I’ll Never Be Quiet! Loud and Proud

I had a boy tell me to shut up not once but twice this week and it had me seething. And here’s why, since I was a child too many people would try to govern what came out of my mouth and it felt like I had a knack for saying the wrong things.

I’ve come to accept that my birth gift was to be a storyteller. My god can I tell a story! But along the way, people I came into contact with tried to diminish that gift by censoring me and I almost let them. I’m not having it no longer!

I was binge watching a series called Greenleaf and I was blown away by the similarities between Grace Greenleaf and I. I am that family member that has a gift of causing chaos and as much as relatives would rather you’d shut up, you really can’t stand by when there’s an injustice. If you didn’t want the truth to come out, then you shouldn’t have done the bad things to begin with. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have unprotected sex. It’s the same principle.

You couldn’t govern my young mouth shem. If what you’re doing is wrong and I would tell you live and direct that you need to make it right. Nobody likes Grace Greenleaf, they’d rather keep the skeletons in the closet, the dirt under the carpet and the dirty laundry wherever the dirty laundry goes.

The worst things happened to me and I was told not to talk about them. People would say just let go, get over it, you’re being dramatic. Nah fam, if something is hurting me, it’s hurting me. You don’t have the right to tell me what I can or cannot feel. People can’t or don’t know how to handle other people’s pain so they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist as opposed to getting involved and feeling helpless.

Also, stop telling kids to shut up. You’re gonna make them unable to communicate. They’ll second guess themselves all the way into their adult life. They won’t be able to fight for what they believe in. They won’t be able to communicate when someone is hurting them because everytime they tried to speak, you shut them down.

I wasn’t allowed to speak about the abuse that I endured. It was problematic. I wasn’t allowed to speak about being pregnant at 19 and I had this emotional baggage sitting on my chest. There was no way I was gonna get counselling because I wasn’t allowed to talk about these things and now when someone tells me to shut up I get so mad because it’s tapping into a torturous painful back story that I haven’t quite dealt with yet. Make my day, try to silence me, I dare you!