For years, my throat chakra has been shut down. You may not have really noticed this because I know how to hide myself behind the facades of what I want you to believe of me. I have shared with you matters of the root, which is security, stability and groundedness. I share sacral ideas with you, which is thoughts on creativity and procreation. I give to you my Solar, that is thwart in power and strength. And I clearly tell you about the heart space and the listening to your soul, the third eye and crown.
What I completely skip over is that which is spoken. And that’s because my tongue has been bound. Now, let me be clear - I speak on matters that are socially acceptable and only push the envelope just enough on taboo subjects that threaten the mud of mind… but it isn’t what I really want to author from the lips of my mouth.
I want to say things to you that would make your panties drop and your demon flee. I want to communicate to you not just the words I pull from our collective consciousness, but of the horrifying truths that occur in this timeline. I want to speak with authority, integrity and influence; uncaring of my tone, my inflection or effect.
And there was a time in which I did speak so valiantly. I was fearless. I didn’t care about your rank, your position of authority, your feelings or the consequences. If I felt validated, I would cut you down to size without blinking and move on. If I felt impassioned, I would take a stand and give grand speeches, indifferent to the responses and reactions of others.
People who have experienced me in these ways have called me a dragon, a shark, a Firestarter, a menace and… so many other words along these lines.
So, what happened? Why am I so overly cautious now? How did I become so entrapped within my own self? When did I become so silent?
These are some of the quiet questions I have riddled myself with here in Mexico. Being here on my own has forced me to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me shaken and yet, much stronger than I ever have been.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
And therein lies the key to all of this… my words being bruised and misunderstood.
It’s incredible how I am constantly discovering how multifaceted trauma truly is.
My trauma with speaking began with my biological endorsements. My parents shot me down and gas lit me every time I spoke up about the abuse happening to me, to my mother, to us in the home. My father read my diary as a punishment and then reprimanded me for my own personal thoughts. When I stood up for myself when Teachers and Professors were mistreating me, I was admonished. My rapists stuffed my mouth to hush my screaming for help. My bosses condemned me and fired me for having opinions and even for filing a sexual harassment case against a colleague. Friends stopped speaking to me because they didn’t like what I had to say. Religious leaders rebuked me because I questioned the integrity of the bible and their human actions. I mean… The catalog is extensive, I assure you.
In my elongated space here, I recognize that the causality of silence in each of us magnetizes the face of his/her own fear – fear of contempt, of criticism, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of social annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility… without which we cannot truly live. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable, is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
I believe that we can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger, so of course I’m afraid.
As I said before… You only know what I choose for you to know. You only see what I want you to see. You have been involved with a masquerade of public appearance because my experience and those around me were telling me that I am too much.
What I know to be true is, you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
I know now that it is not the differences which immobilizes us, but silence.
Today, I speak these words as an attempt to break my reservations of recluse quietness.
For there are so many silences to be broken.
And so I am moving forward with the sacred practice of Kujichagulia. It ultimately means Self-Determination; the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.
Aho! Ase! Haux!
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