So, yes, I want(ed) to race again. But this is bigger than running a marathon. One of the things that truly sucks about living with a so-called rare disease like sarcoidosis is you're invisible even in the spaces that are designed to help you. In clinical environments, you are a question mark. There are so many presentations, you could be suffering from anything...or nothing. In the world, you don't "look sick." In research environments you do not take precedence.
So let me try this: I wanted just to say that I homed your fuckshit in my belly so long that I have fertilized a field and they are some of the most vibrant colors. They could be weeds. And facts: even weeds are useful sometimes.
As hard as it’s become to love my body through the challenge heart failure imposes on it (and if I’m honest before h.f.), I absolutely don’t not-love her. I do worry that she will up and leave me altogether. The truth is, our relationship will end because all bodies end. It’s no secret that all of them are fallible and impermanent despite the corporatizing of them that says we can make them otherwise.
"A good girl: bright, perhaps a bit of an introvert, perhaps not romantically pursued or interested in the pursuit for these reasons. Of course, these traits are likely not all she is, but when she is told that her brownness negates her goodness, she must determine how to be herself—all of herself—anyway.
Tropism is the biological phenomenon that describes how she does it. In tropism, external agents determine the direction of an organism’s growth. For better or worse, it is often external agents that show a good girl of color how to grow into herself; they determine what she will look like and how she will act."
I'll be reading poems from Marrow, my manuscript about the Peoples Temple, a congregation of Americans who emigrated to Jonestown Guyana and were coerced into suicide by their spiritual leader.
Talking to myself--especially when it becomes a lot of talk all of a sudden, always tells me there is something I'm trying to work out of my brain and especially out of my body. It's interesting that I haven't been able to run lately, one of my choice ways of working stuff out of my mind and body.
I'm only recently accepting the extent to which my physical body has been intrinsic to how I self-identify. The realization has come on the heels of a bunch more that are the result of the heart failure (cardiomyopathy if you like big words) diagnosis in September. My body has changed significantly in the way I use it for self-identification purposes. [...]
Sexuality presents as attractiveness like “You’re cute, I’m attracted to your physical-ness.” And ultimately if biology and evolution is to be trusted, that translates into “I’d be interested in having sex with you.” It’s one way to fertilize the earth I suppose.
The training, racing, and creative process...is a triumph over the physical and psychic conditions just outside the parameters of control which would censor and stilt performance.
...common roles illustrate how Black women, and their sexuality, have often been synonymous with deviance. And reclaiming, repackaging, and/or discarding the roles has given women agency; a control denied the Good Girl who is essentially invisible. She needs that.
darlene anita scott 