Lyrically Speaking

Five-years ago, June 22,   my father died unexpectedly and you would think that with my line of work death would be a lot easier to handle as it something constantly talked about and discussed. The reality is, nothing prepares anyone to lose a loved one and no one can tell you how grief will be handled.  My dad and I (I'm around 6) For the most part I deal with a bit of object permanence in that if something isn’t in my view every day or consistently I tend to forget it exists until something reminds me. But my body always knows. My body remembers these traumas and my body responds accordingly. I can tell you that every March I get blue around the 24 th of the month. Even if my life is going well and I am not actively in a depression, my body feels the loss of my grandmother and the ache of her absence.   And in June around the 20-25 th of the month, by body feels the loss of my father again, even if I am not actively in a state of depression and even if I don’t acti...

I haven’t quite figured out how to take certain things back and claim the ownership. Like the term, Super-Sized Big Beautiful Women (SSBBW) which apparently I am. What I should be doing:      Delete.      Block.      Move on. What I Am doing:      Allowing it to permeate my brain and simmer angrily inside me. So let me allow myself a moment to open the metaphorical vein and bleed it out because I can’t seem to shake it and I can’t seem to put in into the category of words that I have taken back and used as my own. Words like fat, chunky, or chubby. They seem to easily switch to the side of good. SSBBW, implies a lack of person to me. It’s a term used in search engines that I find to dehumanize and reduce women to objects. Objectification of fat people seems to be my biggest “trigger” in any situation where I go from feeling good, to feeling pissed off. It’s not something endearing and I liken it to the backhanded comp...

When I was 18 I moved to Bloomington Illinois to live with my Aunt. It was the first time I had ever seen so many people of color (POC) in the same place as me. I grew up in Arizona and the ethnic make-up of my childhood was more so Hispanic, Native American and white people. That’s not to say that Hispanic and Native American’s are not people of color, but I mean black people in general. There were of course, black people, but there were far less and none in any of my social circles. So moving to Illinois and working with so many POC was, for lack of a better phrase, culture shock and culture admiration for me. It’s when the white bubble I lived in truly popped. When I say cultural admiration, I mean that in the child-like wonder and excitement to learn more. Outside of history classes about slavery and civil rights, I knew very little about black culture and I wanted to know more. But I was also was very naive falling into the same cultural appropriation of wanting to touch one...