Dear World, You Fucking Suck

Dear World, You Fucking Suck 

A couple weeks ago I was interviewed for a friend’s journalism project. “How are you handling the typical college stress with the stress of how insane the world is right now?” she asked me. Swap college for another word (high school, work, family, relationships) and you have the question of the year. I answered with something vague—taking breaks, making lists.

But if I had more time to answer I’d have probably just been honest. For me, true honesty always requires time. The long answer is that I’m not really handling it all. The longer answer is that I’ve been being-in-school-while-Black for a while now.

I remember I spent a lot of time hoping nobody would notice that I was Black. This is a side effect of youth: a profound, exhaustive need to be liked. I did not want anybody to realize I was Black—or that I liked One Direction, or that my favorite color was pink—because I wanted  badly to be liked. So I changed the way I spoke, I straightened my hair until I had none left. In fourth grade, during a climate-change unit, we had to write letters to the planet. I wrote, Dear World, why do you hate me? I still have the assignment.

And, I’ve asked this question a lot since then. Dear World, why do you still hate me? Dear World, what is going on with you? Dear World, you fucking suck. That last one’s not a question, exactly, but it’s something I’ve needed out into the universe, too.

My first answer to the question, I think, is that it is not so hard for me to hand in assignments while I have a fire inside, because when I was learning how to divide, I was also learning how to be anybody other than who I was. 

In middle school, I was still a child in a child’s body with a child’s mind when I realized I was being looked at by adults who had already deemed me a woman. I learned that word, woman, in a number of places—in the curl of my mother’s upper lip when I’m told to put on pants around an uncle, above the raised brow of a man on the street who crosses at the stop sign to walk beside me. I spent a lot of time wishing I wasn’t a girl.

Then he comes, and he shows me woman in the pockets of his clavicle. He shows me woman with a hand at my throat and suddenly I see woman in the way my mother smoothed back my hair. His skin smells like woman, like copper and discharge. Like teething, you don’t ask for woman, but suddenly these new teeth have pushed out all that was before, and you’re stuck with them for life. Woman feels like gnawing on absolutely everything, including wood chips, and glass, and those tiny little screws that twist into the battery panel on your vibrator.

My second answer to the question, I think, is that it is not so hard for me to study for online exams, when I’ve spent hours sitting in classrooms beside the boys who made me a woman, daydreaming about how I was going to kiss them, and then how I was going to take a chunk out of their arms with my new grillz.

There is the intersection of identities you can have and how hard it becomes, in relation, to do normal things like, say, be a college student. Being Black makes college hard for me. So does being a woman. So does a long, complicated list of a hundred other things. Personally, I like: Dear World, you fucking suck. Because the American PWI was never created for people like me. The American educational system was not created for me, and that’s always been clear.

How am I handling the typical college stress with the stress of how insane the world is right now? The first day I went to high school after getting into college, two white boys looked me in my eyes and said that dreaded pair of words: affirmative action. That was the introduction to my college experience. And no part of my story is unique, or rare, or especially harsh. It’s just how things are for a lot of people—people for whom, the world hasn’t “all of a sudden” become insane. People for whom, the world has been insane. 

How am I handling the typical college stress with the stress of how insane the world is right now? Insert another word where college is  and you have the question of my whole life.  I don’t have the answers to anything, and I want people to stop assuming that anybody who looks like me does. I want people to realize that the questions they’ve just started asking, some of us have been asking for years. What I do know—what I wish I didn’t know—is the labor of endurance. 

There’s always a way.

And when there’s not, I carve one.