Words from The Bearded Lady

Words from The Bearded Lady

 

i am a modern bearded lady

An oddity – a spectacle of human gender

An anomaly – of human nature, and a puzzle

Full of missing pieces

Put out on display, hanging from this wall

My words, my body, to be interpreted by your gaze

 

Don't tell me i'm brave.

 

i am tired of hearing that i am brave for surviving a society that has embraced its trauma as culture and tradition – while ignoring the blood that stains our hands as we applaud for the scripted survivors’ narrative

 

i am tired of being brave.

 

i am tired of pulling out every fragile piece of me

Slowly unravelling

Unwrapping this aching, bleeding sliver of identity i rescued

And holding it up for you

To gawk at, to debate it’s existence

Like it’s a hypothetical alien

And not my beating heart.

 

i am tired of foraging for the right words

Unearthing old language

To craft around this part of me that does not fit

Your narrow definition of human

Tired of begging for understanding

For compassion

For dignity

While you play the devil’s voice of reason

 

This freak is done playing in this circus.

 

Instead let’s make visible 

What has only been allowed to be defined by darkness and pain

Let’s stop pulling us out from the shadows to shock and woo for the next campaign, 

My trauma is not a freak show for entertainment – my scars are not your medical study to twist into proof of my inferiority! 

i am no one’s trendy #awareness week

My reality doesn’t pack up and leave at the end of the month

i don't want rainbow bracelets and hollow words from podiums

 

i want accessible health care! i want to stop counting how many Autistics have been murdered for being Autistic this year

i want to stop being terrified waiting to see which one of us will fall through these man made cracks in this system to our death

i want to stop having to cut out pieces of myself to serve up on a framed platter for 

Consumption just for a morsel of acceptance, 

 

i am not a freak show

 

i am a fucking galaxy, a god damn universe

 

Exploding inside of blood and muscle and sinew

i am Time coming undone into linear expression

i am a fairy travelling between realms of existence you couldn’t dream of

i am magic and lore, fantasy and reality

Colliding into organic nature

i am a forest filled with the ghosts of abandoned Autistic children

Coming back to life in my unashamed flapping hands

i am joy incarnate, beauty expressed as flesh and bone

i am Divine,   i am holy,   and sacred

 

i am not reduced to my trauma, nor bound by my limitations

i am not confined to a singular word defined as identity

i am the breath between the atoms of this matter before you

i cannot be contained by words, by language, by marrow

No, all of me will not be found inside this construct of bone

 

To know the rest of me is to know the robin’s song

To know the laughter of the flooded river

And the mercurial nature of the ocean

 

Our bodies are a mirror

Reflecting aeons of moving earth into mountains

And time carving valleys from rivers

 

We are Life expanding in infinite variation

 

And i am done holding onto my trauma

Like it’s the only valid proof of identity, 

As if the only valid way to be queer and disabled and Autistic

Is to be synonymous with suffering

 

We survivors, we disabled

We queer, we mad and wild

We freaks make for good billboards and shocking titles,   

the images of our trauma used to garner as many clicks as possible,

our identities compressed into buzzwords that spew from politicians, 

Our pain glorified, 

Our communities reduced to tragic statistics

Only for us to be wheeled back to our quiet rooms filled with the deafening Silence

Once the parades end and all that we are, has been pressed through the factory of palatable, 

And commodified into marketing schemes

We go back … to Invisible

To being the shadows that are cast into monsters and warning signs 

 

But not this time!

This time this bearded lady will not go quietly into this night

 

This time i take back my too loud laughter

My too big happiness

My too wild imagination

My too deep thoughts

My too expressive body

From the spectators and the white coats

And i claim this ground as holy 

As worthy, and valued for all that it embodies

 

Defined by my hands alone

 

Crafted to remain visible and in the light