Last year after my mother’s wake my aunt and cousin pulled out old photos for an impromptu trip down memory lane. During the conversation, my cousin mentioned that I was obsessed with one particular band during our youth. I couldn’t think of who she was hinting at, to be fair when I think of my favorite band it’s the band from my high school years because they kept me from taking my life. This other band wasn’t as important.
The band she was thinking of was Matchbox 20.
I could see why that band stuck. I played Yourself or Someone Like You on constant repeat until the CD skipped. As an adult, I find Push to be the anthem of toxic relationships but at that time in my life it was relatable. As middle school faded into high school, and crippling depression, screaming Linkin Park at the top of my lungs while I wrapped the extra-long cord of my headphones around my throat became my reality. And the band of my middle school years disappeared to the back folds of my mind.
More than 20 years later, I spend my Friday nights unpacking my life and what lives in those folds. Now that I’ve made peace with the fact that my mother is dead and all we were is all we’ll ever be, I now have the monumental task of finding out who I am. In my teens, I was the family's black sheep. The weirdo who liked “white people” music and wanted to spend every penny of her birthday and holiday money at Hot Topic. No one knew that in my head I was the lead singer of one of those bands, belting every note from my core, hoping they would shine a light on the wound the world refused to see.
I picked my first husband because I thought he understood, I could be the weird kid. I didn’t have to perform, but the joke was on me. I was now typecasted. I could only be the Black girl who liked rock music, but I needed to also not be so punk. There was no need to destroy the establishment, I just needed to let it mold me and shape me in its image. The same shit as before, with a different name. When we divorced I spent less time listening to my rock playlist and more time with the R&B and hip-hop I hid from everyone.
My therapist says it’s not surprising I’ve spent so much of my life confused about who I am when the messaging I’ve received always had the underlying lesson that no matter what I did it was wrong. I took the performance from inside my mind and applied it to my life. Never giving myself the chance to really figure out who the hell Rayven was/is because there was always someone who wanted me to be something else and depending on how I felt about them I either bent and broke or I fought back and went the other way. Swinging on a pendulum of confusion until death knocked and reminded me that I don’t have forever so I better figure this shit out before it all comes to an end.
I’ve had to go back to the drawing board and erase all the ways I learned to hide who I am. I’ve had to ask myself “Do I really like this or did I lean in because of love or spite?” That’s been hard. To feel lost at sea and face the harsh reality that you won’t find a port until you find the person who has eluded you your whole damn life and that person is you. At first, I thought I could make some changes to the board. Erase something small and draw it back bigger or leave it off altogether.
Then as I stood in the shower under water hotter than the fires of hell itself hoping it would wash me of my sins, my playlist on shuffle, Matchbox 20 came on.
Hello old friend, I thought. I couldn’t help but smile. I had forgotten how much joy I found in songs that were really fucking toxic. I guess that’s growth, but now I wanted to go down memory lane and see if I could find the pieces of myself I lost along the way. I hopped out and searched through the playlist until I found a song that had, at one point, filled me with hope. I had somehow forgotten what hope felt like. “How Far We’ve Come” blared through my phone, reverberating off the walls, but I was older and wiser this time around. The hope hit differently because there were nearly 20 extra years to reflect back on. I stared into the mirror, thinking back on how far I’ve come. All the little deaths I’ve overcome throughout my life, the tiny cuts that stay hidden from the world’s view. All the ways I was forbidden from grieving.
The mother I needed but never got.
The father who passed on his hurts instead of addressing them.
The baby I lost but was encouraged to move on from. The way I yelled at myself in the mirror a few days after because I had to pull it together, because I didn’t deserve to grieve. The loss wasn’t enough. It was to me though. But I had to pretend. I had to perform.
The men who have never loved me well because they conflated their love of consuming me with actually loving me fully.
The friends who only liked a specific version of me and expected me to stay that way forever.
Every tear I cried that was dismissed because my pain was irrelevant, all that mattered was the labor I performed for others.
Performance. A puppet on a stage for everyone’s consumption but my own.
These performances didn’t come with fame and money, though. There was only grief.
So. Much. Grief.
I cried as I mouthed the words, “Let’s see how far we’ve come, let’s see how far we’ve come”. Through the days of forced smiles, and nights of silently crying myself to sleep. Through the thousands of tiny cuts that aimed to kill me, I stood naked in my bathroom with tear-soaked eyes celebrating how far I’d come. I remembered who I was becoming before the world chained my throat and told me to perform.
I used to keep notebooks full of poems, plays, songs, and short stories. I used to dream of being unapologetically me, dripped in black and leather, my hair natural and free to take whatever shape or color I deemed.
Every time I started to forge my path my leash would get pulled. Someone would tell me to be quiet and I’d get tired because fighting is fucking exhausting. Screaming to be heard hurts one's throat when you’re being choked into submission. I am keenly aware more than ever before that these cuts were packed with poison and I either have to treat them or watch as I die slowly in real time.
The world is on fire and as much as I want to save it, I have to save myself first. I have to treat the wound so the light can enter. I have to see how far I’ve come and I have to keep going.
What is that going to look like? I don’t know. I’m fucking terrified. I know there are places and people I have to let go of. There’s a version of myself I have to free myself of because she exists out of survival and in order to appreciate how far I’ve come I have to stop being scared of thriving on my own terms and just do that shit.
It’s morbid and fitting that my wake-up call came in the form of my mother’s exit from this mortal plane.
The whole experience broke the levy I built around my spirit and now it aches to be free. To fly as high as I wish to go.
To live, laugh, love, and cuss some motherfuckers out.
To be unafraid of what will happen if I love myself the hardest and out loud.
To not let others' opinions have any weight on who I am and who I want to be.
You’re all welcome to enjoy the show, but the performance is no longer for you and I absolutely don’t give two shits about how that makes you feel! Sometimes you have to reset and start again because it’s only in introspection that you can figure out how far you’ve come and see where you want to go next.
Smooches, bitches.
Copyright(c) 2024 Rayven Holmes
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