as small as a world and as large as alone

3:53pm July 7, 2014

amorpha-system:

youneedacat:

whenthereckoningarrives:

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

I so frequently hear this quote cut off after “it is better to speak,” and it is so much better this way why would you do that

“We were never meant to survive” always brings chills down my back and tears to my eyes.

…is it okay to relate to this as someone who was never meant to “survive” therapy as an individual existence? who was supposed to be integrated into a whole that couldn’t happen? supposed to have everything I was and ever could be (and there turned out to be so much more of the “what I could be” than I ever knew) subsumed into it.  

They called it healing, but it wasn’t healing.  It was the systematic stripping away of every defense we had until we ran into predator after predator, with no defenses.  And yet somehow I still survived, protected in that core part of us where no one could touch even when I spent years sleeping.

But I worry it’s not ok to relate to a thing like this.  Because I worry it wasn’t written with people like me in mind.  Sometimes I think I’d be better off just writing my own poems.

-S.

I can’t answer that, because I didn’t write it.  But I think it’s okay to relate to a poem, as long as you remember who it was originally written for as well.  It becomes a problem when you relate to it yourself, but strip it of all its original meaning in the process, making it sound like it’s just for people like you.  Like since I’m white, I have to be careful to remember this was written by a black woman, and that the experiences of black women are central to this poem, even if I can relate to it as a disabled genderless person, among other things.

I personally feel like it’s important for people to be able to identify with things that weren’t necessarily intended for them specifically.  It’s part of how people connect with each other, and stifling that is generally a bad thing.  But there’s also a problem that can happen when someone identifies with something without acknowledging the original meaning and the original source of the poem, and that’s when things get ugly.

50 notes