from the desk of mx yah yah: help, girl! i was taught that pride was the biggest sin and now i struggle to lift my head under the weight of people humbling me

or "why yah yah keeps rewriting and republishing short stories"

So, do you remember that one Adventuring Academy where Brennan and Aabria are talking about cakes versus pie, and Brennan says "“Are you trying to achieve greatness or avoid disappointment?” Oh, you do? Good, okay, because that’s the theme of this therapy session of a post.

I’m never anywhere good in terms of my confidence about my writing. I always think I’m doing too much or too little. I fret over my word choices, I worry about being misunderstood? Should I say less? Should I say more? Another comma here? What if people don’t get it? What if they come to the wrong conclusions, what if what I made isn’t good enough, what if I’m not good enough? I work myself up. I convince myself that whatever spark I had to trick magazines and anthologies (and a whole ass agent) into taking me on has sputtered down to wet ashes. Convinced of my worthlessness, I do what I love most. I rewrite.

Rewrites are comfortable, comforting. I lean on the crutch of words I’ve written before. The characters are easy; they’re my children, I birthed them in size-12 Times New Roman. I know the plots, the twists; these I crafted with the careful precision of a horologist setting the diamond in a watch.

There’s no risk in rewriting, but there’s hardly any reward either. I get nothing from it but the security blanket of past greatness, a balm against the self-doubt that wracks me. I circle the stories over and over and over; I hide from the knowledge that I can do better, be better, if only I wasn’t so afraid. It’s a confidence thing, of course, something to do with deeply embedded shames about pride. I operate under the impression that I have to prove something to the world, that I have to do everything in my power to show people that I’m smart, I’m learned, I’m well-read, I’m erudite. I think I have to, as Jenny Slate said, “make up for it being me”, a constant apology for being Mariyah. There’s a cavern in me, something child-shaped and small, that never got over the Baptist lessons of my youth, over the lessons taught to me by living in this world as a Black lesbian. Bow your head. Be humble. Don’t look nobody in the eye. Don’t speak, make yourself small, make yourself invisible, do not brag, do not gush, don’t look too long in the mirror. Stand straight but not too straight. Achieve, excel but not too much, you don’t want to get cocky. Shrink! Shrink!

I’m constantly in competition with myself, desperately trying to show the world at large that I can be more than what I appear, that who I am is worth something. Even as I tell others that there’s nothing you have to do on this planet to deserve kindness, I tell myself that I have to be smarter, I have to be useful, I have to be open to everything and everyone. The child-shaped cavern inside of me howls; it remembers when everyone called her a ‘good girl’, when she was prized for quietness, conformity. It remembers the horror of speaking up for herself, of trying to be understood and heard, only to be shut down with yelling or with violence.

I am no longer a girl, just as I’m no longer that girl. I am, to steal from my own novel, my own thing, something in the mid-way point between caterpillar and butterfly. I’m melting, I’m changing, and yet, I fear I’ll carry this hurt girl around with me for the rest of my life. I try to put her to bed, but she prefers to stay in the backseat of her mother’s car, seven years old, wailing about how nobody loves her. I think if I was to show this girl, this she-thing that lives in my belly, what we were able to accomplish she wouldn’t even crack a smile. We could always do better, she’ll say. Aren’t we disappointing everyone? Aren’t we being too loud? Too visible?

How does one start to undo years of conditioning? Do you just jump into it, feet first? Even as I write this, I’m texting one of my best friends. Baya reads me for filth. She doesn’t let me close my eyes, she doesn’t let me flinch, and I adore her for it. She tells me, sternly, that hard as it is I need to kill that voice in my head. Stop apologizing, says Baya. You are great, be sure of your greatness. Stop being sorry for being great. She tells me that it’s not my fault that the seeds of self-doubt have been planted in me by other’s cruelty; tells me to water the seed with patience, with love, with acceptance, and let it bloom into confidence, into pride, into an unwavering sense of self.

fiona apple’s ‘fetch the bolt cutters’

This fear of mine, this fear of burning, this fear of change, is not a foreign sensation to me. When I first started on my mental health journey in earnest, back when I was eighteen, I thought I was losing a part of myself. I thought my sadness was the beautiful part of me, that without my tears and self-loathing I had nothing to hold. If I wasn’t depressed, who was I? If I wasn’t afraid, if I wasn’t anxious, if I didn’t melt into the background, who was Mariyah? I didn’t want to get better. I wanted to rot in my bed, to listen to sad music, to fall deeper and deeper into my pit, my depression and OCD like weighted blankets over my body. Squish me, I said. Make me flat, disappear me.

But am I good enough? Am I worth the fuss? Do I deserve what I have?

solange, ‘cranes in the sky’

What’ll happen, really, if I let myself let go of the past? What will I gain if I open my arms? How will I change if I put the girl to bed and wake the person I am now, if I learn to trust myself? What will I become once I delete the old files and start on the new, when I stop looking over my shoulder to the past?

Do I think too much? Who is this self-flagellation for? Who benefits from me being humble?

I wish I had a clean, clever way to end this, some token of advice I could press into the hands of my readers, but I have nothing. There is only Mariyah at a cafe, iced coffee and overpriced sandwich at their elbow. There is only Mariyah the author, Mariyah the little girl, Mariyah the faery, Mariyah the daughter and friend and sister and confusing, convoluted burst of color. There’s only me, unlocking the car door, picking up the girl not much taller than I am now, cradling her head as I carry her up the stairs and to the bedroom that used to be her older sisters’s. I touch the crown of her head, the beaded braids and sing her the song her dad used to sing her to put her to sleep: Time to Say Goodbye by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman.

And, as her eyes close and she falls into the fitful sleep of an anxious child made grown too soon, I seal the wound, I refuse to go over what’s happened before. I leave the room; I write something new.