Lucy Valentine (he|they)
Infinite: Everything is on Purpose / A Personal Essay
Black Radical Imagination Essay Contest: FIRST PRIZE
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My particular Black imagination has been waiting patiently for me.
I watch Joyful, Joyful on YouTube for the fourth time, dancing in the bathroom with headphones as a silent anxiety treatment.
I had been spending time deciding who exactly I was going to be.
*Hearts unfold like flowers before thee...*
I studied my face in the mirror, willing my unfolding out of a cocoon flowing, grounded, and graceful.
My mirror works magic like a Pensieve
I see myself, years ago, watching a reader tell me "you have everything you need."
I decide commitment is what's needed to be a sentient imprint of my imagination… and perhaps manage some dysphoria. Two birds, one stone; efficiency is in my astrology.
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I'd been having a fun bout of body 'dysmorphia'…?
Huffing in my nostalgic aesthetic of post-puberty/pre-teen/enby-emo/tired-of-biology type angst and fear.
He said, "when you say, 'doesn't make me feel like a girl' that way, it feels like you're disrespecting parts of yourself that are really beautiful."
It was at that point I felt every single blood cell in this inaccurately labeled body I call the moon slowly but surely begin to warm inside my veins like a damp washcloth heating inside a microwave until I boiled in wide-eyed realization. I was missing something. It was like a visual representation of screaming, "Who the fuck even AM I anymore?!"
My sense of identity had been a bit of a crisis lately. Ever so lightly. I don't think anyone noticed.
Who is this version of me? Didn't I use to dream more? What am I carrying and is it all even mine? Am I still trans? What am I hiding from inside my own body? Am I trans enough? If he doesn't want me because my body parts change is it wrong to stay? What's holding me back???????
All questions I've been asking this December, really all of this forgotten – and probably cursed - year. Every answer I've been blessed with has gone wildly left.
I have heard from my star-minded friends that since I am turning twenty-nine soon these kinds of conversations with myself/wild reflection trips will go on for the next year or so. They're calling it my "Saturn return".
I may call it "First Off I'm Tired: How I Stopped Giving a Fuck and Had Panic Attacks Anyways".
I'm not sure where I am returning but I imagine it's that place in my old dreams
Celie's house
through the purple, gentle, pulp
house of thick, soft, love
always recovering like the breath and contraction of
exquisitely
folded velvet flesh.
I guess 'boy with boobs' doesn't roll off the tongue the way I'd like, but I do decide I will love this body as it came to me because that's what I need to commit to my agenderness, femmeness, boiness, transness, blackness. To honor the legacies, I was blessed with; that of Black womanhood, surviving poverty, and QT existence.
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LESSON ONE
"Blackness is inherently queer." P.50
"Yes, our strength can be found in struggle… and we have to find pride in the ability to create an entirely new ladder." P. 107
There is room – and many reasons to – love me in infinite unconditional ways. Not just because it's the only unconditional love I'll ever get; but because it's the first love I have always deserved.
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Back in my room Pretty Hurts pops up on auto play and I sing along.
"Perfection is a disease of a nation…"
She sits there in rainbows of grace and fortitude knocking over trophies in perfect waves and bedazzled jean shorts.
All these women
Reminders that non-male existence is kind of like choking on a brick and flailing
But it's also, more so, like drippin' in that grace
Well-moisturized and smiling.
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LESSON TWO
"We are called reactionary because we refuse to be silent about the blood spilled on the streets by state-sanctioned violence." P. 109
"It is important that we tell our own story and that it belongs to us." P. 110
The golden honey saturating Black Women never stops flowing and everyone is always tasting that healing sweetness and walking away.
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Because of all this glory and light radiated by Black non-male folk as a whole and Black Women specifically, I come to a set of questions that require lifetime repetition:
What have Black Women done for you and what have you done for Black Women? Today? Tomorrow? Next year? One hundred years ago? One hundred from now?
You have to keep asking yourself, like a prayer.
This book is like a ritual some Muslims call a zikr or remembrance. In this way of practice, one engages in a sweeping motion of the head from left to right and it is done as a closing to help us remember our roots, our identity, and to cleanse ourselves of unneeded energy. It's a reminder of what is good, clear, and just.
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LESSON THREE
"There are far too many incomplete stories and partial solutions to getting free. We must look back to where we came from to help determine where we must go." P. 114
Be invited, again, to go to the places Celie and Yeine and Tamika live. Remember who taught you to imagine and remember how to get there.
When you do?
Explode.
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