How I Found Myself
Reflections On Loneliness from a Serial Monogamist
I.
Sometimes the lesson is letting go. The lesson is to surrender those dreams conjured in the throes of abandonment, the ones where you believe someone would come rescue you from your loneliness. You do not realize that means you are asking to be rescued from yourself.
What about you requires saving?
II.
Where did you first learn you were unworthy?
Was it when you laid on your back stacked in the hold as the ocean rocked you? Was it at (the end of) the block when your folds and your breasts and your feet and your hair and your teeth and your skin were inspected and certified of good quality? Was it when you were named mother-breeder against your will or when you were stripped of a name and marked as ditto ditto or when you were stripped and prodded to enter school? Was it when you bared everything and your heart and were still told you were not the right shade, the right type, the right shape? Was it when your mother insisted you be her reflection or when your absent father’s shadow lingered on your empty plates?
When did you learn you were something-someone to be rescued from?
III.
I do not remember the first time, but I do recall the sting of one moment I learned I needed saving. I was 13. It was a half day at school and I went to church to pray (the closest I could get to Perfection). Back then, my prayers almost always asked God to forgive my imperfections, to correct my ugliness, to make me holy and acceptable, precious and protected. I was taught that I could only be perfected by sacrificing slivers of myself at the altar of daughter, so I fully embraced that the only way was to deny myself until my throat throbbed with servitude. But even that was not enough.
When I walked into the sanctuary, I saw my pastor on her knees wailing, interceding on behalf of my wayward spirit, filling the gap between Heaven and Earth with her cries: “Dear God, deliver Brendane from the demon of lust. Deliver her from the spirit of Jezebel. Keep her close to You.”
I had no idea I was possessed or that I had powers to turn people away from God. Perhaps my demons made that boy press his pelvis against mine as I walked past him in class or made my white woman teacher comment on my shape or made that man follow me to the bathroom or made that other man ask me when I was turning 18 or made that boy misname me the mother of his beautiful brown babies or made that other man lie about his age because he just wanted to look into my eyes again or made that other boy tear at my clothes and flesh or made that man call me a garden ho or made those men on the corner discuss how & when they would gang-rape me on my way home or made that cop remind me that he knew where I lived or made that professor kiss my neck or…
Under my spell, they had no choice but to touch me. I pulled them away from God and closer to themselves. My body an offering to a spirit that was so terrifying that it took a Black woman shouting to Heaven for my deliverance. I had more than enough proof.
Everything about me required saving.
IV.
For years I walked this earth, girl-woman possessed, ashamed of my power to bring people closer to themselves. I expelled pieces of myself, but I couldn’t dull the edges of my unholiness, so I claimed responsibility for every hand, tongue, bite, grope, slap, whisper, “Bitch, who the fuck do you think you are?” thrust upon me because clearly this lust demon had control of my body and theirs. Nothing I wore, no piece of myself that I exorcised would diminish its power.
The first man who convinced me I was worthy of saving told me that his love could bring me closer to Perfection, and his lies were proper prayers for my vexed-vexing spirit. After 3 years, I found another lover who convinced me that no one would love me because I was not a good person possessed, I was simply not a good person. But he could love me anyway, and I believed him for about 6 years until he let me go. Then I ran to another who said I had no demon, but I did have an attitude problem, and I stayed for about 2 years trying to fix that but then they let me go too.
All these years I revolved through Heaven’s back door only to come out on the other side alone, forced to face the someone-something that needed salvation.
V.
No amount of light would provide the breakthrough I needed.
I learned the goodness of my own salvation in the pitch-black womb of my loneliness. Sitting with myself, I hold that young girl-woman possessed as she sputters up the pain of her own rejection. I call back those pieces of me I had exorcised in pursuit of Perfection, of Love that required me to be impossible.
In those moments my prayers I make to myself are different: meaning I see myself as gift, as revolutionary, as love itself, as power, as kindness, as grace, as gratitude, as truth, as beauty, as friend, as lover, as change without needing to earn who I am and who I’ve always been. I forgive myself for believing I was never worthy of my own love, protection, and affection, for choosing suffering and baptizing it as love, for staying in relationships until they buckled and snapped and popped under the pressure of maybe this time it’ll work, for attempting to build from brokenness. I extend my own loving mercies to that Black girl-woman who was convinced her worth could only be measured by how much she gave. I release those dreams conjured in my own (self) abandonment.
No one saves me like I do.
This essay draws inspiration from the stories of Jezebel (1 Kings 17–21), Eve (Genesis 2–3), Venus, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” by Hortense Spillers, and “Seduction and the Ruses of Power” from Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya Hartman.
