Not Even Worth a Thought

Let me tell you where those words came from.

Not from the truth. From a mouth that needed me small to feel large, that measured its own height by how far down it could press me, that handed me a verdict dressed as an observation and watched me accept it because I was young enough, or tired enough, or alone enough to mistake cruelty delivered with confidence for something that knew what it was talking about.

Those words did not come from the truth.

I want to say that first.

Before the poem does anything else, before it sits with the feeling the way it has to because the feeling is real even when its origin is a lie,

before any of that:

those words came from a damaged place in someone else and landed in me,

and I have been watering them ever since.

---

Not worth a thought.

Someone said that to me.

With their whole mouth. With the specific, practiced confidence of a person who has said it before, who has a list of people they have said it to, who will have a list of people they say it to after me,

because the saying was never about me.

The saying was about them.

The saying was the sound a small thing makes when it needs to feel large.

I was the room they made it in.

I was not the reason.

---

Here is what I know about the man I want and the gap I've measured between him and me:

the gap was not measured by a reliable instrument.

The instrument was calibrated in rooms where I was told to be quiet, where my voice was assessed as worthless before it finished forming the sentence, where my face was handed back to me marked insufficient by someone who had decided the marking before I arrived.

That instrument is not reliable.

That instrument has never been reliable.

I have been using it my whole life because it was the one I was given and I didn't know there were others.

---

Sorry excuse.

Someone said that too.

I want to ask myself something and I want to sit with it before I answer with the answer they trained me to give:

a sorry excuse for what?

For existing at a volume they couldn't control?

For having a face they didn't want to look at because looking at me required them to see themselves reflected and they didn't like what the reflection showed?

For being a person with edges and depth and a specific, unrepeatable interior that was too complicated for someone who needed me to be simple?

For being, in short, too much of a person for someone who wanted an object?

---

Don't speak unless spoken to.

And I learned this.

Of course I learned this. The body learns what it has to to survive the room it's in. The body is smart and practical and does not distinguish between lessons worth learning and lessons that were imposed by someone who needed my silence because my speaking threatened something in them they couldn't name.

I learned the silence.

I carried it here.

I am carrying it into the space between me and the man I want, using it to measure the distance, to calculate my worthiness,

and the silence was never mine.

The silence was theirs.

I have been punished with someone else's silence long enough.

---

Here is the true thing, the one underneath all the words they put in me like furniture in a room they were going to vacate anyway:

I am not the sum of what the cruelest people in my life decided I was.

I am not the verdict of someone who needed me diminished.

I am not unattractive inside and out as measured by a person who looked at me with eyes that were only ever looking for a place to put their own ugliness.

---

I am not going to tell myself I am perfect.

I am not going to write the poem that fixes it in twelve lines with a turn at the end where I realize my worth and everything resolves into brightness.

That poem would be lying and I have had enough of people lying to me.

What I will tell myself is this:

The voice that says not good enough is not a neutral voice.

It is not an objective assessment from a qualified source.

It is the accumulated volume of people who needed me to believe it,

and I believed it because believing it was safer than the alternative,

which was believing they were wrong,

which would have meant they were cruel,

which would have meant I was in danger,

which my body knew and protected me from the only way it could:

by making me small enough to survive the room.

---

The room is different now.

The man I want is not the room they built.

The man who sends a song and means it, who sees me without the diagnostic agenda, who is simply present,

is not measuring me against the verdict they handed down.

He is not using their instrument.

He is not even in that room.

---

I have been told many times.

I know.

I know the many times is the weight of it, the accumulation, the chorus of it, the way a thing said enough times in enough voices starts to sound less like someone's opinion and more like a fact of the world.

It is not a fact of the world.

It is a fact of the rooms I was in.

I am not in those rooms anymore.

I am here.

With the feeling, yes, with the old instrument, yes, with the voice that says not good enough running on a loop that was recorded a long time ago by people who are not here and do not get a vote,

but here.

Outside the room.

Carrying the instrument and knowing, for the first time or the hundredth,

that I can put it down.

---

I am not nothing.

I am the person who survived every room that told me that I was.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, the thing they were most afraid of:

a woman who lived through everything they said about her and is still

here.

Still.

Speaking.

Worth every word.