am's inspiration

I started this nearly 3 years ago and am JUST finishing. Nonetheless, it means more today than it did then. Hope you enjoy!

this reminds me of timeless novels named after the main character - simple titles. charlotte's web. selah's bed. song of Solomon. resurrecting mingus. sula. assata. you get the drift. but this isn't even about amity, more so for her and me and any other woman who may read this and understand the joys and pains. the frustrations of adulthood, livelihood, and trying to be and achieve something in life without much guidance. it's hard. and most days, it hurts.

the inspiration. the love. the passion. most of it has left me again so I can do me again and search and find me again. to look at me and change me again into a new me again. find a joyous me that has found a lot that I can say I love you in front of my mother type of again - again,

this is about the life of a girl turned lady who's still fighting to become the woman her mother so eagerly hopes shes trained and raised her to become. this is about the heart that has been through some things but keeps going. keeps searching. keeps trying. keeps praying humbly for change and honesty and consistent love.

I hope this inspires you to do more. to be more. to understand more. to want more and therefore, achieve more.

so am called my bluff without her even knowing it. I've been trying for a while to write something with the same umph my past writings had. something striking and poignant. but I failed to realize that words written with truth are poignant and prolific alone. they stand on their own like a persistent toddler who insists on learning to walk but to stand on its own. without help and guidance - only inspiration. even more so, I fought with myself to do this and still am because there's nothing I can find in the obvious, nothing that sits directly in front of me that screams pain and therefore begs for me to etch its existence and my memory of it on paper. It's said that writers write best when in pain. Or upset. Or angry. Yet, none of these apply to me.

when creativity takes a break, life happens because life has to go on and it has to get things done. accomplish a goal. teach lessons. change the lives of other people. it inspires. it sees and feels and tastes and hears and smells new things to inspire and build and create something new.

many, most, if not all of my writings have been mere exhibitions of what it was and felt like to be hurt and pained. to have been wronged and left to lick wounds that originally werent there - wounds that we tell ourselves shouldn't be there. but in all honesty, they need to exist and need to live in order for us to learn. I've learned this and still am learning that my body, heart included, is nothing less of an open, blank, plain picture, sitting silently and still, on an easel, waiting to be scribbled and written all over on, to be negated and loved, to be hurt and healed, to learn and be miseducated - to be painted on with blood stained hands and lips.

I know I'm a woman. I was born with a vagina. raised as a girl. grew breasts. learned about sex in-between my mother and I going to the movies to see Waiting to Exhale as a little girl and that night she sat me on her bed to have "the talk". as a woman now, but specifically as a girl then, and many of us, once as girls, we learned about our sexuality and sex organs in correlation with the difference from a "girls" privates and a "boys" privates. everything we know, we learned by accident. many of us, learned about sex far before our parents told us that god awful Birds & the Bees tale. many of us, learned that fire is hot and ice is cold not because someone repeatedly repeated it to us, but because we had to find out on our own.

for me, it's only recently, in the last few years that I've realized that I am a woman. that my struggles and pains, joys and triumphs, my dreams, are all shaped around and by the fact that I am a woman. I pray for my unborn children and their lives because I am a woman. I want to be loved by a man with the same mustard seed that and hopefulness that I have come to love my God and spirituality because I am a woman. I have experienced many and plenty of hardships and have been knocked down in life because I am a woman! a woman who loves herself. a woman who loves her femininity but doesn't lavish in it. Call is paralyzing if you'd like, but this is beauty and sensuality all wrapped in one.

with time and patience, I've learned and have come to understand that life is shaped by experiences. Experiences can happen to us and to those who we love forever and a day that shapes who we are and who we eventually become. I use to question the validity in such a thought, but with age comes a lot of things, more specifically wisdom and understanding; and there is truth in that thought. and this realization more times than not places uncertainty into my heart as I joyfully look forward to motherhood and a life as someones wife. joyfully look forward to a life of success and limitless possibilities. but to know that what I myself have and will continue to experience in this life will shape the lives of my children and my future generations, and even, may shape the ways to which they view me. that my pain and joy will mold the lens to which my husband and children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews will view me in this harsh world. so, I secretly pray away from others but publicly in the corners of my bedroom that the lens that I will someday be viewed with will be one of strength and respect. nothing more. or less.

there's something sacred I believe in realizing who an individual is to themselves. because, if I don't know or can't tell you who I am and what I mean to me, then I can't tell you anything else. if I can't tell you about self-love, self-understanding, self-empathy, self-compromise - SELF, ME, myself, and I, then I can't tell you anything else. if I can't tell you these simple things, if I can't tell you how much I love and adore myself, then I can't explain the depth of my love for another.