You say I am too young.
Too young to be a feminist.
Too young to know my own sexuality.
Too young to be depressed.
Too young to hate.
Too young to protest.
Too young to be an activist.
Too young.
Too stupid.
Too naive.
And you are right.
I am too young.
Too young to be scared of finding me or my LGBTQ friends killed, abandoned, or sent off to a conversion camp because all they wanted was love and acceptance but instead they found hate and rejection because they were “disgusting sinners” who were just “confused”.
Too young to be sobbing with such loss and grief over people who were killed and died too young because no one would help them because all of their cries were “fake” because they were too young to know “real” pain.
Too young to be scarred, bruised, bloody, and beaten by a war I did not start or choose to fight in.
Too young to be surrounded by people telling me and others what gender is right and wrong, and what race is right and wrong.
Too young to be scared to go on a walk alone. Too young to be feeling the need to cover up more than necessary and walk across a street when a man is walking on the same side as me.
You say I am too young.
And you are not wrong.
I am too young.
Too young for
H O M O P H O B I A
R A C I S M
S E X I S M
R A P E
S E L F H A R M
S U I C I D E
G U N V I O L E N C E
and
S C H O O L S H O O T I N G S
To be normal to me
I should not be so desensitized by this violent reality.
So yes, I am too young.
But you cannot blame me for my hyper awareness of our reality.
My generation was born with information at our fingertips
And we have been told to sit still and be quiet
Because the adults were talking
But you had your chance
It is now our turn to speak
And our turn to fight
Because our rage is pure fire
And with every ragged breath we take
Our lungs get more shredded by all of the hate and misery
Gen Z is the gayest, most trans, most racially diverse, most atheist generation of all time
And we are going to fucking change the world.
You will embrace change or die on the wrong side of history.
isabelle i literally have no idea what you’re talking about
{Hannah Green, from "Are you still hungry, Mother?"/ Unknown/Sam Gordon, "A Mother's Hate"/ Ella Wilson/ Joan Tierney/ Ella Wilson/ Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous/ Unknown/ Nayyirah Waheed/ Sharon Olds, “Holding To A Wall, Treading Saltwater”/ John Green, Turtles All the Way Down/ Safia Elhillo, "an inheritance," published in Narrative Northeast/ Annie Ernaux, from I Remain in Darkness/ Poplar Street by Chen Chen/ Unknown/ Tumblr User: @inkskinned/ Elena Poniatowska, from "La Flor de Lis," published c. January 2011/ Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom}
"The whole world was a dream, I realized."
Paranoid Park (2007) dir. Gus Van Sant
Don't become so afraid of being annoying that you don't allow yourself to be anything at all.
it fucked up to see people who are around my age live through a genocide and have to market themselves as someone worthy of being saved to get people to donate to them.
it just seems so dehumanising. like is one supposed to worry about their current conditions or think up new marketing strategies.
no aid has been allowed in gaza in 70+ days. people are starving. it's so messed up to have to market oneself during all this in order to afford food.
it's heartbreaking to see young children going without proper food and nutrition.
please help @abdalsalam2000. he's around my age and has nieces and nephews who are very young. they don't deserve to go hungry. his old gofundme was deleted without any reason and he's trying very hard to advocate for his family's survival. please have heart and help him in WhatsApp way you can.
donate here (verified #4)
for a while i lived in an old house; the kind u.s americans don't often get to live in - living in a really old house here is super expensive. i found out right before i moved out that the house was actually so old that it features in a poem by emily dickinson.
i liked that there were footprints in front of the sink, worn into the hardwood. there were handprints on some of the handrails. we'd find secret marks from other tenants, little hints someone else had lived and died there. and yeah, there was a lot wrong with the house. there are a lot of DIY skills you learn when you are a grad student that cannot afford to pay someone else to do-it-for-ya. i shared the house with 8 others. the house always had this noise to it. sometimes that noise was really fucking awful.
in the mornings though, the sun would slant in thick amber skiens through the windows, and i'd be the first one up. i'd shuffle around, get showered in this tub that was trying to exit through the floor, get my clothes on. i would usually creep around in the kitchen until it was time to start waking everyone else up - some of them required multiple rounds of polite hey man we gotta go knocks. and it felt... outside of time. a loud kind of quiet.
the ghosts of the house always felt like they were humming in a melody just out of reach. i know people say that the witching hour happens in the dark, but i always felt like it occurred somewhere around 6:45 in the morning. like - for literal centuries, somebody stood here and did the dishes. for literal centuries, somebody else has been looking out the window to this tree in our garden. for literal centuries, people have been stubbing their toes and cracking their backs and complaining about the weather. something about that was so... strangely lovely.
i have to be honest. i'm not a history aficionado. i know, i know; it's tragic of me. i usually respond to "this thing is super old" by being like, wow! cool! and moving on. but this house was the first time i felt like the past was standing there. like it was breathing. like someone else was drying their hands with me. playing chess on the sofa. adding honey to their tea.
i grew up in an old town. like, literally, a few miles off of walden pond (as in of the walden). (also, relatedly, don't swim in walden, it's so unbelievably dirty). but my family didn't have "old house" kind of money. we had a barely-standing house from the 70's. history existed kind of... parallel to me. you had to go somewhere to be in history. your school would pack you up on a bus and take you to some "ye olden times" place and you'd see how they used to make glass or whatever, and then you'd go home to your LEDs. most museums were small and closed before 5. you knew history was, like, somewhere, but the only thing that was open was the mcdonalds and the mall.
i remember one of my seventh grade history teachers telling us - some day you'll see how long we've been human for and that thing has been puzzling me. i know the scientific number, technically.
the house had these little scars of use. my floors didn't actually touch the walls; i had to fill them with a stopgap to stop the wind. other people had shoved rags and pieces of newspaper. i know i've lost rings and earring backs down some of the floorboards. i think the raccoons that lived in our basement probably have collected a small fortune over the years. i complain out loud to myself about how awful the stairs are (uneven, steep, evil, turning, hard to get down while holding anything) and know - someone else has said this exact same thing.
when i was packing up to leave and doing a final deep cleaning, i found a note carved in the furthest corner in the narrow cave of my closet. a child's scrawled name, a faded paint handprint, the scrangly numbers: 1857.
we've been human for a long time. way back before we can remember.
So I read a poem of yours a long time ago and it really impacted me. I've had this in my head for years and finally got the nerve to work it out
im actually obsessed with this
The Smell of Parchment & PetrichorI write sometimes19! they/thembe kind
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