Report 000: Introduction

A short prerequisite course on the author.

For months now, I have been contemplating what my first post on this platform would be. I wanted it to be something memorable, something that would make readers come back for more. I wanted it to be something that felt real and authentic and true and like me. For months, I have brainstormed and delved deep into my mind and looked back on my childhood all in an attempt to unearth the version of me that I want to showcase to my audience, whoever they may be. After many months of soul searching and failed attempts at healing and becoming one with myself, I have realized something terrifying; I have no idea who I am. 

Perhaps “realized” is the incorrect word to use here. Part of me feels that the one thing I have always known about myself is that I know nothing about myself at all. This isn’t to say I have no opinions or preferences, though. I feel like anyone who knows me in person would use “opinionated” as one of the first words to describe me. What I mean when I say that I know nothing about myself is that I do not know what I am here to do. I do not know what drives me, what lights me on fire, what makes me cry. I do not know the things that make me human and perhaps this is because there has not been a single day of my life where I have felt human. 

Here is what I do know. I know that from the moment I was old enough to go to school and interact with other children, I was othered. I was different. I was weird. Now, this isn’t me lamenting my unfortunate childhood in the fashion that the white bread male love interest of an indie YA novel would. I truly mean that from a very young age, the first thing I noticed about the world is that there was me, and there was ‘everyone else’. I grew up in a primarily non-Black city and thus went to primarily non-Black schools. There is one “other”. If I was lucky enough to make friends with the one other Black girl in my school, I was the dark one and she was the light one. There is another “other”. Even inside my own family, I was othered. My family members would make jokes about how dark my skin was, how weird my long limbs looked, my nappy hair, my crooked teeth, my pigeon-toed walk, my sensitivity, my inability to take a joke. I’m sure if you ask those family members now, they would laugh it off and say that it was all a joke, or that they never said those things at all. That I’m a grown adult now and that it’s time to let the past go. That it’s unfair to paint them in such a negative light. Nevertheless, my point still stands. From a young age, I was always hyper-aware of the many many ways that I was different.

What does this have to do with me not feeling human, you ask? Well, it has everything to do with it. When you are a child, and you are different, othered from your peers and family members alike, you internalize it. What else is there to do? Instead of thinking “wow, people can all be so different,” you think “why am I so different? Why am I so wrong? Why can’t I be like other people? Am I even a person?” You become hyper-aware of every single way you are failing to fit in, every way that you are not human.

My other-ness became a bit of a fixation for me. I would obsess over how humans interacted with each other. I would study body language and slang and fashion and tone and makeup and pop culture and it was exhausting and it didn’t work. I would always be different, and for a long time, I hated it. I was embarrassed to be different. Standing out was my nightmare and yet it was all I could do. I felt like a spectacle; a specimen. A commodity. Everywhere I went, it felt like there was a giant sign behind me reading, “LOOK HERE, AUTISTIC BLACK GIRL TO GAWK AT! COME ONE, COME ALL!” 

Somewhere along the way I started to appreciate the ways in which I was different. I started to make it part of my identity. I would lean into the way that I didn’t fit in anywhere. I relied on it. It also became my biggest downfall. I started to expect being the weird one, the odd one out. I stopped opportunities from happening because, to me, even standing out for positive reasons was still standing out, and standing out was bad. I hated the attention. I hated the eyes, the judgment, the visibility, the scrutiny. I allowed myself to sink into the shadows because I was afraid to shine. The worst part about the last few paragraphs of the impromptu pity party that is this introductory passage, is that somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that there were no parts of me that were capable of shining. My fear of being seen somehow morphed into this huge, disgusting monster of self doubt and hatred.

If you are even an eighth of the amount of chronically online I am, then you know that people being ultra vulnerable and honest on the internet about mental health is not something that is hard to come by. People talk very openly about depression, anxiety, self worth and self image issues daily across all social media platforms. I’m sure most people are intimately aware of how low self esteem and a poor self image can affect the mind. However, something I don’t see a lot of conversation about is how hating yourself can prevent you from ever knowing yourself. I have spent more than half of the 24 years I have been alive hating myself. Sometimes, it feels like ever since I had a self, I have hated it. And when you hate something, what do you do? You refuse to look at it. You refuse to acknowledge it, to even give it the time of day. You ignore it, neglect it, talk down on it, try to convince others to hate it too. Very rarely does someone hate something and attempt to understand it. Very rarely does someone hate something and try to study it, to dissect it, to be at peace with it. 

I do not know myself. I do not know how to attract an audience that is like me because I do not know who I am. With this introductory passage on this platform where people can see my name attached to a piece of writing, where people can see me, I am hoping to begin to learn about who I am. I am hoping to learn what drives me, what lights me on fire, what makes me cry. I am hoping to learn everything about myself through writing, one of my first loves. And I am hoping that anyone who was able to resonate with even just one sentence of this passage will join me on this journey, so that we may learn to be human together