For the Love of Writing

In graduate school I spent 6 months pouring my heart out for my Master's paper. I wrote about my life, the complicated experience of being a multiracial Black woman. I wrote about my family, my friends, childhood enemies and the women who saved me. It was very akin to that quote about writing where you're bleeding on the page.

This blog hasn't been quite as personal. Many of them were barely edited, apologies for the typos and general lack of commas. I did this project to prove that I could and to remind myself what it was I loved about writing. I was reminded that it's writing from my experience that I love the most. Quirky noticing and painful memories that helps me explain the systems of inequality we live in every day.

"B in the Borderlands" is meant to be a play on words, it's meant to reference my first initial and a state of being. A reference to Gloria Anzaldua's famous book that brings forward that which is usually hidden and ignored. The in-between, the intersections, the borderlands. When I came to terms with my Bisexuality I remember sobbing heavily, yelling out to the universe "why do I have to have another one of these identities?" The kind that don't make sense to people, the kind that aren't seen fully. I'd already struggled through navigating a multiracial identity and couldn't bear to feel that on another plane.

But here I am, in the borderlands just the same. 

I've tried to ignore the pull to confront these things in my writing. The need to write my experience felt like a vain quest for validation, more of our fame obsessed culture creeping in, my need to be the center of attention. But the more I write, the more I share myself--my borderlands I hear from the friends that have been kind enough to read, that it resonates with them too. I remember that so much of what we know is based on our experience and the experiences that have been shared with us. We are a country of people hearing the stories of those with power and not listening to the quiet voices of those on the margins.

I cannot speak for everyone but my ability to put my experience into words is a gift and a responsibility.