“Am I allowed to write about this?” I asked, doubt sinking into my gut.
“Ideally, you have every right.”
He had a point. I do.
I have every reason and I had every possible motive to write this. But the feelings
of reservation and worry lingered within.
Maybe, it’s because
I’ve been told time and time again, by a society so hateful and set within
their ways that what I believe in and what I am is deeply wrong. It always
feels that I am split between realities, one of caring acceptance and the other
of hateful confinement; and it’s dangerously easy to believe the one you have
been raised within.
I never, and have not
yet felt at home within my family. Sometimes I just wish I could tell them, and
for them to love me for who I am and I just want to be open and safe, but I
can’t and I don’t. It is tragically comedic the way I fear the act of exposing
myself and it doesn’t help that I hear first hand the way some have reacted to
the same news. I dread the possible outcomes, the way they would blame everything
and everyone, the “westerners, and their ‘liberal’ thoughts”, the “media and
their influence on young minds” and even “the devil himself”, and as archaic
and tired those beliefs are, a small part of me believes it too. And possibly
worst yet, the way they shall choose to fathom the information, “it’s just a
phase”, “you need to change your mentality”, or worst yet, “no”.
Nobody likes a sad
story, so I don’t tell most people; and in place a façade of unimaginable glee,
and mask my insecurities with jokes that diminish myself.
Solitary and alone I hid. But as the cliché goes, the truth
set me free. For the first time in my life, I could say and be who I truly am,
to feel whole and candid about my emotions and feelings. And even though it’s
my intentional secret to keep, for now, from my family, I am fortunate to have
discovered another in my friends and right now it is enough.
But, it’s not. It’s
not okay to have to put up with relatives hounding you on when you’re going to
finally get a girlfriend, having friend’s parents say, “be careful” when they
hang out with you, and for my very existence and who I am to be illegal. And
neither is it okay that others are able to dictate a woman’s right to wear
clothes they decide to wear. And it is not right that some are forced to marry
and lack the access to education. And yet, we are still forced to live with it.
While everyone has
the power and capability to form their own opinions, one must not forget that so
is everybody else. And by limiting each other and forcing upon other people an
opinion, especially from a position of power, has absolutely devastating
impacts. Psychologically, constraining and pressuring people to change and
conform, potentially, has the power to effectively, pull someone into depression
or worst to becoming suicidal.
I write this in hopes that I manage to evoke at least a
tinge or slim sliver, of emotion, sympathy, regret, anger, comfort, something,
anything that makes you different and that this effects you in whatever
insignificant way. My hope for this, whatever this may be, isn’t so you feel
sorry for me, it’s beyond that, I wanted to break the boundaries, and the glass
celling, that maybe I have created for myself, and the taboo surrounding real
issues effecting real people. Like Lauren Myracle once said, “What I find cool
about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction,
books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.”
