welcome to my loveletter 🥰
Hello sunshine! Welcome to my loveletter! I am creating this as a new way to connect with you and a space to be joyful and complicated and reflective and evolving. I both know exactly what I want to say and have no idea at all. This is good because the truth often has a divine quality of contradiction, so I feel reassured that in these words I am living mine. If you see yourself as someone who has supported me in any way, I want to say such a deep thank you. You have propelled me towards a deeper form of self-love and self-knowing. It is difficult to reconcile the relationship between the big and the small, how tiny things add up to Big things. Grains of sand band together to give us beaches, specks of paint combine to give us murals, and tiny comments of love and appreciation gave me the confidence that my voice was worth sharing. I am writing this for you and for myself, especially for my inner child who once dreamed of being a writer. We are what we do — and so I am.
Like you I am on a number of journeys with myself that i oscillate between forgetting about and obsessing over. Unlearning perfectionism is one of them. Perfectionism is a form of self-monitoring weaponized by oppressive systems to ensure that the marginalized silence ourselves on their behalf. So long as there is an unattainable standard to reach in order to justify us sharing our voice or art or dreams or truth or needs with the world, we will continue to feel defeated before even trying. And since we are taught that defeat is unacceptable, we flee from ourselves. Hence, perfectionism is a form of self-repression, one that is imposed on us by forces that have no interest in our survival.
If you wait for the perfect words, you will never speak. You will never release your truth into the world. And in turn, your unsaid words will never reach those they were meant for. Speak even though you are terrified, if it is safe for you. And there is such a legitimate fear in speaking. Black people in particular have been punished, tortured, incarcerated, and murdered for speaking our truth. To make matters worse, we face backlash from our own community each time we try to be honest about the oppression we face within it. In addressing this tension between the need to speak and the inherent fear of doing so I am reminded of three Audre Lorde quotes from her phenomenal essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” that I have had saved on my Notes App for years:
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger”
“In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live”
Wow. Rest in peace and power. (P.S., I have been thinking of starting a book club for months, perhaps Roxane Gay’s Selected Works of Audre Lorde is a good place to start?)
I love that last line: we fear a particular form of visibility we cannot live without. Each of us deeply craves being seen in our truth. Yet this is a two-sided dynamic, every person who has something authentic to say (with their words, queerness, energy, presence, body, activism, art, humor etc.) needs a nourishing community who will authentically listen and receive them. We need each other. We need each other so desparately. When we are brave enough to be in our truth, we need to be held in that truth, to be celebrated, to be accepted. So we all need to play this role for each other as well. Thank you for playing it for me.
I have felt called to write and to share my writing by a voice somewhere deep within me. I don’t fully understand it and I don’t need to. And then as soon as I sit down to do it, as soon as I find the courage to show up for that voice, the self-doubt and fear of judgment kick in. What role is my perfectionism playing? A role of disconnecting me from myself by limiting my authentic self-expression and causing a premature death to its potential impact on warm souls like yours.
Perhaps you are just like me — you’ve been meaning to do something for months or years, but your fear of asking for help, embarassment, judgment, or failure stops you. It is a form of self-love, self-nourishing and self-advocacy to be in your truth, and it is an absolute necessity that communities are ready to Receive you: to offer you encouragement, love, support, and money in the form of mutual aid.
So if there are words, art, videos, protests, forms of self-expression within you that speak to a deeper inner voice, and if it is safe enough for you, I hope you will let it sing. Know that any belief that stops you from sharing your inner voice alienates you from yourself and others and must be unlearned and rejected.
You are loved. You are needed. You are valued. No one else can embark on the project of being radically you, except you. In the great words of Audre Lorde, then, the question is: What do you need to say?