Monday, July 30, 2018

day FIVE HUNDRED and FIFTY SEVEN


There is Nothing Stronger Than a Broken Woman Who Has Rebuilt Herself

How do you learn to be worthy?
This should be a textbook given out in class
to every girl
to every queer
It will be thick and the font will be too tiny to read.

How do you learn to be worthy?
When your stories don’t matter
when you’re told to stand on the sidelines
when you have sat at the table
of self-hate
and eaten everything you can
get your hands on.

How do you learn to be worthy?
How do you undo what has been done to you?
How do you manage the trauma?
This book would be a journal
a confessional
a series of tweets
from women about how they breathe
stretch and
wake up every day into a world that hates them.
It would be a book about how they stay alive.

It would be about survival
not happiness
not success
not mastery.

It would talk about being the only woman in the room.
It would talk about shame.
It would talk about laughing at yourself
in order to stay safe.
It would talk about being invisible
and living in that invisibility as if that were okay.
It would talk about power
and how power is not something you are allowed to touch.

This book would not talk about men.
There are already enough books written about men.
There are tomes and they are studied in schools
with accolades and tall wide halls.
Plus this book about learning to be worthy is not for them
because the binding is not big enough
for that conversation too.

How do you learn to be worthy
in a world that tells you
you are not.
How do you carry blood
in your veins,
thoughts in your mind,
beats
in your heart.

How do you stand up every day and
decide that you count
when everyone around you
tells you do not.

How do you learn to be worthy?

This book has two words
and they are not
me too
they are

what
else?

--Ally Malinenko


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