Sometimes I look through the windows of houses as I walk past and wonder what life is like on the other side of the glass that blocks my view from behind the curtains.
I wonder if life is as complicated for the people who live behind those windows as it is for the rest of us, and I realized tonight that life is always complicated, no matter who you are.
No one has it easy, money just makes it seem that way.
I have been struggling lately, to write fiction and I think it’s because all of my characters represent the experiences that I have had up until this point and that is a deeply personal journey that I am not ready to birth into the world just yet. At least not creatively, not through my fiction anyways.
Every person on earth has their struggles, their moments of believing that they are never going to make it at some point. It’s part of the human experience, what makes us strong however is deciding that we’re going to keep pushing no matter how hard it is.
Defying the projections of the people that surround us is a fucking super power, it’s a talent and a skill that is learned and honed over time, it’s not something that comes easily. It’s a decision that you make every singe day.
I will never forget several years ago someone ran into me at a house party, she called me Siddha, a name I hadn’t used publicly for anything yet, “you’re Siddha, you’re Siddha Lee Saint James, you’re a fucking super hero.”
I had never written about Siddha before, so I chalked it up to us both being drunk, it was only many years later that I remembered that this event had taken place. I had her thrown out of the party, much to the chagrin of some of the women there, largely because I wasn’t interested in what she was selling, and also because I had only just been gang raped and was…basically using the last of my street power to show off how tough I was.
I was a fucking cunt, in the bad way. If you looked through my windows you would have seen a house that a hoarder would have been proud of. Shoes, clothes, books, old pizza boxes I was too lazy to take out. My place was a mess, because I was so busy pretending to be happy on the outside the miserable was manifesting in every other area of my life.
After I was gang raped the last time I put so much effort into being publicly “happy” that I legitimately forgot who I was.
Siddha was one of my many alter ego’s, a person who was a soldier and a guardian who I “discovered” as a child when I was about three or so. I will never remember seeing her standing in my backyard in the sunshine wearing an army green tank top and a pair of camouflage fatigues.
Siddha was everything that I wanted to be, grown up and beautiful, powerful and strong. I will never know how that girl knew about Siddha, but it was a wake up for myself and for a lot of people.
That was the night that the carefully built web of lies I had created to protect my rapists all those years began to unravel, even before I realized what was happening, I was manifesting physically the way I was feeling emotionally.
I would randomly start to just fall down for starters, it was like my body would just get tired of holding my body up. It hasn’t happened in a couple of years, thankfully, but for a good six months there I was really afraid something was super wrong, even though Doctors and Paramedics thought I was making it up, more than one person saw me randomly just “Fall down” without passing out.
It’s only in this time of isolation that I have been able to look back and see what else was manifesting in phsyical ways in response to emotional trauma.
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 