Bitterness and Poison
I remember bitterness.
I remember the feeling of all my roads closing but this one, the vodou priesthood, of finally realizing that the dream that kept me alive when I was a homeless child would never be. I dreamed of success, sleeping on concrete for its fading warmth in the desert night, curled around my backpack, my arms threaded through the straps. I dreamed while swaying with starvation, glassy-eyed outside a store filled with food I did not even have enough energy to steal.
I came somewhere public so at least I would not die alone.
I was 16. I almost died three times that year. Of starvation, after being sold by a friend to a pimp who wanted to break my will by withholding food. Of a gun to the forehead after breaking up a fight at a party. Of a man trying to stuff me in his car, in a city with an active serial killer.
It was probably more than three times.
Even when I found a portion of that success later in life, it always seemed to fade away under the condescending comments about the way I looked, or what I was, or how I was. I remember my rage at the fact that no matter what I did or how hard I tried, or if I was a “good person” or not: I would never have the life I wanted, the life I promised myself. I remember looking in the mirror at my first gray hair with the despair of knowing I had reached far into adulthood and would never be as successful as the children around me in engineering, whose families had supported them in their ignorance of what it could have been.
The lwa understand bitterness. The lwa understand rage.
Danto came for me several times in ceremony and we screamed together until the blood vessels burst in my face, leaving me spattered with red and maroon ink blots, hoarse and gasping. I screamed until I gagged, over and over. I screamed until I hit my knees and she held my hands, preventing me from toppling onto my face. I, who learned early that no one would ever come when I cried, nor did you want them to, screamed in front of a room full of strangers, giving them something of the keys to what was in my then soul.
There is a lesson you learn sometimes about emotion. You learn to never let anyone see your suffering or your joy, for fear of what they will do with it. So you eat your bitterness and your rage. You ferment them until they are poison, just as poisonous as what you have been fed. So you feed that poison to others, enraged that they have not eaten it yet. You feed it to people like you and people not like you. It is what you have and it taints all you have to give.
I have seen a lot of bitterness from people this week—on forums, in conversations. I am here to remind you that the lwa understand poison.
They also know we do not have to eat it.
