No One Can Grade You On Your Gift

Before I spoke from my body, I contemplated. I thought many thoughts. I imagined poems and paintings before they rose up in my throat and sweated from my pores. I laid in many rooms with music blasting in my ears, the door closed, and my body in a bed that just fit me. Seasons of isolation have the power to birth amazing things. One must decide: keep going.

I've personally lived enough life to know that what keeps people alive is not always what capitalism rewards most loudly. When one goes quiet, we inherently go dormant as well. Where we struggle, in the noise of influence, of validation from likes shares saves, is legitimizing our own gifts, our inner workings regardless of posture.

Through my most recent recovery, post open abdominal surgery, through my never ending confrontation with my own mortality, I decided to take decades of my interior life and say:

I will not die holding this.

My art. My language. My sweeping ideas. My heart space. My vulnerability. My gifts. My downloads. My inner workings. My spiritual maps. My Ancestor’s secrets. My desire. When you've lived with chronic illness, financial precocity, instability, medical trauma, interrupted life, and the constant awareness that time and energy are not guaranteed, your relationship to creation changes.

I don't think there is anything wrong with disappearing for some time. I actually think it is essential to grow roots so deep you have something to stand on. But in a time of hyper visibility, as we live in a world where the surveillance state increases and we naturally feel watched, we downplay our humane means of creating.

We may feel like re-emerging is dangerous, that we may not be tall enough to be seen, that our dormancy chopped our height down, but we know deep deep deep down, this is not true. We should ask ourselves, who am I trying to be seen by? Who am I writing for? What are my greatest fears? Where is shame living in my body? Who am I living for?

No one can grade you on your gift.

I’m proud to be the woman who turned survival into beauty without lying about the cost. It cost me everything. To speak cost me comfort. The love I thought I inherently deserved. Speaking cost me daughterhood. Cost me normalcy. Silence? Hmph. Cost me everything. It cost me peace. Cost me sanity. Cost me livelihood. Cost me my relationship to God. To paper and pen. Silence buried me alive and disappeared me from a life I deserve to belong to, to be growing inside of.

Re-emergence is not one moment — it's a series of small, unglamorous decisions. I revealed large scars, I asked for help, I shared a poem meekly, I responded to a call. I wrote it down when it came up. I deemed it worthy. I'm not writing for the market. I am writing because it needs to exist. A lot of writers spend years technically "working on a book" while emotionally avoiding the vulnerability of finishing it. Finishing is terrifying. Publishing is terrifying. Saying this is mine and I stand by it is terrifying.

I'm doing it anyway.

Life is not theoretical. It is happening now.

Bodies change now. Opportunities disappear now. People die now. Illness progresses now. Love arrives now. Art either gets made or it doesn’t.

Someone is reading this essay right now with something they haven't said yet. I say: say it while uncertain. Build while uncertain. Love while uncertain. Create while uncertain. Continue while uncertain.

No one can grade you on your gift.