Training bras in the mail, 12 yo. And being an outsider, admitting it to myself, yet again.

And not really giving too much care about it.

I am sitting here in the place I am renting, I think it is an on-the-way kind of place. It is in a city where I do not connect with things that are Black American only, because I am both.

I am in a city where no Black people are really.

I have not interacted with one Black person today. On the bus, I shuffled away from one Black person, but I didn’t feel comfortable around him. He got too close to me. I do not consider this an interaction really.

There are also no Black women or girls. I need someone who is my match. Black women have helped me along the way, but I realized eventually they are not my matches. I will still be nice to them. But they are not my match. They are people I think I was supposed to bring on the journey too.

Anyway I want to talk today about my wounds. I have a close sibling recently dealing with serious illness. So these blog posts are actually to highlight the wounds in myself and our lineage so that healing can take root, Godwilling.

Where I say, I just wish I had a Black girl or woman I could relate to. I looked on the shelf at Essence Magazine today when I went to get tampons for my period (third day), and Beyonce was on the cover. I do not relate to Beyonce for various reasons, and realize that being bicultural, also, I feel out of place with a Black woman’s magazine like Essence as well. Created by Susan Taylor (I looked her up), a Black American woman. Rightfully so.

This is what I mean when I say I am uniquely oppressed. I do not relate always to Black American women because I am not just this. Yet I am supposed to align with this when it it not fully me. Someone, for example, a Black and White woman who were nice to me, they tried to give me Janet Jackson as an example of confidence, when they saw me struggling with confidence dancing. What are you talking about? No. She has absolutely nothing to do with me, even if I liked her music. And I don’t think you need confidence to succeed.

I think confidence is a gamed concept and kind of silly given the oppressions of the world and its genuine impact on a person’s psyche like mine. Knowingness is different, spiritual knowing. Like the ones called a lot of times don’t think they can do it, so I’m in this camp. That doesn’t stop them from being a superhero, for example. It is a connection to something bigger…anyway I’ve philosophized about this a lot recently.

Anyway, this difference is something I feel in my DNA innately. I had to run inside today to my room because I just needed to be alone and not talk. It is difficult being around no one who looks like you, but they are still kind.

Rehearsal was okay. Some parts I have to go over still tonight so I’ll write this quickly. I will keep working on this, although it is hard.

This post is actually about bras. It is about figuring out how to best communicate with my older sister. And give her her due for the things she’s done in my life. And also understand the things that she did that hurt me, unconscious or not. I hope that in blogging I can let the pain and good things hit the air to transform into something better and find understanding, data to use to communicate better.

I do know that I’ll have to hold back and keep parts of myself for those who can take it. That is okay if you can meet a person where they are. I will have to eventually do this with my older sister, match her and reciprocate from that, nothing more than that.

When I was 12, she mailed me bras from New York, when she was in college at New York University. I am very proud of her for going to this prestigious school.

What is significant about this is two different wounds that I carry today still. That I am starting to release. By the way, I don’t know if all, but conceptually, sickness is dis-ease. It is emotional. These emotional and physical wounds from trauma I pray will release from my body and no longer take up space within to turn into eventual sickness. And from my younger sister’s.

It was helpful because my mother did not know I think how to help me or my siblings with Girl Stuff. I am very possessive about my mom because I have had people tell me that she neglected me. And it I realize is judgmental. I would talk about her to others a lot before understanding, and actually, a couple of times they told me to stop talking about her, rather than maybe helping me to see that my words were valid, actually, and also see that it was not intentional on her part. I don’t know. I understand a lot now, and only her dying would allow that. I wouldn’t have understood otherwise I’m sure.

Not everyone knows how to communicate or pass down more than girl trauma. And another African girl — I am an African girl too by way of my mom. Who was helping me in a driving lesson, she told me how her mother had done the same with her, not helped with her period when it started or during puberty. It was nice to connect with someone like me. Finally. It is voyeuristic when others do not have the inside experience.

So I have this mother wound. This neglect. That my mother also has I’m sure with her mother who has it with her mother, a generational wound probably, so talking about it will free us, my mom, and me, her mom, our girl line. It is without judgment but the pain is still rich.

And then my father, who had molested me two years before on my breast. So a breast wound.

And bras, the place where my mom didn’t help nurture my girlness in growing into womanness. I was neglected I know, all of us girl children were in this way. Boy children are another article.

So I was somewhere between being touched too much and not enough. So my body is actually probably still in shock, as is my sibling’s who had been diagnosed with illness. But healing, Godwilling.

Not to mention that my older sister was abused by my father as well, same age, same way, as me. Except I do not think she is as vocal about it as me. I wish she was more vocal, actually. But she is not, to my knowledge she is not.

Black women I have met and shared with, two at least, have heard me. But eventually said to let it go or forgive, or you talk about it too much.

I believe they are both African American women, and the irony of this is that America has yet to atone for the abuse of Black American women in slavery, gynecology, interfamilial abuse (Black men’s apology to give), community abuse. It is almost as if these two women were unconsciously accepting the place this country and Black people gave them, and trying to have me accept this default devaluation.

But no, it is time for African American girls to talk and not stop talking. And African girls too.

So I’m glad my older sister tried to help me. I think later that year maybe she would do something else, but something hurtful instead. Again, it is the time to release and to extract the information from these fossilized experiences.

At some point, I’ll have to delete this account.

Onward.

Gaa n’ihu.

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