“You are Black. You’ll have to work twice as hard for half the results.” I heard this again and again while growing up. I was bound by the ties and expectations I was born into. The lesson learned, as I am, I am not enough. If I wanted to do something, to make something of myself I needed to do more, and be better. As intersections of oppression stacked higher and higher, the ties that bound me wound tighter and tighter.
You don’t get to make mistakes.
You don’t get to ask questions.
You don’t get to be given answers.
You don’t get support.
You don’t get to be yourself.
You don’t get to be loved.
You don’t get to look how you want.
You don’t get to rest.
You… Have to be someone else.
Unless, you want to be nothing.
When excellence and perfection are the only answer, when building a dream with nothing but hopes, when all that you are is wrong, when you are taught that the only way forward is to learn and get better. When everyone is expecting the world from you and if only you would work harder you might make something of yourself, you might prove your worth, and if you can’t it’s you holding you back, it YOU who is the problem… it’s you who is failing… how do you accept that?
Without coming to the obvious conclusion, I am a failure.
We like to say you can do anything if you put your mind to it. But, that’s not exactly true, now is it. The world has standards and if you can’t make them, you are nothing. What if the world is set up for someone the opposite of you? If it tells you there is only one way to be in the world, and it’s simply not you?
A Festival
I sat in the staff room watching friends prepare their performances, frighteningly aware that I… was failing. The types of people I admire and have been taught to appreciate ran through their sets, they could do what I could not. What did I have to offer of value to this festival? I looked on while the shakes set in. They were all so impressive and clearly planned out. I wanted to be like that. Instead all I could think about was my many failures. My troubles keeping up with emails. My discomfort with posting online and self promotion. My inability to not lose my belongings meaning I was without a coat in the dead of winter in a nordic country, and without my dance shoes I bought specifically for this reason. I was trying!
I was trying to get more organized, and my failure to be more organized meant I wasn’t prepared for this performance. Looping the song as many times as I could in the short period of time before I had to go out. I cursed myself for not being able to write a full choreography and simply execute it. For not planning farther out so I would have a partner. For not wanting to lead despite it being easier.
Why was I going forward with this?! Everything I was doing was “wrong” and yet I didn’t know another way to do it. If I bailed, I not only wouldn’t do what I came here to do and I would for sure be proving that I failed. That I couldn’t be good enough. I started to panic.
Memories swirled just out of sight. My art teachers telling me I was drawing wrong. My English teachers telling me I couldn’t write. Feeling caught between queerness and blackness and standing out even in Black queer spaces. Being made fun of mercilessly for not being Black enough. Being overlooked because I wasn’t what a leader looked like. Being told I wasn’t confident enough to ever have a blue mohawk as a teen. Being told over and over if only you were more like, X and willing to work hard to do Y you’d maybe be worth something. Trying and miserably missing the marks of Black woman empowerment for a lifetime. Being told that X is easy if you would try, only to try and still find it so very hard.
Even when I went through the motions of actually suffering to force myself into the box that would mean that I could prove to YOU that I was serious and worth taking seriously, somehow what I made was… worse. Even when I was successful I was still failing.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was going to embarrass myself and everything I stood for. I quickly texted someone about how unsure I felt, and ran out of time.
I set my phone down and quickly walked out of the back room and into a crowd. I struggled to push my way through the bodies, worried if I wasn’t near the front I would never be able to reach the open space in time. Which would be worse. I’m so anxious I’m hiding in a fake plant with my whiskey still fighting within myself about if I should be doing this at all.
But, I know myself.
the irony
In this story of being a failure there is something I am actively omitting. A simmering frustration, a difficulty, and a perspective I have cut out. A steeliness in my soul. All of the above is true. And so is this…
While I doubted and worried, I also believed with my whole heart that I could do this. That I knew myself. I know how I feel before performances, and I know how assured I am when I volunteer for things. I had a goal and I could achieve it. I had a rough outline of what I wanted to do and some part of me knew that, for me, was enough. I would figure it out along the way, as I always have. In a society that devalues me and my natural way of being in the world, I have had to build a strength in myself about myself as well. If I exclusively listened to all of you, I’d never do anything and hate myself, as much of the world does out of ignorance and biased beliefs.
Those people in my memories were wrong and I proved that again and again.
And yet…
To be anything else is considered a failure.
That we as a people (and like many of the other oppressed intersections I experience) are a degenerate version of white culture and therefore as inherently wrong. That our way of doing things is wrong our values are wrong and that we can only be a pale imitation of our paler cousins. If you can’t prove yourself via the metric set, then you have nothing to offer. The best you can do is work twice as hard for half the result.
But what if it’s actually easy? What if you can’t meet those metrics and yet still know you can achieve everything you set out to achieve? What does that make you? Arrogant? Delusional? wrong?! If people less oppressed can’t do it in these unusual ways, why would you think that YOU could?
I don’t know. But I know I can and it will be good. I don’t need to understand it to know it’s real. Faith I suppose. Vision I guess. Perhaps it is when society gives up on you and you have known nothing else that you learn that in reality it’s all made up. So why bother trying to be more like you are meant to be, when you will just fail.
the performance
My mind is swirling with the voices of doubt. I want people to see Blues. I want people to see that it can be evocative and emotive. That a simple dance is not necessarily an easy dance. I want them to see the connections to jazz and Lindy hop. I want to demonstrate the ephemeral elements of the dance that are often missed, particularly in performances. I want to show that it isn’t always slow, or sexy. I want to use movements from the class I taught that day.
I want to show a view of Black masculinity that is… like… me. I’m dressed just in my day clothes. Despite who I am and how I present, I’m reaching back generations into movement and ideas of ancestral traditional values. It gathers around me in shadows as I am called on the floor. The crowd is fading out as my mind cuts through the internal noise and into the music.
I may not feel ready. I may have failed… But I have a job to do. I have a point to prove. I have something I want to share. This way of doing it… is just as good. For me, it’s even better for what I am trying to do in the world. Even if I can’t explain it.
I just have to show them and they will see it my way.
Self acceptance
Creative. Gentle. Compassionate. Joyful. Intelligent. Vulnerable. Empathetic.
I am all the things I ought not to be and do everything in ways I ought not do. I am who I am. Black people, and specifically Black men, aren’t supposed to be like me. We are meant to be strong and hardened by the world. Filled with self hatred or self importance. Shouting to the world that our voices, our bodies are important, valuable. Proud. Funny and entertaining. A performance of being a certain type of human being. We are meant to be both the white ideal and our own cultures. This is before we add in any intersections and in the eyes of the majority, I… am a poor representative.
Still my research lately for a secret project has forced me to contend with who I am and accept the way I am. I don’t do things in the ways I am meant to. I don’t think in the ways I am meant to. I don’t create in the way I am meant to. I am speak or dress how I am meant. My personality isn’t what people want it to be and yet, I remain.
Despite long history of people like me existing in history, many don’t realize I am more old school traditional that my looks may imply.
“Merely by being a Negro in America, one was a nonconformist.”- LeRoi Baraka
I am not a failure. I am simply, me.
