To be willing to grow, you must be willing to be, at this stage, at least a tiny bit wrong.
I said wrong, not different.
When something or someone different has to be vouched for as being “okay,” “alright,” “I mean it’s fine if that’s what you choose…,” you are indicating a system which demands that perceived otherness or badness be accompanied by language. “She’s fine.” “I guess that’s okay.” Despite, despite, despite. Lifestyle, relationship, tone, design. Shape, size, etc.
My point is that it is a privilege to move through space unaccompanied by language.
To not alarm anyone by your need for explanations.
To be a disseminator of the language of approval is basically to disguise judgment as tolerance.
Some things don’t need to be said. Or shouldn’t have to be. A more tolerant world would, in fact, be mostly quiet.
I suppose oxygen is okay. I mean breathing is fine. It’s alright if a “deep breath” is what you prefer. But I wouldn’t take one myself.
Who says a single person needs to understand everything?
[ People who feel the need to vouch for otherness.
People who refuse to couch their fatherliness.
People who peruse and who mouth and who cover up the rest of us.
Here, let me explain this to you. I know how badly you want to understand. ]
There are good things in the world that you’ll never understand:
How the sun works.
What gives water its blue-green precision.
Your birth,
or where and when excitement is distinctly born.
You want to understand because you can’t distinguish love from facts.
You can’t love me without thinking about me. Thinking through me. Right through the middle.
And what’s the point, you say, in thinking, unless you’re gonna do it all the way? Think until you understand comprehensively.
So that when you’re done thinking, you tell yourself you’ve arrived at comprehension. F-a-c-t.
You can’t see the rooms the doors of which you haven’t even opened.
You can’t see the frog in your throat.
There is a frog, and you love him. You want your love mirrored by the cold shape of unmoving, published statement. You want to understand love from the inside, as if it were capable of being emptied out. To dissect the frog, it must be dead. Then you’ll know so much about him. Your thoughts about the frog will be buoyed by
your own objective knife, called apprehension.
I am working on healthy boundaries:
Distinguishing no from yes.
Leaving a room when I must.
Not laughing out of habit.
Not picking up weight that belongs to another.
I watch “love” and “understanding” meander down the street, side by side.
Not interchangeable, but in many ways, yes, parallel.
And when the two diverge, I sometimes maintain my grasp on the former, let my thinking brain go on ahead a few more blocks, however far it wants to go, while we stay behind, me and my heart, no longer wishing to replace presence with scrutiny.
The thinking, at times, interrupts the being. Segments it. Blood-letting, a slicing motion.
It says:
I think it’s okay. I mean, what you’re doing. I suppose I think it’s fine. If I can just see it from the inside first, take a closer look at the stuff naturally kept away from me, I think I’ll feel better releasing it back into the pond.
freelance feminist 