*This is a transcription of a personal voice recording from January 7, 2021
It is January 7, 2021. It is 4:21 pm.
I am sitting at a Sonic. I ordered a strawberry milkshake, small.
I doubt that the guy who asked me out is reading this, but if he is, yes, I went to Sonic, a fast food place that I know you despise. Also, you only asked me out once, which was when I had something to do. Then I said another time, and you haven’t spoken to me since. Even though I feel like we are food soulmates, you can’t fault me for getting a milkshake at Sonic.
My shift at work starts in an hour, but I plan on going in a little bit earlier, maybe thirty minutes earlier.
I needed to leave my house. We’re not in a tiff or anything at my house; we’re doing great, actually. There’s nothing crazy happening. We’re all kind of adjusting to a big change that’s coming, but I have spent the past twenty-four hours absolutely upset. I’ve cried so much, and it’s not fun.
It’s crazy because just after a few months of feeling absolute self-disgust and self-hatred and feeling so incredibly lost, I was finally accepting who I am and beginning the journey of self-love again. Then it’s like… *sighs*
I love my skin color, but all of a sudden, the color of my skin determines my future. I can’t graduate from college without an internship credit, and I can’t get internships. I think there’s a few reasons for that. One, we’re in the middle of a freaking pandemic, and I guess that seems to escape some of the staff members at my school; I’m not sure. Also, I’m sure people read my name and think they can’t pronounce it; therefore, because they can’t pronounce it, they assume that I’m black, which is correct. I am very much so black and proud.
However, it’s difficult because by them reading my name, they know I’m black, and in my city, as far as I understand and as much research as I’ve done for different firms and studios to do an internship at, none of them are owned by black people. I think out of all the firms and studios that I looked at, only one of them had one black person on staff. So the likelihood of me getting an internship here wasn’t going to happen. With the first place I applied to, my application was immediately rejected.
It’s like no matter how many times I would try to get an internship here, it’s not going to happen because it’s fucking Tennessee, and racism is alive. You can be in a “liberal town,” but at the end of the day, because I am black in a white-dominated field, I am not going to get an internship, and it sucks.
To make that whole feeling worse, I feel incredibly unsafe after what happened at the Capitol. This is why we protest; this why we’re fighting in whatever way we can. People are fighting in whatever way they can because with the way the Capitol being raided went down, the response was so ridiculous. It infuriates me. It genuinely infuriates me.
Long story short, I’m pissed. I’m pissed, and I’m struggling.
I’ve neglected a platform I love because I was struggling mentally. Then, it’s like, I’m finally coming back from that. Now I’m struggling all over again in different areas– mentally, emotionally. If my teachers and staff at school decide not to be helpful, I’ll be struggling financially too, and that fucking sucks. It makes me feel super shitty.
Yes, there are a lot of curse words, and if my family is reading this, I couldn’t say this in the house because I would feel awful. Something I’ve come to realize is part of my unhappiness is from being in the house and feeling awful because I can’t be my real self.
So to my family reading this, specifically my grandparents and maybe my father, my name is Jamilah, and I have never had the courage to be one hundred percent myself around you. I’ve learned that not cursing in front of you guys is a sign of respect, and I hope that you understand that I completely respect you. I love everyone in this family way too much, but I want you to understand that part of the real Jamilah tends to swear like a sailor when she’s hella emotional. She’s also exploring her sexuality; she’s very much so heterosexual, but she’s also still a virgin and likes the feeling that comes with having an orgasm. Any innocent image you have of Jamilah, erase it from your brain because I try to be innocent and appear innocent in front of you, but I’m also going to be twenty-two this year. I need to live. I need to be myself. I feel like I can’t live without being myself, and I can’t be myself without living.
Unfortunately, I have to do that living in a world that’s not going to accept me, a world that’s going to challenge me because of the color of my skin. I knew it was going to happen; I knew I wasn’t going to have an easy or a free ride in this world.
Am I okay with not getting an internship? Hell yeah. I realized that I would love to beat the odds and defy the odds in a predominantly white field, but I can’t do that if I’m not passionate about what I’m doing. I love interior design; I just need a break from it because going to a PWI really ruined that passion for it. It ruined that happiness that it brought me, and I want to rediscover that.
Fortunately, going to a school that has created so much mental trauma led to me creating a blog where I feel like I can be myself and where I feel like I can express myself, even if it’s in weird “how to” posts. I can be super sad and write a fitness journey results post and feel happy because it’s a platform that is completely mine. It helps me release any emotion that’s built up or any thoughts that have completely overtaken my brain, including this here blog post that is actually an audio recording.
My milkshake is so thick. Also, they put a cherry on it; I don’t appreciate that.
If anything, as sad as it sounds, I kind of hope I don’t get an internship. I do hope that my school is accommodating and lets me take another class, but I hope I don’t get an internship because that will give me time to explore a creative side, to expand the part of me that wants to use her voice in the world without having to be quiet.
I feel like I’ve always had to be a certain way on the internet to impress people so I could get a job in interior design. I already have a fine retail job; I’m lined up for a full-time position in a department that isn’t in the one I’m in now because an evil woman I work with makes working in a tense environment absolutely awful. Like, I can’t wait to get away from her and all the negative energy that exists around her, as well as the overall feeling of invisibleness. Imagine working in a giant retail chain and every department gets visited except for yours. Yeah, I can’t wait to get away from there. I can’t wait to have people finally say my name right.
Backtracking. I have a job, and it pays well enough for me to explore myself creatively, explore my writing, expand and better craft my drawing, and to get better at anything that I’m passionate about. Maybe one day my passions will lead to a job that fulfills me. It was something I hoped to get out of my school’s program, and I didn’t get that.
So as I sit at this Sonic parking area thing at parking lot 31, I feel better.
Still, we’re barely into 2021, and I feel like it’s going to be a shit show. Like, 2020 was a shit show, but I think 2021 is going to be a shit show in a completely different way. I think it’s going to be in a way where… Twenty twenty, everything was revealed, and now, twenty twenty-one, there’s going to be progress that’s made. To make progress in any area, especially one that comes with racism and civil justice, there has to be challenges. If January 6th was a sign of anything, it’s that we’re going to be challenged.
Fortunately, we have a herstory maker as the vice president, and we have someone who can really bring some semblance of the country together as a president. I don’t know how much he’ll be able to accomplish in four years, but something will be accomplished. I’m also happy that all of the evil in the world has been exposed, and now it’s time to fucking do something about it.
I’m tired of feeling worthless, and that’s it.
This was a very nice therapy session.
I know everyone is struggling in their own way, whether it be with the pandemic or with racism or both or things that may be happening that aren’t even getting reported.
Right now the racism is such a black-white game, but I’m sure Hispanic people, Latino people, Asian people, other countries are experiencing their own forms of oppression and discrimination and segregation and racism. America is so self-involved that we’re only hearing about our problems.
So that’s where I’m at. That’s why I took a long ass break from blogging. I was trying to get myself together mentally while the world was literally pulling me apart. Well, at the end of the day, I was pulling myself apart, but the world was not helping me. The negativity and overall chaos was playing into this mental worthlessness.
I’m trying to build myself back up, but it’s so hard when I see people who look like me being pulled down and objectified.
I just have to keep fighting, and I think that starts with getting back on a platform that I love, that makes me happy, that I know will help me mentally.
