protest

“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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Today is one of those days where I feel like I don’t have much to say. At least not anything I think is worth the effort to type out. But here I am typing anyway.

Bookmarks are being used more than the books themselves. Messages are becoming increasingly harder to open. I overload my senses with too much to feel or stare at walls that reflect no feeling at all. Walks turn into naps. Tasks and hobbies become chores. Passions feel fruitless. Relationships seem measured.

I want to protest every thing and person in my life. I want to protest the world. But protest has become punishable, smeared, and smothered, in ways most learn about only in history classrooms, particularly when inconvenient for the folk who hold power within the structures that I protest. For as long as I have lived I have been trapped between the upheaval subsequent to self-determination and the comfort of conformity, however uncomfortable that reality may be for me. In other words, I either speak up and disrupt the peace, at a typically substantial cost, or I continue to masquerade as though the things happening inside of me aren’t anything but peaceful. My peace—or their’s.

Today I choose my own. Being cast in a role deemed as too negative, too angry, too critical, too bothered, too…too, if too were able to exist as itself, is nothing out of the norm for me. I exist in spaces that I contrast in every physical sense, evident by the stalking eyes and perked ears, and most often in a psychological and emotional sense as well, evident by… well, everything else? An important note: I am not prescribing myself with any brand of terminal uniqueness here; rather, I’m merely speaking to objective differences and how they affect my ‘subjective’ experiences, as they so often do. I want to cut off friends for not being ‘political’ enough; I want to huff and deflect all my aches and displeasures back onto those who impose them; I want to eject every thought and feeling I have into the atmosphere the moment they come to me like fierce river rapids, allowing it to yield what it may.

“Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down.” Malcolm X taught me this. Today I am picking up the (metaphorical) gun, because getting shot at and smiling through the pain does nothing but encourage the shooter to reload. Malcolm X taught me that self-respect is the most overlooked act of protest, that to respect myself is to see clearly how others don’t.

Even as I write this, I doubt myself. I doubt my voice, my reasons, my convictions, my talent, my meaning. I’m respecting myself enough to click the orange button labeled publish in spite of my doubts, in the spirit of protest.