vigorous honesty

i used to be really quiet. the one time i got into a fight at school was in the fourth grade and that was because a boy named jonathan used to follow me around the black-top and ask me continuously if i knew how to talk. on that particular day, i got fed up and i turned around and said the one thing i knew would shut him up: "fat ass." i said it again and again and again. i said it, i said it, i said it. i spoke. i gave him what he wanted. 

as if i had been the one following him around the school for weeks, poking and poking and poking with the smart-mouthed remarks, he became enraged. he started charging at me and pushed me hard against the iron of the fire escape, swinging viciously at my face. to think, he persistently decided that it was a necessity to trail me and ridicule me about the one aspect of my personality that, despite what everyone's questioning made me believe, i didn't need to understand because it was just who and how i was, and then the one time that i gave him the slightest and quietest taste of his own medicine, he felt that he had all the right in the world to lash out at me for this perceived grand injustice. i lost it. i charged right back and i beat the shit out of him. one punch square to the face and once he fell backwards onto the pavement i jumped on him and kept punching.

i remember this incident quite frequently. that's because i'm constantly thinking about what and how much i say, what and how much i hold back, and why. sporadically discovering spoken word in junior high was a gift from god, the gift of gab that i hadn't gotten with birth. the act of being silent slowly unraveled around me. but spoken word didn't unravel that silence within me. i learned how to speak with spoken word, but i didn't learn what to say.

today, after a series of fast-paced and unexpected and expected but unsuspecting events, i found myself having small but significant tumultuous inner battles with my silence. "should i say something?" became the question of the day. and as these events (stories for other times) unfolded, i began to realize that that question, from that fourth grade fight and before to today and beyond, is the question of my life.

lately, the state of the world makes me angry, people annoy me, and i am constantly disappointed in myself. but at the same time, i love the world, others, and myself unconditionally, unwaveringly believing that my relationship with each of them is a perpetual process of learning. because of that, i cannot just rely on the outer aesthetics of speech to progress that process of learning, i have to carve away at that exterior, scrape at the stylized soliloquys, let some words be raw and natural and let it get ugly. i spent some time learning how to speak: breaths, pacing, volume, enunciation, emotion. but now, now is the time to learn what to say.