I want to write for me

At least try

I’m no longer interested in living a life that holds me hostage to people’s ideas of who I should be. Or rather my idea of what other people’s idea of the life I should lead. I want to be free to be who I am without constantly parsing every single cell of my existence to reveal my true self. What is my true self anyway? How can I be true when my breath, my touch, and my thoughts have been programmed by my machinations outside my control? 

What does it mean to be one's true self when your idea of a life was derived from watching too much Sex and the City? Without knowing that Maxine was your blueprint for what it means to be a successful person. While being surrounded by so many Carries that now want to be Mirandas you had to vomit out all the white supremacy inside your soul to finally feel anything. 

I told myself that I would be honest through my writing and stop writing for anyone’s gaze. I want to write for myself. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for myself. It’s always been about pleasing someone. Whether it’s my parents or someone out there who I just really wanted to like me. I don’t know what it is about me that makes me lurch onto humans I’ve just met and convince myself that my life will be empty without them. Like I just met you two minutes ago and I’ve lived a full life and now I have this sense of devastating attachment. 

Yesterday I was watching Girlfriends because I was so sad I could taste the depression overwhelming every single cell of my body. The Black capitalist propaganda was rife. Joan was a 29 year old junior partner at a law firm. When I was 29 I was having a panic attack in my cube at work, confronted with the reality that my life was not mine.

I rewatched Girlfriends because I’m trying to revisit all the sites that colonized my brain as I try to decolonize my mind. 

Girlfriends taught me that all I needed was to be thin, smart, beautiful, and own a pair of Pradas to live a good life. I didn’t know what a good life meant at the time but I thought anything would be better than being a friendless geek who was never invited to parties and fought with her teachers about American imperialism. 

I did all those things except for the Prada part, but I wasn’t happy.

I remember my boss asking me if I wanted to manage people when I was 27 and I said no. I didn’t know what managing people meant. I just knew that it’s not something that I should want. It felt like overstepping the boundaries of humanity. Managing people felt so close to owning people to me that every single cell of my body fully rejected it. I didn’t know why I said no at the time but I understand why now. Something inside my soul repudiates hierarchy and domination. No amount of propaganda has been able to override this base instinct. 

When I say this it makes it sound like I think that I’m better than other people. I don’t. I’m capable of cruelty. I see homeless people around me every day and I don’t rebel against a system that allows for this to happen. Sure I post my little videos on TikTok, squeeze my squeaky pig toy when I see the cops, and carry out long diatribes about how everything is bad to everyone who will listen. Deep inside I feel like that’s not enough because it’s not enough. I’m just like everyone else who carries on as the ruling class engulfs the most vulnerable of us in pain and misery because my pain and misery is still tolerable. 

No, I don’t think I’m better than anyone else and it burns my soul to live in a world where different lives have different values. 

Yesterday I baked banana bread and it was really scary. I was baking it for a communal dinner. I told everyone at the dinner that I was really proud of myself for baking the bread because I have a terrible relationship with failure. I will write more about this later but I want to end here.

I told myself I would do things that scare me. I think writing this and posting it for a lot of people to read is terrifying. I’m sharing it because I think these thoughts want to be read by someone else. Otherwise they wouldn’t have forced themselves out of me onto this google document. 

I hope you find the courage to do things that terrify you for you.

❤️

Your favorite anarchist comedian/poet/social critic,

Marcela