Go where it hurts
It’s been a while - since I’ve been on here, but it’s also been a while since I have been inspired so strongly that I would have to write about it.
Life is lived so comfortably in the spectrum of mediocrity, but what about going to extremes? I need mentors that push me to the edge, have me go to where it hurts and then create from there. The thought that has pierced my soul was during the Grada Kilomba talk at the AdK in Berlin on 14 January.
The exact term she used was “everybody’s darling”, which moved me strongly. No, more even, it shook me. How often do I place being ‘liked’ and preserving ‘harmony’ over my own feelings? More often then not, I keep my thoughts and feelings to myself. Instead my soul is shouting “fucking set boundaries”.
It’s harder than some might imagine. Being raised by world to be a ‘good girl’ and having manners means being silent rather than learning to articulate an opinion from early on. Additionally, I feel like calling out what hurts or merely displeases you is making a big deal out of nothing really worth the mention. That thought right there feels so far fetched, yet looking back I am really shocked how often I had that feeling in my stomach area, piercing and stabbing, when someone says something to me or around me that I would strongly disagree with and I would just think “It’s nothing don’t make a big deal about it”. That’s not my voice, that is someone else’s, so what needs to be done is excavate the inner voice underneath the nonsense society has indoctrinated me with, less elegantly put “unfucking” myself.
