She Has Gone Mad

good.

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There is a ravenousness tearing through my life that I am the maker and the witness of. Ripping the tight areas of my life and re-organizing it with something eternally boundless. What can I say other than the most radical thing I could do is become a free artist born from two immigrants. I am a Black woman holding her story by the jaw. No one is a part of its widening anymore. No one holds the key of its permission. All it takes is me opening my mouth and spilling onto the page you are reading for this truth to leak out into a beautiful stain.

For once, I am not hungry. This ravenousness exists around me almost as a separate entity. Adoringly picking up and choosing things for me to eat. Chosen perfectly for my specific appetite. I am not the one being eaten. I am now the one who gets to eat.

I feel more alive and ungovernable than I have in my entire life. A sense of purpose that is bolted to the core, searing straight into the Earth. Locked. I am understanding as the days go on, with even each passing hour, that all I have ever wanted, all I have ever dreamed of — has been warranted. Not just warranted, but chosen. My desires were chosen for me to live.

I saw a figment of myself in my dreams and hoped and prayed the world would do something about her. That someone could pluck me from my own obscurity and discover me as the shining ruby. Dusting me off to serve me on a shining platter where I would beg, “Use me! Let me become something important enough for you to see!” — For you to eat — Hoping, praying, that how they would use me, would somehow align with the “me" I had encountered in my dreams.

I am understanding now that this wanting, this desire for my fate to be decided by an outsider, has come from a societal illness. No person, entity, business, corporation, etc. will ever satiate me. What I had really wanted, was the belief that I am the sword. That these dreams I inflated could be stabbed by my own righteousness and reality and overflow into a real birth. All of my life I have wanted to give birth. Birth to my dreamed reality. Birth to a vision of myself I saw in my dreams. Though I, unknowingly, did not trust in the power of my own body. The belief that I could birth was not fortified. I did not believe I was capable of it without the leading of another. Without the insight of another. Without the manipulation, exploitation, and inflicted commercialization of another.

I thought I just didn’t have the chemical that caused the action of believing in yourself.

Now, I am aware, such a chemical, is not a chemical at all— it is made up of the circumstances you have been afforded. So, I did not have the “chemical” of money, I did not have the “chemical” of whiteness, and I did not have the “chemical” of being male. But, I did have the precision of a loving family, the electricity of an aching heart, and the strategy to imagine inexhaustibly from the theater of my deepest mind. And if you look at those things, aren’t they what mattered most of all? How the lack of certain “chemicals” pales in comparison to the wealth of what enlivens from the inside. How even the absence of something grows something else. Something deeper and usually much more profound. What a life I have been given out of these lacks. What a life I have been given from these gifts.

I am a lucky girl. I have been afforded many privileges in my life. I have been exceptionally fortunate. However, I have also been so painstakingly hard on myself. I was blinded and stunted by what I did not have. The labor of a dream without the belief-laced action to become it. I incinerated my voice to squirm away from the loudest voices in a room. Because if they are so loud, they must believe in what they’re saying to be true.

Do I believe in what I’m saying to be true?

Who are usually the loudest voices in a room?

Well, I have separated myself from that room. The room I live in is my own. My sanctuary. The scream I will be letting out will be so loud it will beat and break down the walls— clean. My voice will scream so fucking loud the whole Earth will have no choice but to hear me. And those voices, those loud, insufferable, idiotic, meaningless, voices — will be cut short. Room tone. I’m going to be screaming until the day I fucking die.

I’ve had so much trouble as a woman, as a girl, as an in-between of the two, of feeling this inescapable madness and fury of not being devoutly heard or listened to. My disposition betrays me because I have been trained so well. I have seen too often what has been done to the mad woman and I swore to never let myself become her. Or really, never let them see. Because I am a mad woman. I am fucking insane.

Though as the years have gone and being a girl has shifted farther away from being a woman, I am more drawn to my reservoir of unabashed madness. The water that makes my blood run scorching hot and thick. This inexplicable anger caused by the damage that has been inflicted upon my ideology. I hold surges of pure intuitive connection that I am stripped of mercilessly every time I play the “game”— The game of rigged survival. No — not anymore. I don’t listen to the rules of that game. Of that twisted, hollow, purely insidious game so sorely detached from the fruits of life. The mad woman, is the woman on fire, the woman who scorches the world and somehow still heals it.

My throat widens. Like a mountain ready to pour. What could this mean? What could this possibly mean for me?

Ah yes, more.

More is coming. I open my mouth wider for the more surging through my stomach and out of my core. Opening my mouth, not even a word has to come out to feel the weight there. I just open my mouth and it drops to the floor. Swords. I pick up these these weapons. To build. Because to build I have to slash down. I have to stick my sword into life and gush out the poisoned ends. I have not been given something pure, but I still have access to it. Breathing as I become it. Becoming it is as simple as breathing it. Because belief comes true when you let it in. When your body takes hold of it.

And breathes it out.

This madness is a music that whips throughout my body and out towards the tongue of life. I take this unfelt anger that secretes under the tombs of my stomach and resuscitate the sparks. I jolt myself into living, out of the catatonic, and into fury.

Though fury is not all of it. Underneath something else lies. Like a film, I slide the fury off. Revealing an endless pool of infinite wonder. An iridescent glaze pearls over me as I submerge into this secret gift. I bathe in this absoluteness. Covering myself in the knowing that I was not made to be rageful. The rage is a result of something.

Or rather, an entrance.

I float in this endless pool and stare into the ceiling of clouds, the fury that dissipates. They hover like a light fog granting subtle shadows over me. I stare up at my anger. How was I to have known that underneath it this experience would lie. That in conjuring up my madness — another madness could appear. A truer, freer reality, unlocked. That under anger is pleasure. Pure beauty. A legion of possibilities laid fact by the knowing that there is something innate and clear inside of me.

The rage is a protection of this under world. An alarm that something is trying to destroy my belief of it.

I am the one in charge of birthing my reality.

All I have to know, to remember,

is what is true.