The Audacity

the truth about creative expression.

I never scavenged the audacity to write. I was never white or rich. I could never find the words to describe the life I would keep experiencing. The feelings passed through me and I would sway. I don’t move alone, I can’t write without the feeling that something is in the air. I just leap from phrase to phrase and it’s my signature now. I don’t remember what made me think this was okay. I never wanted to write for anybody else, I was selfish in literature. Completely immersed in my world, I was selfish with the air that passed through my lungs and I would never let people inside this vault I built for myself. I just wrote to feel the rain again and to feel alive. It’s accidental.

Lately I feel a compulsion of meteoric magnitude. I am completely overtaken by a need to senselessly express myself. I’ve been buzzing for years in secret. I am reaching my limit. I will sleep and lustfully write; just like my lineage intended. I come from an incredibly deep lineage of strong mystical women on my matriarchal side and a founding Mayor on my father’s side.

Being peculiar is enviable and I have dealt with all the wrath of plain personalities that would come ready to tame me with whips of shame. Ruthless anger I could never unravel and understand.

I am almost reborn. I don’t think there is anything cryptic about me but people seem confused by what exactly I think. Maybe that’s because they are subtly attempting to force a perspective that does not exist; they cannot see beyond their unconscious prejudice because I am too visibly Black and too visibly a woman. I occasionally pierce their walls of assumption through radical authenticity. I haven’t felt safe to express myself aside from when I have been alone. There are always people waiting with their staplers to attach me to a bulletin board. Compartmentalise me into a project, a puzzle of sorts.

I am Grace. Call me as such.

There is nothing exceptional about me. I live and breathe and that is as important as my existence gets.

I have not manufactured myself and I have been forged by suffering and pain and sorrow. I was a very sad person and I spent a year in total isolation forging a fire within myself.

I do not want to be labeled but I have given myself notes of artistry and authorship. I am neither. I am Grace.