Worthlessness

It is not that someone directly tells you that you are worthless. its something you internalize with the passing of time. you are an affair child. your father maybe loved your mother, just not enough to choose her over his wife. Life was always just you and your mother. Growing up Saturdays and Sundays were for cleaning so you became a woman that doesn't understand sleeping in and not doing. your mother has always done. since you were 8 you've been doing too. rest is foreign.

you grow up and its not that you weren't pretty. its just the boys liked your prettier friends. your skinnier friends, your perfect life at home, no money problems friends.
all your female cousins are in volatile relationships and you link relationships to violence. you run. you run. you don't stop running. you arrive at your late teens and you are tired. you rewire your brain and start thinking healthier thoughts. tell yourself you can change your whole life.

you meet a teacher who makes you a project, she shapes you into something better. she is a brilliant woman but looks nothing like you. neither do all the successful women you meet after. you take the lessons, but keep in mind that whiteness does to their life something blackness does not do for you.

you leave everything behind at 21, the 10 hour flight drowned the fear. you hear your own voice for the first time. you are now a young woman that is grateful but anxious.

you go back for the summer and suddenly you're in the bed of the finest people on the island. you ask yourself how it happened, but they are no answers. you just know they want you to keep it a secret, just know you feel ashamed and you wonder when your body became unworthy of this world.

you go back to Europe and you are extra foreign now. you put on the TV and the only woman in the show that looks like you is playing the prostitute

this is how you became that girl Alysia talks about in her poem. this is how you recognize yourself in Adele's heartbreak
this is why you think
Warsan's line "lovely and lonely" is about you...
this is why all Zahira's tweets about Afro-Latinas being forgotten make sense.

.."where did you learn to feel worthless"
they ask you
you turn your head
you don't reply
the story is too long