failed romances. Today I think he liked me too, we were in flirtation and we even kissed, but most days I think he was just curious. That same week I met someone so painfully like me it was scary, except for the fact that she was more beautiful than me, smarter than me, and of course cis. This Black Queen whispered to me that she thought artsy white boy was cute, which was funny because he had told me the same thing about her. I watched their relationship start while I had not yet been told that ours was over. When he asked me if I minded I lied and said no of course not. Of course not because who was I to deny a Black Woman anything she wanted in this world. Many months later I stayed friends with two people who Black Women had removed from their own lives. When I reached out for help it was never those two Black Women who came to care for me but others including, at separate times, the people who they had cut out. I pushed aside any resentment I may have felt because, like always, the reality of Black Womanhood was on my mind. I was reprimanded for having anything to do with those two people and I understand it felt like betrayal. I was not emotional intelligent enough to express the betrayal I felt at. being left so few options. They were saying, “we can not be there for you and you can not get your needs met from those who can”. When I look at the parallels of my brief week with art boy and my interactions with two banished individuals I can not help but to notice that the main difference is the parts of my body I hate the most. The situation with one of the people I stayed friends with is one I probably should have handled differently and it would be unfair if I did not acknowledge that. The expectation of respect was not evenly dispersed between me and Black Queen, I should have never even been asked if I was okay with art boy being taken away from me, the validity of my claim would have never been questioned if I was cis. But of course I have no claim to anyone, and I still thought I owed cis Black Women everything. This feeling of owing is not without reason.

Raury and Nokia are two Black Women whom I owe a bottomless debt to. I spent most of my self actualizing years around white people. I had only ever learned of myself in relation to whiteness. Which means I know a great deal less of myself than I care to admit. One of the most visible evidences of this personal failing is in my complete ignorance of my own hair. Hair is such a strange concept. Their are so many who would dismiss its relevance, me of two years ago included. But a deeper analysis would show how much femininity is attached to hair. It is a mini revolution when a Woman or Femme cuts their hair short, or when they let their body hair grow long. It is a political act when a Woman or Femme does almost anything that requires agency with their body. For Black Women and Femmes this is an even harsher truth. We are a people that have been denied femininity, been denied soft, been denied motherhood, been denied curly and kinky, and so for us hair is more than a revolution. It is a desperate clinging to those who dreamed us into existence. It is a way for us to access the deep and dark arts and wealth that sat in between the temples of our melanated mothers. This wealth had never been shared with me until one day when I got pink yarn braided onto my head. Raury sat on one side of me and used her brilliance and skill to secure my Blackness neatly in my memory, on my other side Nokia used her unchallengeable creative vision to fasten my Femmeness in its rightful place. Black Women are a closer reflection in which to see myself in than I ever had and I have seen the way the world consumes them so I would seek to protect them.

During the events of spring the Black Women and Femmes of Evergreen flung ourselves into action and those of us who did not often interact were forced to begin working closer with each other. Some of these people, the supposedly radical Blacks, are people who I had previously avoided for plenty of reasons. I had been infatuated with their community building skills, leadership, and presence at the beginning of the year but I started to notice the cracks in their so called radicalness. Instead of growing angry I just avoided them and I was pleasant in passing. I was content to celebrate and support them from afar. I think they believed inviting me to their house and events was enough to create a space for me, but they were uninterested in changing themselves to actually hold my truths. At one of the actions a Black male staff member began yelling at a small crowd of gathering students and was visibly upset. I paused for a few moments, even though my adrenaline was through the roof, to get a better read on what was happening. I heard two things, first being that he and others were working within the system to change it and we should let that process happen. I am someone who believes we should take advantage of all the possible avenues to address our oppression, but I resent him telling us to rely on reform because I know it as a model that only the privileged have time for. Second I heard him telling the white students to stop barricading the doors, this is a point I agreed with so I stepped in and cut him off and told the students to remove the chairs that had been set up in front of the entrances. Everyone jumped into action when I said to and the barricades were removed. Later that day I was approached by one of the members of the supposed Black radicals who was upset with me for my dismissal of “a Black man in distress”. This led to a long conversation in which I did a lot of apologizing. Her stance was the same one that her in her friends had used against me ,and others before me, in the past. Her stance was that my dismissal was being anti-black. This phrase anti-blackness is so important as it describes a form of racism that is specific to the Black experience. The problem is that this group of friends has weaponized the phrase against so many Black people and a group that claims to be invested in bringing people together has pushed so many away. There is not a single drop of doubt in my mind that I have an upsetting amount of anti-blackness in my psyche. But, there is no coincidence that this same group of cis Black Women have upset and pushed out every Trans Black Femme I know at evergreen. They have defended and supported cis Black men over me several times, dismissed my discomfort with certain music because it makes them feel empowered, invalidated several Black Women and Femmes’ claim to Blackness, acknowledged that Blackness takes many forms while also calling all forms other than their own anti-black, and they created a hierarchy of Blackness on campus. They made claims of being the leaders of the Black movements on at evergreen which erases all the work of AR and Lawrence. One of them has made a statement that some people, not including themselves, view and treat Trans Black Femmes like Black men which shows a very limited understanding of transmisogyny. Even within this conversation in which this person was expressing anger at my dismissal of a cis Black man’s emotions, she herself and others in the group have dismissed my emotions countless times. She also expressed resentment for being roped in with the rest of the group, which I understand considering how much Black Women are homogenized, but when none, not one of them, have made any clear attempts to call each other out I do not believe it is my labor to separate each of their separate moments of transmisogyny. I have a lot of emotions about this and my relationship with that group is actually the biggest catalyst for my decision to leave to California. I did not vocalize almost any of these complaints because I was still stuck in this mentality that I owed these people my compliance. I was accused of making decisions without them which was confusing because I had spent this whole ordeal looking to the guidance of them and my friend Lettuce. I had spent most of those last weeks spreading information about choices they had made, organizing meetings so that everyone could be heard, and making sure people were getting fed and taken care of. My voice was never centered and if it had been I would have advised so many different actions, but I doubted I had claim to knowing what was best for Black students so when the rest of them sat in a room finishing the demands I was running around making sure everyone else knew what was happening and making sure people were getting water. In fact the one thing I pushed for was to make one of the actions a rally for moral and spreading information to those who were still confused, they wanted a healing space which I understood but did not feel it should happen that day. Next thing I know they decided to move everyone into the administration floor. They disregarded my voice and did not bother asking what AR and Lawrence wanted, some of the people they had been claiming to be advocating for. It makes me uncomfortable that these people kept leading cheers of “community love” while actively pushing out an important part of the community and no one stepped in to advocate for us. In fact, these “radical Blacks” allowed Latinx and other Brown students to join in on their isolation game, but who is anti-black? This situation felt helpless as I did not feel comfortable advocating for myself and I did not know who could. I avoided doing more organizing with them and decided that instead of trying to be everywhere at once I would put my energy in specific places. I began spending more time with AR and Lawrence, particularly now that it was clear that I was one of the few Black students invested in make sure they were safe, or at least as safe as people like us can be. They helped me understand that the way Black movements have gotten so much labor out of Black Trannies is allowing us to feel like we have something to prove. The cis Black Women wanted to act like we were equally targeted and on an equal footing and I believed them. They forget they are glowing beacons of privilege when standing next to us. Later on the next week, 5 people from that group showed up to an outreach meeting under the guise of wanting to be involved in all parts of the movements planning. It quickly became evident that they were seeking me out and all of their questions were about me and if I was being accountable. I felt targeted and alone so I stepped out of the room and called AR and Lawrence, which was a mistake because they showed up to support me and things escalated from there. During the argument that followed the arrival of AR and Lawrence one of the supposed radical Blacks stepped towards them yelling and I stepped in between pointing my finger at her and told her to leave them alone and told AR and Lawrence to leave. One of the other “radical Blacks” started yelling at me, asking me if I thought it was okay to stick my finger in a Black Womans face. After a while I was able to convince AR and Lawrence to leave, I should not have called them and I should have vacated with them. I was left to continue the discussion alone. At one point the same member of the group who asked me about the finger pointing then asked me if I thought it was okay to try and punch a Black Woman. What? Five minutes ago it was finger pointing and now it is punching. This is the same demonization tactic that has been used against Trans Women/Femmes, particularly the Black ones, for all of history. This was possibly the most blatant moment of transmisogyny I have ever experienced. No one stood up for me, not my white friends in the room, not my Black cis Woman friends in the room, and none of her friends called her out. I had to defend myself to all these people alone. After that night when I expressed my frustration to others they expected me to extend the olive branch for the sake of the movement. That has always been the case, Black Trans Women/Femmes expected to compromise for the sake of the movement, for the sake of the people. The truth is I am Black and Trans and I am no longer willing to be around people who can not attempt to respect both sides, all parts of me. I call bull shit on cis Black Women who do not place themselves in space to protect and love Trans Black Women and Femmes. In Lauryn Hill’s feature on the Nas song “If I Ruled the World”, she sings about how she would free all of her children if she had the power to. That song reminds me that our liberation is tied to each other, sometimes I worry I will not be able to convince others.

On November 14th I was born in a water birth to a mother of 17. Misunderstood by her own mother, abandoned by her father, too white acting to hang with the Black kids, and too Black to kick it with the white kids, she felt lost and unsure of herself. She felt she had a lot to prove. She found herself, that moonless November night, in my eyes. She grew stronger and more reassured with every night of sleep she missed to stay up and take care of her little Black bundle with the weak lungs. It is clear to me now that I grounded her. She validated her life by having something other than herself to take care of, and by accident trained me to do the same for her, and then my siblings. In the song “To Zion”, Lauryn Hill sings about her son, “And I’m reminded every time I see your face, that the joy of my world is in Zion”. Hill’s son is named Zion and she was pressured to have an abortion and the song is her reflection on her decision not to. My mother used this song to solidify that her decision to have me at such a young age was not a mistake. Her decision to carry through with her pregnancy was not a mistake. I do not agree, I think she had a lot of love she needed to give herself before trying to waste any on me. I think it was selfish of her and self harming. But like Hill with Zion, my mother’s happiness was synonymous with my own. She was like god to me. A young, vulnerable, powerful, brilliant god. I was well behaved so she would never stress, I took care of my younger siblings so she could sleep in and disappear in her room and into her depression when she needed to. When I was seven and she forgot my newborn baby sister in the car I gently reminded her that she had left something behind. I never doubted or judged her knowing, without understanding, that caring for others is what I was born to do. Literally, I was born to help raise my child of a mother. The age difference between us is barely greater than that of me and my youngest sibling. It did not stand out too much to me until I turned 17 and found it difficult to carry my own depression. My mother handled her depression, was pregnant, raised a child alone, moved out of her mother’s house, went to college, all before the age I had my first kiss. There is a long history of Black Women being denied motherhood starting with slavery. Most Black people in this country were born from water. Most of our history and ancestral power was washed away in the oceans that carried us here. This is the reason why the question so often uttered from white lips, “where are you from” serves as a reminder of a painful birth. Black women were to have babies and then have them stolen away, left only with tender breasts and broken hearts. Black women had to teach and reteach themselves how to mother, often having not been mothered themselves. Black Women in america have never been given the chance to mother without the knowledge that their children might be taken away, whether from white people with chains and rope or white people with badges and guns.

I often like to say that I did not know what being gay was for a very long time which is misleading. I knew in some ways, like when the artist Aaliyah died my mother told me it was because she was friends with gay people. My mother hated white people out of principle but she still married a white man, my stepfather, so the hate was not deep in her heart. But the look she had when I swayed my hips, when I was silly for my friends, when I danced, when I chose to hang out with her adult Women friends over boys my own age, that look felt it as though it was steeped in real hate. I do not think my mother was equipped with language that could separate queer as in gender from queer as in sexuality, so it was all just gay. I knew what things were gay to my mother and I knew I did not want to be those things. I had not hit puberty yet and sexual attraction was a vague and uninteresting topic for me. I just wanted to be the mom when my friends and I played house. I was actually a very popular child. Little boys liked me because I was the tallest, fastest, always down to climb some trees or collect animals like snails and snakes. The girls liked me because I was gentle and never teased them. Adults liked me because I was clever, well spoken, bright eyed and a bright smile, and I always kept the other children in order. Some children turn corners too quickly, some children grow up too fast. Somehow I was teacher’s pet, a jock, class president, and a nerd all at once and I loved it. I did not really have to act out to get attention. Like most people shit hit the fan for me in middle school. My body was growing quickly but not quick enough to hold all of my new emotions. I was no longer young and cute enough for my feminine ways to stay endearing. My mother’s search for herself and a home left me quite isolated. She converted to Islam, moved us all around California and then all around Georgia, she homeschooled me and put me in charter schools and private schools and public schools. We were even houseless at one point. I never spent more than two years in one house. It was actually this inconsistency that was probably most damaging to my development. She was still trying to find a home and make her world what she wanted it to be. Make me what she wanted me to be. Needed me to be. While I mostly thrived in school academically I struggled with friendships. I know now that I have some social disabilities, and I was homeschooled at important developmental times, and spent most of my time with people far older or far younger than me. I did not understand the humor of my peers, I was so out of it I could barely understand when I was being bullied. Except when the bullying was from my mother. In my teen years she tried even harder to steer me into the man she expected me to grow into. Though I did not really get gay yet I think even without the words I knew I was agender, or genderless. I knew I was not a man and I did not think I was a woman. I wanted everyone to let me do all the things I could do. I wanted to build houses and decorate the rooms. I wanted to play football but only if I could also be a cheerleader. My mother would have sooner killed me then let that happen. My step father was pointless to me. We mostly avoided each other except when he was bored and wanted to scare me or when my mother forced us to spend time together. I think I resented him for taking part of my mother away from me, but also they were very abusive to each other. I spent many nights listening to them beat each other with words and fists. I would pack a bag for me and her and later on I packed bags for my siblings as well and I would pray that we would leave. Sometimes we did but we always came back the next day. When I got older I started stepping in to be a barrier between him and her. Whenever people want to fight me now I always laugh because I know I have been fighting people twice my size for way too long to be scared of anyone. It is funny how children somehow know that certain things are not supposed to be shared outside the house. In many ways I loved my stepfather, mostly because my siblings were only possible because of him. As I got older taking care of my siblings was one of the few ways I could be useful to my mother. My mother feared that I would be resentful of my lighter skinned siblings, which was more related to her own insecurities than any of mine. I am ashamed to admit that the eldest of them did see some very ugly sides of me. Most of which were just normal sibling beef. I hated when she copied me, but quite a bit was jealousy for the parts of my mother she got access to by virtue of her gender. My mother would never hold me the way a daughter gets held. I opened one door in my mothers heart and my sister opened another. I also hated the thing about my sister that I love most about her now. My sister is fearless. All of my siblings are fearless in one way or another. I think my sister thinks she is weak because she cries a lot and cares a lot, but I think that is strength. She never feared bursting into tears every time I tried to run away. I should have let myself cry in front of her and let her know that I only came back those times because of her. I shrank in my teenage years, not physically but in my spirit. I became shy and quiet, no longer comfortable being the center of attention. I was tolerated at school by my peers, given knowing looks about my high test score by my teachers, and then I would go home and read read read read EVERYTHING. I read way too much honestly. I threw myself into fictional worlds to distract myself from my own. I was a better me in those worlds, with friends and magic and I was happy. I was addicted. I spent very little time away from my mother, away from my siblings, or away from my books. I still understand the rules of middle earth better than the rules of this world. I can still get a baby to laugh better than I can keep friendships. It would be misleading to suggest that I was a saint throughout all of this. I became very secretive, manipulative, and I complained all the time about everything. Most of this is in response to my feelings of powerlessness. I felt like I could not get my needs met unless I tricked people, which is true. An example is I have some food based trauma that developed when we were poor and I did not have the words to express that and my mother and stepfather could not be bothered to acknowledge that everyone is different than them and not everyone can eat like they do. I learned most of my lying skills from having to take food when I was hungry and throw away food when I was not. I often get upset when people demonize habits like deception because I know from experience that they often develop in people who are not getting their needs met. It feels privileged for anyone to say unequivocally that one should never lie or steal. Of course after that behavior started I lied even at times when I did not have to and I have to be accountable for that. Sometimes it was not my needs I lied for, just my wants.

When I was 14 my mother tried to kill me. At this age the children at school were insisting that I was gay and I figured I should know what that even meant. I would stay up late at night and google the word gay and after a while my late night searches led me to gay porn which in my exploration I accidently saved on my computer. As sheltered as I was I did not even have a grasp on what sex for pleasure was. One day when I came back from school I walked in to find my stepfather shaking his head angrily at the computer, my mother crying and pacing, and my siblings sitting confused watching the tension build. The sound of the door closing behind me made my mother’s head snap up and the look on her face paralyzed me. She looked at me like I was a stranger and I started tearing up before she even opened her mouth. She had discovered the videos and after a lot of tearstained screams in my direction she turned to my two brothers and asked them if I had ever molested them. This is the beginning and end of her understanding of queerness. This is always the hardest part to talk about and never fails to make me cry. I remember sobbing in that moment and feeling like I might be sick. It was like watching a painful scene play out from behind thick dirty glass. I felt like I was outside. Outside in the dark and the cold, outside of my family, outside of my mother’s heart where I had lived for so long. I was a child and I grew up so much that evening. I grew cold and numb. I could hardly feel when my mother lunged at me with hands open to wrap around my neck. I could hardly feel it when my stepfather pulled her off of me. I did not fight when he told her that I was not worth it. I told no one that my heart was broken. I had no one to tell. When I was 14 my mother tried to kill me and sometimes I am not certain she failed. I still hold a lot of trauma connected to sex and have a hard time expressing it to others.

. For a year I lived in a state of war in my mothers house. Avoiding her and sticking to my books. She took me to several different therapist because I was clearly depressed and losing weight. She did not know at the time but I tried to kill myself twice in that year. I was educating myself about queer issues with the help of the internet and the library and I grew ever more indignant at my treatment at the hands of my mother. There has never been a time in my life when I actually considered myself to be gay, in my older years the label queer felt more accurate, but I knew I was not what my mother wanted me to be and gay seemed like a good enough word to describe why. My mother’s mother, my nana, and I were always kindred spirits. That is to say I only saw her enough to not see any of her faults. One day when things were getting particularly hard I called her in tears and begged her to save me. Save me. In a blizzard she flew down to Georgia to come get me. I could not go with her that day but she began the process to get legal custody of me. And in very little time I moved in with her in her place in Washington. My grandmother will always be a hero of mine. With very little hesitation she heard the pain in my voice and made a plan to rescue me. Rescue me. Many Black Trannies end up houseless, often being forced into sex work and eventually dead. There is not a single doubt in my mind that this would have been my fate if my Nana had not made room for me in her life. It’s hard to acknowledge that as much as I love my grandmother, I would have needed less from her if she had been able to be more for my mother. My Nana is not a very open person and her lack of vulnerability made it hard for me to tell if she even liked me at times. Made it hard for me to know if she needed me. I am addicted to being needed. I never quite felt at home with her and I feel guilty because I do not like spending holidays alone with her. She has so many expectations and I am the only family member she still talks to regularly so I feel a lot of pressure is on me to perform. I have never liked holidays very much. As someone who always feels the need to perform for others, holidays feel like a marathon and are always exhausting. The ease in which my grandmother forgets my pronouns but still attempts to police my engagement with american cultural norms and respectability reminds me of the hypocrisy of people telling children not to say curse words while allowing them to repeat transphobic and ableist slurs. My grandmother will often criticize the length of my shorts while allowing people to misgender me, thus prioritizing respectability over my humanity. However, I love when we get together and have lunch and go shopping, it reminds me of the day trips we would take when I was younger. I also do not like how patient my grandmother is with my mother because I consider the later to be my abuser. But I try to understand how hard it is for my grandmother to want to cut out her only child. Probably as hard as it was for my mother to give me up all those years ago. Like me, my mother used to sketch plans for her dream home on paper and in her head she would sketch her dream family, her dream life. She fought desperately to make all those things come true, but I just could not break myself into what she wanted as much as I tried. The problem with being codependent with your abuser is you start to value the feeling of being used over the feeling of being loved. Over the feeling of being loved the way you deserve to be. Loved the way a secret dark place within you is asking to be loved. You grow addicted to the push and pull. You crave the mystery with the same breath that resent the inconsistency. Love and abuse become synonymous. My mother knew I would die if I stayed with her and she feared my soul would die if I left her. I think she also feared apart of her would die. The first few months that I was in Washington I would go out in public and my arms would feel so empty. I was used to holding a sibling in one arm and pushing a stroller and balancing grocery bags with the other. Those first few months in Washington I cried in a quiet house not knowing what to do with my arms.

The Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki is an absolute icon of mine with his precise and unrelenting creative vision. His film Spirited Away features a character called No Face, who had the power to create gold, money, any physical representations of people’s desires, out of thin air. He does this in order to draw them close and then consume them. Like me, he studies his environment and the culture he finds himself in order to pick up on what will be the best bait. When I moved in with my grandmother I went to a large public high school in the liberal Seattle area and I was given more freedom than I had ever experienced. My relationship with my grandmother felt strange because being in a role that was purely dependent was alien to me. I used the skills I had picked up from moving so much to study the people in my new environment. This was my chance to create the life I had wanted, the life I had seen in the movies, read about in my books. I wanted a best friend, a romantic relationship, and to develop a fashion sense. Life is not really like the movies, my new world was nothing like I expected. For one thing the nerds were also the popular kids and everyone was having sex. I did not even know the words for most sexual acts until the end of high school. I am a quick learner and social patterns have always interested me, even now I still find myself mimicking the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals. I kind of figured out fashion, I had friends for the first time, the only thing I still wanted was a romantic relationship. I should clarify that I not only wanted one, I thought I needed one, I still do at times. Often. Legitimately, I would say this desire has been the driving force for most of my life after leaving my mother. It was two birds with one stone, create a new home for myself within the admiration of someone else and validate the parts of myself I had been hiding from my mother. Like the character No Face I studied what I needed to be in order to attract a mate, but nothing worked. That is how my brain started to understand recognize, even without the words, the concepts of anti-blackness and femmephobia. That is when I truly started hating myself. Though I am attracted to Women and Femmes, I never pursue them because I still hold a lot of trauma related to the Black Queer predator narrative. Fast forwarding a bit to the events in spring. When we decided to leave for California a young man, Max, offered to drive us down the coast which worked out well so that we could take two cars and be less cramped. I had spent the last couple of weeks running around fighting institutions, planning meetings, and advocating for myself in every arena. My closest friends were not around, having left campus at this point, I did not have time to go to class or to even eat. I would go to my room once a day and lay on my bed alone and hold myself for a few moments and then jump up and get ready for my next commitment. I knew plenty of my cis friends had lovers to go home and wrap themselves in, some of my non cis friends too. Whenever people were concerned with how little I was taking care of myself they would ask what I needed. All I needed, all I have ever wanted, was to have someone I could care for so much that when I saw them my eyes would grow too big for my face. My smile would swell so large that my hands would not be able to cover it up. My body would fling itself across the room as soon as they enter. I would be hurled into their arms as though tossed by some invisible force. I would find my nose just an inch from theirs. Our eyes would make the traditional pilgrimage from the others eyes down to the others lips and back up again. My lashes bashfully shade my embarrassment. The rose in my cheeks cleverly holding all of my hopes. Noses only barely meet, lips never do. I would pull myself out of their arms and I would gather myself together. I can not forgot their flaws, nor would I forgot those flaws of mine that I want to hide, most of all from them. But somehow, in the 20 seconds of our embrace, we will forget all other people and all other times. This is a fantasy, it is unrealistic, it is naive. I am a fool. But bodies like mine aren’t romanticized. Our beauty isn’t the kind you want to fold into your life. It is the kind you want to pick up and play with and then set back down when you are done. You want to put us in the front lines of your marches. You want to be friends with us so you can prove just how open minded you have become. Everytime I get a notification on my phone I cross my fingers and hope it is someone confessing their love for me, but usually it is someone asking me for information they could have googled. The sickeningly sweet embrace of mutual desire is rare, fleeting, and unbalanced. Rarer still for bodies like mine. Black and/or Trans bodies. When my friends tell me to be patient it makes me feel like a dog. Jamil stay. Jamil sit, hush, roll-over. Jamil beg. I’m disgusted with how much I want someone to break me.

Max and I engaged in some light flirting in the beginning of the trip. I was in denial about it at first because I am too old to be getting my hopes up every time a cute person acknowledges me. Any romance between us would have also been in bad taste because a friend of mine had a history with him and many of my other friends did not trust him. I allowed our game of eye tag to serve as a useful, if not necessary, distraction from the recent trauma. The way he looked at me reminded me of a scene in my favorite movie, Clueless, when Paul Rudd’s character looks at Alicia Silverstone, a pretty cis blonde white girl, and he asks, “are you saying you care about me”. It took me so long to figure that out where I had seen Max’s look before. I liked the way the way his eyes regarded me and that he let my eyes regard him. I wanted to hold every part of him inside every part of me. One night in a motel room somewhere in Northern California a friend, who had witnessed all the nonverbal back and forth, kind of pressured us into talking. I think that was a dark turn for us. It became too real for him and he had to process that he was not as attracted to me as he felt he should be. Even the people who enjoy my validation do not validate me as freely. My emotions were unstable to say the least after the events of the last week and I needed a lot of care which is my only feeble excuse for my treatment of Max the rest of the trip. The few times we kissed after that I could not tell if he was doing it out of guilt or if he really wanted to. At this point I getting flashbacks to the sad boy who dropped me for Black Queen. My body had failed me once again. Was it my Blackness this time? The remnants of my facial hair? Was it too much femininity or too much masculinity? Too little? Was it my curse between my legs? It is interesting to notice what parts of this essay make me cry. I grew more and more annoyed with Max over the trip and we would fight and then make up daily. What used to seem so charming now felt like pestilence. It is worth noting that we had not really been close before this trip and now we were stuck together all day in tight spaces. He did not look at me the same way anymore and as much as that hurt, I would have rather been anxious about our relationship than to allow my mind to drift into thoughts of AR and Lawrence and the people I had left behind. The way he talked about other people enraged me. How easy it was for him to comment on all their positive qualities but he could not bother to mention any of mine. He was afraid of leading me on. I wrote a few poems during this time and one sticks out:

“Drown me

Under kisses, under fairy dust, under full moons, under swimming pools and filtered light, drown me under sweet treats and tightly wrapped presents.

Drown me

Under pinches, under corn mazes, under anxious nights, under an oppressive drought and waylessness, drown me in June Jordan poetry.

Lose me in oceans, lose me in waves, me in tides, in emotions, in motions, new and familiar pains.

Drown me

Under cursed, under growing pains, under lonely bed frames, under versions of yourself you only dreamed of, drown me in trying to keep up with my goals. Drown me”

I was inspired by the ocean that was rolling by outside my window, water has always had a way of healing my spirit just a little. Seeing the frustration on my face, Max would sometimes try to explain what he was feeling. He joined a series of failed love interests who imagined themselves Christopher Columbus, discovering new grounds on which to not like me in “that way” on. I am ashamed that the place I notice the most oppressive patterns is in the realm of romance or attraction. I have run enough tests to conclude logically that I am beautiful, clever, often kind, and some form of interesting. I am not always funny but I can be a ton of fun when given the chance. Of course it is hard to convince the saddest parts of me that these things are true. It is always funny to me when people try convince me how sorry they are that they are not attracted to me. I always point out that in my experience straight men are less straight than gay men are racist. This is an oversimplification of how many institutionalized power dynamics are involved in how little beauty is seen in my body. I am no one’s “type”. I think anyone who bases their understanding of their own sexuality in colonial models like gender and race are excusing themselves from really important anti-oppression work. I give exceptions from this to people whose attraction is colored by trauma. People who are not attracted to me are not the exception, they are the rule and I believe that no matter their identity they have to really sit with the reasons why. The problem with basing your value in how attractive you are to others is that there may come a time when you try to remove agency from others. In my case it was often with the excuse of being marginalized. I am so used to being the victim that it often blinds me to the times when I am the monster. I can no longer beg people to hold me through the language of guilt. My friend Lettuce says guilt is not a sustainable motivator. The problem is that if I liked Max as much as I thought than nothing could be his fault, it all had to be mine, and I was far too fragile to process that. It is scary to except that to change my romantic success probability would require taking on racism and transmisogyny. I started behaving like No Face with Max. Trying to figure out what his needs were, my codependency was rearing its ugly head. I did the same thing with the person who I fell the hardest for in my life and his twin brother whom I was also probably in love with. That failed romance led to my roommate at the time’s mother checking me into a clinic for a few days. So why was I repeating the same foolish patterns? The trouble with trauma is sometimes you step out of your body and watch yourself do and say things you know you should not being doing and saying. I keep crushing hard on these people who find special ways not to love me and they all feel bad for a while. They take a lesson from hanging out with me and promise to work to be better later, too late for me. Their guilt quickly fades, but my shame, my disgust with who I am, that might never go away. I often wake up in the middle of the night finding it quite hard to breath and I think of the people I have been in love with and want to tell them, “I’m sorry that I am broken and I am sorry I was too hard to love and I’m sorry I made you feel guilty and I’m sorry I held that guilt over you”. The problem with unrequited love is not the loneliness or desperation. It is the knowing that now you either have to lose a friend or you have to dismiss your pride. And sometimes pride is the only thing holding me in one piece. “Then you’d understand that what you want might make you cry. What you need might pass you by, if you don’t catch it”, from Lauryn Hill’s, When it Hurts so Bad. Hill perfectly sums up the desperation in romance that sometimes seeps into my heart. The feeling that if I do not try every trick in my book I might forever miss out on what I think I need. Sometimes I am afraid that one day someone will finally want me, and I will cling onto them too tightly, I will not be able to let go. I don’t often get to hear other people’s heartbeats. I do not often get to lay next to people. Max did not have a heart I could make a home in. I couldn’t force him to. I shouldn’t have tried. The scariest part of the trip was one day while driving he was annoying me, which at this point I cannot tell if that is more his fault or mine. At one point I got so upset I envisioned hitting Max. I have only hit one person in my life, many years ago when I would have to fight off my stepfather fairly often. But that was not the scary part, I knew I would never hit Max. The alarming part was the face I was making in my head while I was doing. A face I had not seen any many years. The face of my mother when she would hit me or when she would hit my stepfather. It was the face she would make when we were not being what she needed us to be to fit in her world. When we did not fit into the life she imagined for herself. A face I used to see so much hate in but in that moment in the car, next to a person I wanted so desperately to care for. A person I wanted to care for me. I saw the pain in my mothers face. Max was not being what I needed him to be. I am not defending my mother’s domestic violence, nor my violent thought. I am pointing out the layers of my mother I had never seen before. After that moment I stopped resenting Max. Why do the people I claim to care about most get to see the very worst parts of me. I can not turn into my mother. I refuse. The cycle has to end somewhere. Sometimes I question if I was really that into Max or if I just was reacting to a stressful time. Or if I just tend to like people who show any interest in me. I suspect it is all of the above. I miss seeing the face he made when he looked at the ocean. I miss the excitement of the twins when they talked about science. I miss the way sad boy blushed when we complimented his art. I miss the way the white man who left me alone on the night trump won, I miss how impressed he was with my knowledge of Lord of the Rings lore. Max drove me safely back to Olympia where I had more work to do. We do not talk much now because I felt my friends would not forgive me if I did not cut him out. But I miss him and I still want to hold him even if just as friends should hold each other. I still want to hold all the people I once thought I loved.

Imagine a large crowd of Evergreen students circled around a stage with me in the middle wearing high waisted mom jeans, with fishnets peaking out above the belt loops, and a long sleeved cropped sweater. I have the mic in hand as I cover Bob Marley’s, Could You be Loved, a question I direct at the amassed students. Could you be loved? What would you do to make sure you are being heard? But this is the Lauryn Hill version so I will end the performance my demanding everyone that every stand up. I will remind them that they have been sitting down for too long. Many people are confused about the events of the spring and that confusion makes me doubt myself. This is and has always been a movement about student empowerment. No one understands our educational needs better than we do. The movement was started by people who understood that as the people most affected by the failings of the school, Brown and Black people needed to be centered. We failed to center Trans people and people with disabilities as we should have. Most of the labor fell to people of Color and almost all of it fell on Women and Femmes. In the end we were shut down, silenced, demonized in all the ways that are typical of an institution. The people who were permitted to speak are white supremacist who threatened the safety of students. The teachers and faculty members who found themselves in danger were not the same ones who endangered students with their recklessness. If the laws you are abiding by protect white supremacy and not students, students of Color than as far as I am concerned you are in league with white supremacy. I know that if you truly cared you would be campaigning for us. You would be the loudest voice to point who the laws protect and who they do not. Whenever I enter a room with faculty and/ or staff of Evergreen I want to ask them what their job is. They respond with something like, “I am the director of…”. Naw boo. You are here to serve the students. Maybe they will say, “I teach…”. Nope. You are here to serve students. Or did you all forget? Did your titles distract you? AR and Lawrence no longer have a home here. They are out on their own now. This institution failed them, everyone in this “community” failed to make room for the most vulnerable amongst us.They excused their inaction with the same excuse that has been used for generations. They thought about the future. They said I need to stay in my job to help future students. But oppression is happening now and some of us do not get futures. When is it enough? When do we throw in the towel?

Where were the white liberal students? They thought they were smarter than us. They disagreed with our tactics. They did not show up to share their ideas instead, they sat on their hands. They better not look me in the eyes again. Did the ones with anxiety think their anxiety was more real than Black anxiety? Where were the cis Brown men? The Black ones? Are they destined to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors? Those who wear badges and claim to serve and protect sure seem to be serving and protecting anyone but the students. There have been endless reports of students who do not feel comfortable going to them for support. Of sexual assaults they handled thoughtlessly and situations related to disability that they handled recklessly. If they truly wanted to serve and protect then why are they not demanding that they receive the training to do that better?

It seems as though people believe that this comes easily to me, this activism thing. I always laugh whenever someone gives an excuse for why they are not involved or why they do not know information that I do. I live in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands. I live in a constant state of in between. How do they think I found out the things I know now? I am not somehow this naturally radical member of society. I have no choice but to know the things I do. I used google. It is free. I resent the people who do have a choice and actively choose not to do the research. I think people believe I do the work I do because I am somehow exceptionally strong. That makes me laugh. This is a way for people to elevate themselves from responsibility. The work has to be done so even if you can not do one action find a different one you can do. I am utterly over all excuses. I am in fact quite a weak person, with shallow desires, and selfish tendencies. Deep within myself, I know I would abandon all of this if I felt I could. I would abandon everyone I claim to care about. I would abandon this earth, the dirt, the flowers, and the bees. I would abandon it all if only I felt I could. I would find a good book to live in and I would rest my eyes and my heart forever. I am a person who has had my humanity stolen from me at every twist and turn. Supremacy has won by teaching me that I have to earn it back, that I can earn it back if I keep fighting, keeping pushing, keep living. It is time that others start proving their humanity to me. But I am not exceptionally strong and I know that this pace will kill me. My body quite literally cannot keep up with what is expected of me, what I expect of myself. And I know that if I slow down, if I rest, if I pull over to the side of the road and close my eyes, that I will never open them again. Either I let the world end me or I do it myself. At least the later mimics the patterns of empowerment. I try to use art as a way to speak myself into the world. I get anxious often that I should be doing more and saying more. But in music, writing, in my instagram feed @honeyhoax, I can find myself. I can create a little bit of home. I am a storyteller at heart and every great story has a soundtrack. Lauryn Hill provides the soundtrack for my emotional life. Hill sings the song “Ex-Factor” about the back in forth that happens in a relationship with someone you care deeply about. “Tell me, who I have to be to get some reciprocity. No one loves you more than me. And no one ever will.” I like thinking of this song as instead of being about a lover, but rather about my relationship to myself.

So this is an apology note to all I have hurt. It is an apology note myself for all the parts of me I clawed at to be someone else. I may fear my niceness is not enough for this fight. But it is one of the few things I love about myself. So this is a love letter, to everyone who has ever held me, everyone I have ever held, and ever will hold. I have a high standard for myself and an equally high standard for everyone who surrounds me. I am sorry for lashing out that standard is not met. For letting anger surface when they could not be the person I romanized them into being. This is a promise that I will honor the softer parts of me. I will not let this struggle take all of me away from me. I miss myself. If gender, race, time, family, mothers, lovers, church, state, and the school refuse to be home for me then I will find it within myself.

“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.”- Gloria Anzaldua, “Letting Go”

. Anzaldua’s poem unravels the myth that we need heroes, that we cannot save ourselves. She claims that we will have to save ourselves. We as students have to stay organized. We have to claim what is ours. The school sold itself as a home. As a place we could come, and share, and learn. But it failed us and we called them out. We tried to do their work for them. The institution attempts to demonize the actions of the students it claims to serve. It sends emails with threats while failing to call itself out for the actions that led to our resistance. The institution seeks to maintain power and control the narrative. I do not see the school making any real strides for change. Just casual attempts at placation. I fear that the students will stop pushing come the fall. And I am worried they will not. I honestly do not think I have any more fight left in me. I can not keep giving and getting nothing back. But I have to. We have to. We have to keep holding Evergreen and all institutions accountable. We have to hold ourselves accountable. We have to hold each other.

    Jamil A. Bee

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