I really want this to be a great post, because I haven’t been around in a while.

I really feel like an adult lately. Which is weird, I have never thought of myself as an adult and it has little to do with the fact that I just turned 20. I feel as though life is really, unequivocally happening to me, right now without my consent and that is what being an adult is all about, no? You were right when you were four years old and decided you didn’t want to grow up, because Adult Life is all about the details. The mind-numbing details of dealing with the day-to-day until your mind finally derails, maybe in a nursing home somewhere, or if you’re like me, at 3 10 pm on the bus ride home from class, unable to stop crying unable to explain why you are crying. Those dreadful details of communication and bills and being thousands of miles from your family and winter days that you didn’t sign up for.

I really want to fulfill my goals.

On better days I can see that these details are just obstructions and not what life is really about. On better days I can see beyond myself, to other people in need and pull my head out of my own arse long enough to help someone else. On better days I can see beyond today, to tomorrow and next year and all the things that I want to do with my life. I want pets and an herb garden and some good pots to cook good hot meals for the people I choose to surround myself with. I want time and money to travel. I want to learn Capoeira and speak French fluently. I want to make music and write papers and books, I want to graduate, I want to love and be loved many times over. I want to feel connected to my best friend again. I want to be a mother to little black girls who can believe that the world really is theirs without feeling the burden of it, without feeling as though they have to prove themselves, without feeling as though they are undeserving. I want to create and live in a commune in Africa, and show the world that there is more than one right way to live. I want to teach in an education system that is not a business, another cog in the capitalist-patriarchal machine. I want to teach the truth, not convenient illusions.

I really want to be a writer because my voice is not just my voice, but the voice of those who have been silenced.

From “African Women Writers: Towards a Literary History”

“African women writers engage in several different discourses which give rise to their many realities. They are conscious of neocolonialism and are interested in fighting through their work for a greater genuine independence of Africa. They are critical of the exploitation of women. African women explore what is useful and what is dangerous to them as women in traditional cultures. At the same time, they examine which influences from the West are positive or negative in their environment. They write of realities in ways male African writers do not. They also pay particular attention to the insider-outsider dichotomy, because they are often aware of participating in their societies but not always being part of the contemporary political decision-making structures.”

I really want to be more honest.

My best friend is a compulsive liar. She is also a philosophy major and she will find some way to temporarily convince you that it is justifiable but the fact remains that if I can’t trust her with the small things, how can I trust her with the big things? I may be in the process of discovering that I cannot. Have I really grown apart from her? That girl that I hated the first time I met her, on the jungle gym, 9 years old still wearing those itchy, frilly socks to birthday parties.

“ “I have dogs too, but even I’m scared of some dogs. Some dogs are dangerous, especially when you don’t know them.”
“I’m not scared of any dogs because my daddy has really vicious dogs.”
“What kind of dogs?”
“Half-Rottweiler half-Doberman. Those are the most vicious dogs”
“So? That’s stupid, just coz your dad has big dogs doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be scared of dogs, I know some people who….” “

I do not even know if she actually remembers that incident or if she simply pretends that she does because it is a fun story. To remain friends with her, and at the same time, to let go of her, I must recognize that I will never know.

I really want to be a part of making things different for the next generation.

From an essay I wrote about menstruation:

“So a premenarcheal girl will learn of menstruation as this vague, hidden thing that will happen to her when she becomes a woman. She may therefore look forward to it, even after she sees and hears the dry negative description that Tampax or Playtex presents to her through the fifth grade movie, couched in girly images and clinical descriptions that have little obvious connection to what will actually happen to her. She will not find out what it really feels like until it surprises her one day, a brown stain on her panties just before gym class perhaps. At that point any discussion of menstruation will become strictly taboo, and the vast majority of images of menstruating women that she sees will be of thin, Caucasian women, illogically clad in white pants. When she is older, and tired or irritable from being an underpaid workhorse at the office and at home, her emotions will be invalidated by someone’s offhand comment, “Are you PMS-ing?” And always there will be the shame and concealment and embarrassment and the emphasis on hiding, hiding, hiding. Like trying to check out a book in your favorite library and being told your records are not there, she will look for a reflection of herself in society and be told that she does not exist.”

I really want to end this on a good note, but you can’t always get what you want.