Yeah, I'm Bout it

During my time in middle school, the label “bout it” became popular, as if the stars aligned just in time for it to be used as part of some insidious agenda to destroy me. As children, we made up words all the time, silly words to describe feelings and experiences that we didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe. Some of us had parents that would laugh it off and correct us and some of our parents never thought it was funny.

Even now as an adult, I imagine an alternate dimension where parents encourage their children to make up words and respect their creations as true and as real as anyone else’s. Either way, made up words somehow became a way for us to punish those who we didn't understand, just as we had probably been punished, and I was on the receiving end of it this time.

If the term”bout it” were listed in a formal dictionary, the definition would be as follows: “a label given to a young woman by her peers to suggest that she was promiscuous”. Colloquially, it was a term given to me and other girls who possessed a healing energy that was misunderstood as sexual. Ever since I could remember, men had been drawn to me and women were jealous of me for reasons I wouldn’t understand until my 30s. At the time, I had no idea what this was that I possessed and I didn’t want any of the attention it brought because it all felt so heavy and complicated, like thirty 10 pound sandbags that I carried wherever I went. How a middle school aged virgin could be a whore is completely ridiculous to me now but then, during a time when all I wanted was to fit in, I was desperate to prove everyone wrong.

I tried showing people who I really am, a shy, sweet, caring person who just wanted to show love to everyone but people would call me fake because who I am did not match their perceptions of me. They would use me to get what they wanted, then cast me aside when I tried to say no. I used to be hurt by the accusations of sexual acts that I supposedly performed but It got to a point where I decided that if people thought a certain way about me, why not prove them right. Being myself didn't work and It was the only way I thought I could maintain some sort of control of the narrative. At least, now what they said about me would be true and I didn’t have to feel like a stranger in my own body. The secret of who I truly am would have to remain buried.

One day my cousin and I were hanging out and I asked her to take some photos of me in my bikini so that I could post them on my social media account. I figured this would be the perfect way to stop fighting against what other people thought of me and give them what they wanted. She took the photos and as I was scrolling through them, I imagined how I would finally be praised instead of ridiculed and how I would be able to control what people thought and said of me. I transferred them from my phone to my computer and just as I was logging into my account to post them, an error message popped up.

“Too many attempts have been made, please reset your password”

Someone had been trying to hack my account and I felt the heat of shame spread all over my face and down my spine, it didn’t matter why or how or who. All that truly mattered to me was that no matter what I did, it wasn’t going to cause them to change their mind. It wasn’t going to give me the control or the love that I was searching for in return, it only made them want to bully and control me more. I would later come to realize that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t change or control how others saw me, only how I saw myself.

And that is the only thing that matters.