#WriteWithMe: Musing About A Prompt

Spent my #WriteWithMe journey writing time on a prompt that took an unexpected turn this morning. Sometimes the prompts hit deep, other times they dont, and then there are days when I go “oh this is a simple prompt” and as I am writing it turns into this…

“F*ck, that sense of “unworthy” runs so g-d damn deep. I am what I do, I am what other people want, I am what I can offer to others. Those protective capes I wear, the ones that helped me to survive in the darkest times of my life, they sometimes feel like they are choking the air right out of me.

I wonder if I will ever be able to fully lay them down, especially in this world that is hell bent on tying my worth to productivity and niceness and servitude. I wonder if I wear those protective capes because they were given to me by society first, and when I experienced traumas that, looking back, were inevitable… the only protections I had were the ones that served the society that created space that allowed me to experience those traumas in the first place. Well sh*t…”

As I am pondering what to do with this now, I am also thinking about how often we dismiss the protective capes folks who have experienced trauma of all kinds must wear. My wife and I were talking recently about a heartbreaking situation we learned about on the news, where 13-year-olds are being locked up for murder of another kid their age. And of course, we got into a conversation about how this is inevitable when certain things happen. Redlining and redistricting, for example. Society giving no actual damns about Black and Brown kids especially. A society that really only gives one way to exist, and then locks you up and throws you away when you exist in that way, is a really sick society…

When are we going to hold ourselves accountable to making change happen? When are we going to say “enough is enough,” and make it be so?

We don’t have to keep living in an inevitability cycle, with grief after grief after heart wrenching grief. We can burn it all down, clear the ground, and build a better world. We can transform, as human beings we have that beautiful capacity. We are human beings, divine and magical. Can we treat each other as though this is true?

Here’s the prompt I was responding to: “As you were overcoming those barriers to reaching your dream or making that change, what was it within yourself that kept you going?”