label: signifier

x,

who would you be without your label... i wonder... i tried to stage a divorce with mine a while ago, and soon found i had a bit of a war on my hands... i didn't expect it... it started out as simply a thought experiment... like what if the label is a crutch, something we lean on a little too much to explain our phobias, our quirks, and the other shit we just can't seem to do like "normal" people... i thought if i divorced mine, perhaps it would be freeing... perhaps, it still could be...

who would you be without your label... i know you never claimed to ascribe to them much, but i know you do in your heart and mind...

i have to admit, without mine, i don't know who i am... i've wanted to be a writer since i was 11 years old... i listened to my mother's well meaning words--"writers starve..." and tried to become something else... i tried other things... other starving vocations.... photography, and film.... some practical computer programming... but still wrote... fragments, snatches of poems in the back of a notebook or a stray envelope... and tried my hand again at this part or that... abandoning it every few years, and returning to it in the years that followed...

not sure what to do with that part of me that wants to "take it seriously..." and make it available for human consumption... part of me wants that... i always saw myself as someone with her name imprinted on the cover of book, but could never actually visualize the book... isn't that weird... i always saw myself as someone who other people would read, though i hoard my work so fiercely... yet, i'm not sure what to do with that idea...

what does it mean to divorce the writer in me? to admit i'm a hobbyist who may never be the writer i imagined... it scares me to death... i don't know who am i without it... i don't know how to explain myself to myself.... it's not that i need it as the identifier for the hi-my-name-is conversations... in those, i rarely mention it... why would i? it's new york, everybody's a writer or a filmmaker these days.... but to myself, in my own story, in the way i make sense of myself in the world... who am i without those two syllables? how do i explain my set-apart-ness, the parts of me that never really belong anywhere... how do i explain the quirks, the weird underpinnings, and abnormalities... the non-existent relationships and strange trajectories of my teenage and college years... it made sense as part of an artist makeup, but without it, it just feels sad... like the loner, wallflower mute that shows up from time to time is me after all... no explanation or redemption song to bear... no savior second chapter to bring it all home and sew it up neatly after the last commercial break...

but perhaps, there will be... i remember what this poet said at the end of this piece i was editing... she said, "i'm just writing this thing so i won't die..." and so we're all just writing to save ourselves... and we're the fortunate ones, if our writing is such that can save someone else, too... that doesn't make us better, it makes us blessed.... i always have to go back to Hyde on this.... the gift in circulation is an amazing thing...

and i guess that's the thing... we want too much to be saviors, because we're in so in love without saints... we know it was reading shange or toni cade at the right time that i kept so many of us from jumping out of windows... but that's easily forgotten... too often, we become too goal-oriented.. not that there's anything wrong with goals, but we're trying to cross T's and dot Y's for all the wrong reasons...

let me remember.... i'm here as spirit... i don't need to be this or that... i don't need you or anyone else to think me something more than i am.... i am just this manifestation of God, as you are that, and he that, and so on... i don't need this label anymore than i need the idea of hell to make me right my wrongs... all i need is to honor the place where God/the Universe resides in me... and it so happens that more often than not, it likes to reside here in me.... where words meet each other, and spread on the page in these large connected communal maps that become texts... and because He/She/It shares with me that way, i know that the gift must move... and the sooner i can make it not about me, the sooner i can get out of the way and let the gift do its own through me...

i'm open....

-me