When I was a child, I had a small obsession with diaries and journals. I would steal away to the stationary section of any given department store and compare the many options. I scrutinized the different cover designs while running my fingers through the pages, testing their texture and thickness. Every so often, I would buy one if I had enough money saved or if my mother was in the mood to spend an extra couple of dollars.
The pages of these journals were rarely met with ink.
More than the frilly, fuzzy and sparkly journals I found at Walmart and Sears, I dreamt of having a thick leather bound journal with a lock and key. In movies, I saw wealthy Victorian era women write in such journals, and I wanted to do the same. I was tantalized by the idea of having a place were my thoughts, though materialized by lead and ink, could remain private and out of sight. I felt empowered by the idea of owning something so precious, something that I didn’t have to share with my siblings or parents--my own treasure chest.
Yet, I was tormented by my inability to turn thought into prose or poem. Unlike Virginia Woolf, I couldn’t create a room of my own because I couldn’t furnish it. My mind was so full, yet my thoughts were without a form that could be manifested as writing.
I grew frustrated with myself because I could write the perfect essay for school, yet I couldn’t bring myself to pour my heart onto the page. My cup runneth over; I was deluge and drought simultaneously.
***
Each thought and every thing can create an emotional signature. The phrase “sharp knife” may fill the victim of violence with anxiety and the gourmet chef with anticipation. Emotions register and leave an imprint on the body. If you grew up in a Christian family like I did, the proverb, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones” might sound familiar. Emotions have a very real impact on the body, regardless of whether those emotions were triggered by impending physical danger or non-physical stress.
I stored my emotions in my body for safe keeping, because for a while, I had nowhere else to put them. By the time I was to begin the writer’s life, everything I felt and wanted to express was locked away in the dark corners of my body. My anger was in my liver; my fear was in my gut; my worry was in my stomach, and my sadness was in my heart. When joy visited, it radiated from my heart and throughout my entire being. The gravity of knowing that I could not get in touch with my emotions weighed on my soul. This is a writer’s block.
Emotions are a unifying human experience. For example, even if the instances that trigger our anger may vary, we are all aware of the way blood rushes to our heads, fire rises in our cores, and the world around us fades to black when we are infuriated. If one can suppress another’s expression of emotions, he has taken the first step to dehumanizing her. I believe that such suppression was essential to the creation of the American brand of African slavery. Return anger with the whip and fear with sexual violence and the work of emotional suppression has been done.
Emotional expression has had a steep cost for generations of black people that were brought to the Americas as bondsmen, but here I will focus on women. From the untold number of enslaved women beaten and/or killed for mourning and trying to escape to find their lost children, to Sandra Bland and Korryn Gaines, who dared to talk back. Assata Shakur has yet to set foot in the United States after escaping from imprisonment for a crime she did not commit and the words she spoke. Black women who express anger, and black women who use that anger to speak truth to power, are quickly eliminated.
It is any wonder then, in an environment in which emotional expression is dangerous, that black parents are likely to suppress the emotions of their own children?
I was young and unaware of this, so I spent years resenting my parents. In my mind, they never listened to me nor cared about what I had to say. When I did dare to speak my peace, I was harshly and quickly silenced, or worse, hit. Getting hit for saying what I felt bruised my soul more than my body. I now know my experience with my parents is not unusual. Many a black girl (and boy) has heard, ‘I don’t know why you came home with that attitude, but you better cut it out before I cut it out for you,’ or ‘I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I know you’re not talking to me.’ Never mind that this child may be slamming doors at home to release anger because they experienced a day of bullying at school or a best friend who betrayed them, or a teacher humiliated them for getting an answer wrong. Some parents don't even think to ask their child if everything is okay.
Children feel fully and freely, but it is in these moments of chastisement that they are shamed and punished for feeling, and are thereby taught that it is wrong to show their emotions. However, emotions cannot and will not disappear unless they are expressed and resolved, so children react by acting out or storing them in their bodies, like I did.
Ageism is another factor that works to suppress our emotions from a young age. I used to wonder if adults lost memory of their lives before their 18th birthday. It seemed like they believed that children’s thoughts and feelings were irrelevant and insignificant -- as if they were never children with thoughts and feelings themselves. The lack of empathy and compassion that my parents and other adults would show for my childhood woes compelled me to promise myself that I would never forget what it was like to be five, six and seven, even when I was 50, 60, or 70.
I believe the life of the mind begins when a child first asks, ‘why?’ Children are people that parents can converse with and possibly even learn from, but to some parents, they are ignorant, naive nuisances that need to be disciplined. Parents can’t fathom that their seven year old may be anxious or depressed, so they make dismissive statements like, ‘Children don’t know what real pain is; their lives should be simple and carefree.’ Apparently, children are so unlike the adults who have bills to fret over and feelings to repress with alcohol and food.
The complexity grows for little black girls. The archetype/stereotype of the angry black women has plagued us for decades. The insanity of it is that we have every right to be angry. Generations of rape, kidnapping, sterilization, and every other form of abuse should have been enough to make an army of vigilantes out of us. Yet, all we ask is for the outside world to realize we are soft, and that our hearts too are fragile--that we matter. However, this effort has caused us to abandon and repress the wild woman inside. We don’t even realize we do this to ourselves because our parents normalized it when we were young, wild girls in dresses sitting freely with legs open and hearts more open still.
No wonder then, that when my menses began and my heart yearned to write that I couldn’t find the words. It took me over ten years to find the words to express my deepest thoughts. From compulsively buying journals to struggling to come up with ideas for my ninth grade creative writing class, I wrestled with my writer’s block. The impending, constipated words filled my stomach with anxiety and made me sick everyday. I found my way to the English department in college, but the hurt teenager in me resisted the creative writing classes and poetry nights my inner child wanted to take part in. I remember ripping the pages out of the journal I did attempt to start and throwing them into garbage cans all over campus so that it would be difficult to recapture the words I discarded. I finally had to take antibiotics for my chronic bronchitis, and as I wrote the 100 pages of my senior thesis, I developed irritable bowel syndrome.
Even as I struggled to breathe and the knots in my stomach caused me to cringe in pain, I felt that a catharsis was on its way. It has been over the past couple years that I have begun to write in earnest. Each word exposes the secrets I’ve kept from myself. Allowing each sentence to exist without hitting the delete button or shredder is an act of self love. As a woman, and a black woman in particular, writing is an act of courage. Writing is a transgression. Each day I write to myself, and each day I write something that I know the world will see, it’s as if through my words, I’m granting myself the permission to cry, to kick and scream, and to laugh loudly and heartily. It’s as if I’m just meeting myself for the first time.
