Frustration

Have I spent my entire life deluded into thinking I have an artistic voice when in fact everything I write is a conglomeration of nonsensical thoughts?

I spent most of my life inundated in subliminal messages about how inferior I am as a quiet, African American woman. I even hesitate to write African American because it is never a category I fully identified with. I never knew what it meant for me, other than that it meant I was the only black person wherever I went. I grew up in a west African household so I was African at least. However, I lost my ability to speak my native language because I was deemed “too quiet” in school. How much of my African heritage have I missed from my inability to communicate with my family? What things make me “African American” other than my skin color?

In the house, I was told I was “such an American child” and chastised for my “American” behavior. I was “selfish, ignorant and dumb”. I felt guilty being American. However, when I went out into the rest of America, I was told I “wasn’t black, I was white on the inside”. I felt guilty being black. I tried to build myself to be what everyone else wanted and dismissed all the things about myself that were unacceptable, like my curly hair. I spent 23 years hiding a critical part of myself and will probably spend another 23 more years learning how to accept that my hair is difficult but worthy of effort and care.

Now I’m struggling to find the pieces of myself that are Belinda. Struggling to put those pieces back together into some semblance of a person, but I find that I can’t. Is this because I’m not a person?

What things make a person? Likes, dislikes, a sense of identity? I don’t have an identity. How could I? I never fit anywhere, I couldn’t fit anywhere. I wasn’t African enough or black enough. Everything I was, wasn’t enough. Did I ever develop beliefs, qualities or a personality that is my own? I don’t know. I also have to wonder if my likes and dislikes are mine. How many of my likes are a result of what my hometown deemed acceptable?  I remember trying to share R&B and hip hop with my friends and having them express repulsion and disgust.  I was being told that I couldn’t like certain things and still be acceptable to white America. All I know now is how to be acceptable to white America. I missed so much black culture growing up as a result. I can hardly identify as African American. Black history and black culture is as unfamiliar to me as it is to every other midwesterner I grew up around. Unfortunately though, I still have the misfortune of suffering the injustices of growing up black in white America.

I have no sense of who Belinda is because Belinda lived her life trying to be accepted by someone, anyone. The only problem was that Belinda spent all her time trying to be accepted by people that hated her for things she couldn’t control. Now all that she is left with is deep seated anger and frustration with the fact that she can’t express herself meaningfully. All she can do is weep over losing who she thought she was and the realization that she was never really a person at all.