Don't Tell Me

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Don't tell me what to think. Don't tell me how to feel. Don't tell me how to react. Don't tell me what to say. Don't tell me how to be. Don't tell me how to live my life.

I spent the first 28 years of my life living up to (or not, as I was often told) one woman's expectations. I reacted how she wanted me to react. I felt how she wanted me to feel.  I said what she wanted me to say. I lived as she wanted me to live. It was a path wrought with pain, as (SURPRISE), I was actually my own person with my own thoughts and feelings and trying to live as someone you're not is extremely confusing and traumatic. But, also, attempting to abide by an endless list of expectations and moving goalposts, doled out by a narcissist is an impossible task.

It took me years to unlearn that pattern. I still fight it.

I spent the first 20 years (and some others here and there) living in stringent religion, which makes no attempt to hide its disdain for two major parts of my being: my femininity and my queerness. I was never very good at it, as, as I mentioned above, I was my own person with my own thoughts and feelings and I couldn't be who I wasn't. I was rebellious and asked too many questions and, most of all, my very existence threatened the fragile dogma. I am who I am and a stringent, patriarchal religion isn't friendly toward loud, questioning, bisexual women.

It took me years to shake off the shame of that upbringing. I'm still shaking it off.

I spent the last 38 years living in a society that tells me I don't matter. My lady brain is too feeble, too hysterical, too illogical. My body is too much everything or too little something. I take up too much space and talk too loud and cry too much and feel too deeply.

My queerness isn't real. I'm just going through a phase or I haven't phased through enough or I'm selfish or slutty (and what TF is wrong with slutty anyway?). And if I marry a man (which I did), then I was actually straight all along or straight now evidently. And if I married a woman, then I was actually gay all along and just couldn't let go of my repressed upbringing. And just using the word bisexual is apparently trans-exclusive, when one of my first girlfriends was a trans lesbian and probably the first person to really understand what it was like living outside of binary expectations.

My vagina is a word that is off-limits while the organ itself is apparently up for grabs to any man that should desire it. This week has been a reminder to all women that our assaults are either our fault or they're no big deal and we should either just report right away and be blamed for what happened or we should wait 40 years and just get over it. And we're not allowed to discuss our assaults in any way that is personally cathartic or healing, because apparently, "there's a right way to do things." And even though my vagina has experienced trauma and pain, I'm not allowed to talk about that either. And don't get me started on the folks who believe my vagina hasn't fulfilled its "true purpose."

My uterus and my ovaries are a source of severe pain, which took me over 30 years to find a decent treatment for, because doctors don't take women's pain seriously, and soon I could be living in a country where I have no say what does and does not belong in my uterus. Soon, it could be difficult to even obtain birth control, let alone an abortion, despite my knowledge that I don't want to be a parent and I REALLY don't want to give birth and, because of my condition, a successful pregnancy may be complicated anyhow. So what I may really be forced to have is a painful and doomed pregnancy.

I'd say I'm over all that, but the healing can come any day now. I'm strong, but I'm struggling. I'm a survivor, but I'm fucking triggered.

I've spent a good decade in and out of therapy to learn to be my own person, to explore my wants and desires and thoughts and feelings, to live MY life, which will always be a struggle both because of a lifetime of trauma I will always carry around and because I, like MANY women and non-binary people, have to slog through the muck of our culture. It was always be a struggle.

But despite the fear, despite the figurative slaps to my face, the one thing I finally have that I am not giving up is my voice.

It took me so long to find it that there's no way in Uncle Sam's Hell that I'm giving it up. I spent so long in the shadows, not feeling, not shouting, just repressing and shoving it all down, that now it's all bubbled at the top. Now I'm an open wound and I'm not sewing myself up. I will spill out all over this world and those who don't like it can fuck right off.

I will say what I want to say. I will feel how I want to feel. When I'm angry, I'll be angry. When I'm happy, I'll be happy. I will process how I want to process. I will express how I want to express. I will shut up when I want and I will scream when I want.

I don't give ten flying fucks if you like it. I'm done complying.