I go by my initials,

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war. I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism; I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table; I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies. With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars, my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck and your swastikas will not be enough to save you, because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming. You just delayed our coronation. We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday; we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business because it’s still nobody’s business; there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing, and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it: we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name, the buildings here are not on your side just because you make them spray-painted accomplices. These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck. Even the earth found common cause with us the way you trample us both, oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles, and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them but I won’t, because they’re my family, in that blood-of-the-covenant sense. If you’ve never loved someone like that you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway. I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now; I haven’t heard my heart beat in days, I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through. But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us. We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder the longer they spend burning us, we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading, by refusing to die: what are we but a fire? We know everything we do is so the kids after us will be able to follow something towards safety; what can I call us but lighthouse, of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud. And of course it’s not fair but rest assured, anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight. This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw. You cannot deport our minds; we won’t hold funerals for our potential. We have always been what makes America great.

Since Tuesday night, what keeps rising like a burn blister on the surface of my brain is all the times I’ve been told you’re being sensitive. All the times I’ve been told you’re taking things too seriously, too personally. All the times I’ve been told, you’ve had every privilege, what are you complaining about? All the times I’ve been told to shhhhhh. All the times I’ve been told to take it easy.

I cannot shake these voices and I cannot shake the feeling they provoke.

There’s a cauldron that exists inside me that starts to seethe when these sorts of things are said, when I am being dismissed, quieted, condescended to. And when the fire under this cauldron is lit, to a white hotness that is nearly blinding, what it takes with it is my ability to be the articulate and intelligent person I know myself to be. Something else takes over, a pre-lingual fury, a heat that erases logic and coherent argument and civility. In these moments, the experience is not just my own self being demeaned or silenced; it is the entire history of women being demeaned or silenced. And the weight of that, the condensed and hot feeling of outrage is, at times, more than I know how to deal with, and certainly, in these moments, more than I know how to rightly express. What goes is the impulse to kindly and gently explain something. What comes is a wanting to smash faces. If it were a sound, it would be a scream so loud it would make birds fall out of the sky.

This is rage. It is a feeling of blood in the cheeks, heart bumping in the throat, whatever pocket that holds tears getting filled up behind the eyes ready to spill, it is a stuttering, frenzied horrible, horrible feeling. It comes from the helplessness of knowing: I cannot make you understand. You will never, never know. Like approaching a smooth white wall that rises forever that you cannot penetrate, that you cannot climb over to reach the other side, a maddening, impenetrable stop.

This is rage, and I am finding myself wanting to admit that it is in me. It is not attractive. It ranks as one of the very worst things I know I can feel. It is scary. It frightens people. It makes them uncomfortable.

But I have been made to feel uncomfortable. Every woman I know has been made to feel uncomfortable. In ways subtle that grind like a dull file across a piece of wood, in ways explicit like an unasked for touch from a stranger. And right now I feel uncomfortable, and that cauldron is simmering and I do not want it to cool. As ugly and frightening as it is. Because there are things uglier and more frightening. The poet Mary Ruefle writes “Anger is an emotion that is produced by fear. There are no exceptions.”

There are no exceptions. This is rage. And this is fear. And I feel afraid. That suddenly there is increased license for the type of silencing, demeaning, assaulting that erases a person’s personhood.

For a long time I thought it went without saying that I support the safety and rights of people of color, of the LGBT community, of Muslims, of immigrants, of women, of every disenfranchised group trying to stay safe and have a voice. Doesn’t that just fucking go without saying? No. No. It doesn’t. Not right now. So I say it. I am behind you. I am so behind you. We have each other’s backs. And I hope I never see anyone being silenced, insulted, demeaned, assaulted. And if I do I will come to your aid as I hope you would come to mine.

In a much-read piece from the New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen writes rules for surviving an autocracy. The whole piece is worth your time, but this section in particular has been echoing in my head:

Rule #4 Be outraged … In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is              essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Prepare yourself. Prepare yourself. I cannot stop hearing it. Prepare yourself.

Take it easy. No. I can’t. And won’t.

There’s a new Local Natives, and it shines as bright (or brighter?) than their excellent first two albums. It’s a different kind of shine, but I’m all for progress and/or reinvention.

Not pictured: me taking a tiny tiny break from Frank Ocean’s “Blonde” to appreciate this album.