How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(20)
I am regretful and ready to love.
I need your help,
Kiese Laymon
***
DEAR KIESE, DARNELL, AND MYCHAL,
I THANK you.
I THANK you for being vulnerable. I thank you for going deep and being unafraid to share that with me. All of these letters made me ask myself a question that I ponder a lot: What do we do with the scars, those of us who did not die, but still aren’t free? We struggle. We fight. We make a way out of no way. Every day we prove that the impossible is possible just by living.
You are right, Mychal, trading worry for living, for being, is freedom—it’s about being present.
You are right, Darnell, loving ourselves is a revolutionary act—we have to practice because the preachers and their Bibles don’t always tell us so.
You are right, Kiese, love can’t be attained through ownership—love is a relationship that must be cultivated through honesty. The truth can hurt, but a lie will never set you free. I, like you, choose truth. Please love me enough to tell me the truth.
Can we heal ourselves?
Yes! And we are modeling that process here. It takes self-reflection.
These days when I look in the mirror, I see change. I see my hips narrowing. I see my jaw-line sharpening. I see the physical markers of black manhood etch a divine design upon my body, and I feel pretty.
But I wasn’t born this way. I was born a black girl and I grew up into a black woman. I was once a queer hippie kid searching for peace in a New England boarding school because home could no longer hold me. I was once a masculine-identified lesbian, a femme-loving stud who was afraid to love other masculine folk—I was never told it was okay for us to love one another and that our love was valuable too. And today I write this as a black transman, queer boi, lover of love. I chose this life.
But what do we do with the scars? I have scars. Visible scars from falling as a kid. Visible scars from nights of self-inflicted cutting in high school. Visible scars from my recent double mastectomy. Those scars are easier for me to deal with because I know where to find them. I know what might irritate the recent scars on my chest. But what of the scars that you can’t see?
You ever go so deep and remember the things you didn’t know you were reminding yourself to forget?
Sadness. It haunts me. It sits on me sometimes and I wish I could move it, transition it.
I only recently learned that the sadness I carry is not just my own. It was inherited. Both my mother and father struggle with depression, but no one ever told me. I thought I was alone, and we still struggle to talk about it—how things from way back when still hurt us. And how we never got to take a break after losing so much.
Once I asked my mother about crack. I asked her about my dad. I asked her how she loved him. I asked her why she made me love him even though he hurt us over and over.
She told me she felt shame. She told me that I was the only one she could talk to because everyone thought she was crazy to stay, but she loved him. That he was her husband and my father, and she knew his heart. Crack changed him. Crack destroyed so many black love stories.
She told me that it was only in the last couple of years that she had stopped sleeping with her purse under her pillow for fear of having it stolen. She hasn’t been with my my dad in more than six years. Scars…
If you cared about it, you had better lock it up in the back room. I remember the frustration of forgetting, forgetting that nothing was safe unless you locked it away. I remember when something of my big brother’s got stolen. I remember how angry he was. I remember how guilty I felt because it was my father who was the addict, not my big brother’s father.
I remember God. God and my mother were the only people I was allowed to talk to. We kept secrets from the outside world—we built our own. But we needed more. We couldn’t save my dad. I couldn’t save my mother. I learned the most radical thing I could do was figure out how to save myself. We all have to save ourselves. We all have to find our way toward healing and forgiveness. And it is a long road.
I am a black transman who loves men and women. I am a man who is just now learning to love my femininity. I was a girl named Kiana once. She survived a summer of sexual abuse when she was eight. When she told the truth there was no counseling. There was no processing, only a fast girl who needed to be watched closely. I prayed to God for forgiveness. Guilt hurt, and I started getting migraines. I moved with guilt in my heart, guilt as my center. I didn’t want to be bad, but I felt bad. I carried guilt when I left my mother with my father, but it was the only way I could get free. I had to leave.
I am Kai. I had to leave. I had to move into this new body.
Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve because we don’t know our own value.
WE deserve great love, laughter, poetry, sweetness, sunshine, and smiles.
WE deserve true love, open and honest.
We deserve healthy love—love, a home where you don’t have to hide what is most valuable in order to keep it.
I write with love for you, brothers, the agape kind.
Kai M. Green
***
DEAR KAI, KIESE, DARNELL, AND MYCHAL,
Damn, you guys are bringing up some things that are making me go deep within. Just two months ago, I was finally able to voluntarily move out of my parents’ house. FYI: I said voluntarily because I spent a decade in what some of my brothers call Mr. Gilmore’s house, aka the big house. I’ve been in prison for the last ten years of my life.