“Your twenties are the best years of your life!”
I actually believed y’all too. I did everything I was supposed to do. I worked hard, and I stayed in school. I found my passions and worked super hard to become an expert. I spent my time getting my face out there and scheduling gigs for the summer and post grad. Hell, I even got into an Ivy League school to pursue my MFA. I was full of hope and passion. I had professors and peers telling me that I was going to do big things and incite change, and I believed them.
Then COVID-19 happened. Dreams were starting to slip out of my grasp, but I remained positive. I wasn’t allowed to get upset about the pandemic because it’s not like anyone purposefully created it. Timelines were altered, but dreams weren’t forgotten. I knew that eventually, we as a country would recover and move past it.
This is something that we will not move past.
I sat on my couch and laid in bed for the entirety of yesterday. I was unable to move. I’m an artist that was unable to create. There was this crushing weight of despair that rendered me hopeless and immobile. I have been fortunate in my lifetime that my brushes with racism have been minimal. I’ve always been told that I “talk white” or I was “a smart one.” My parents drilled into me a soft and polite demeanor that has me walk through this world looking like less of a threat than my brothers and sisters. I’ve been wrestling with this kind of privilege my entire life. Because even though I appear to be “one of the good ones,” ever since I was 12 years old, I have been waiting for the day that I will inevitably be gunned down by a police officer or some random citizen with a hero complex. Trayvon Martin. Mike Brown. Freddie Gray. Philando Castille. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Aubrey. The list goes on and on and on and on. With my parents telling me that I was capable and beautiful, the country has been telling me that my only purpose was target practice for as long as I can remember. I had grown numb to it all. I never thought that I could possibly be numb to senseless murder, and I was ashamed of myelf. I refuse to be numb anymore.
Black people don’t get to think about a future. Hell, if the policemen had their way, we wouldn’t get to even have a future. Believe me, all I want to do is put on my headphones and plan to move to NYC and start working on my summer reading list for grad school, but I can’t. All I can think about is how this system is rigged and how the president wants me and my brothers and sisters silenced whether that be permanently or not. And let me tell you something, if I don’t get to tune things out, then neither do you. You don’t get to sit in your little quarantined houses and online shop or bake your precious banana bread. People are dying. They’ve been dying for years, but history is happening, and you had better be on the right side of it. If you don’t understand or agree with these protests or the firing and sentencing of these police officer, then I’m going to need you to unfollow, block, and get off of my feed because I refuse to be silent or numb any longer. I am black, and black lives fucking matter.
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