America's Human

I want to make the world proud of me. I want to succeed. I want to paint the world with my own colors, my own stripes. I want to tangibly sculpt this life with my own hands, with fervor, with… might.

This is what America taught me. It also taught me how to walk about this life trying to be better, stronger, softer, louder, quieter, fiercer, kinder, smaller, and bigger.

Then, at the end of the day, I collapse into distress at how imperfect I have become, how the bar has hung so low, and still I fail to reach and breach it.

The water I swim in is so far from the shore that I think I will keep my spirit soaring, think I will show the world that I am more than a boring, mixed, unschooled, poor, confused, passionate, intelligent, terrified, unsupervised teenager. I want to be more than my labels, my age, my face, my name that does not even know itself yet. Yet.

Yet.

I feel too tired to run from this pain anymore. My legs are sore and callused and still, I forget that being fallible is the very definition of being human.

Be pretty, be kind, be fun, be sober, be wild, be small, be big, don’t shout, talk louder, eat more, don’t be fat, swallow my advice, don’t fail, be nice… I’m trying. I have been trying for my entire life.

I am watching.

I have seen the way America paints a picture of impenetrable grace, endless power, and legs in a race that ends nowhere, that does not show me how to face my breaking heart and chase my slowing pace with compassion versus hate. I am so tired of hating.

You want me to grow into a wellspring of transformation and innovation while you desperately fear change; you say the world is in my hands while you try to chain and contain my attempts at naming the state of degradation, segregation, and isolation that remains of our nation, and fans the flames of your corrupted institutions.

You want me to pay taxes—which I will—so you can fund police that kill human beings that you call apes and rapists, telling me to beware as I walk streets, now fearing bedsheets and male gazes; and you want me to preach on your stages?!

You breed fear so that you can steer the weight of my peers into tiers of good or queer, so you can elevate the “elite,” and slowly decimate diversity with spite.

And still, you claim you need the might of young voices, of justice and liberation; truly, you want white, light, heightened supremacy, not humanity.

But I already told you: I feel too damn tired to fight.

Listen.

I just wanted you to love me. I tried so hard to please every face I met, to perfect every desire in my head, to collect the best of our society and make it into a passion that could earn me the title of worthy.

And every day a little piece of me dies as I forget and forget and regret my life. Why can’t I be just right? How come I continue to fail in your eyes? What does it mean to be a teen in the United States of America’s fist fight to gain power and height? What does it even look like to live an exquisite life of joy, contribution, ambition, growth, and insight?

I don’t want to fight you anymore. I don’t want to feign enlightenment because here, we are white. I am not just white, or straight. I don’t have a perfect face. I no longer desire to maintain the chase of greatness if it means replacing my humanity with division and hate.

And because I do not want to perpetuate you, I’m afraid that I am not going to make it.

I am afraid that you are going to look at me like I am trash on the street, like my life is as valuable as the trees you are uprooting, the animals you are looting, the atmosphere you are polluting, the waters you fill with oil spills, the people you killed centuries ago to fill the gaping holes in your chests so you might forget the same regret I am met with today: there is lack, life is cracking, pain is wrapping us in it’s net, and we am stuck in the fear and mistrust of a reality that will eventually kill us.

I think you are just like me. I think you are thirsty for the sight of your own worthiness, for a way out of this mess, for some fucking justice. I think you wake up every morning and scorn the scars and sores that show the world that you have been marred, and you forget just like I do, that you survived battle after battle with regret, and gained experience deserving of respect.

And maybe, you too, America’s human, will wake up and see that this place is a maze of pain, and an opportunity to take part in renaming and celebrating collective awareness of our shame. After all, if you are human, you know shame. If you are human, you know pain. If you are human, then you know the toll it takes to maintain hate and separation.

Maybe, when I am old, I will look out at this nation and remember the days I swayed beneath you. And I will laugh as I recall the day I realized that I was crying collective tears fed by years of isolation.

And I will smile because I saw us draw in the breath that we needed to reset.

And I will cry once again because, in the end, pretending I was less than led me nowhere; because I looked at you and for the first time, I saw a human being that tried to fight, be nice, look fine, do right; because in that moment, I understood that there was never a person or a nation that desperately needed to fight, only a world that more than anything, needed love in order to realize its might.