Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

I’ve been struggling a bit with narrowing down what it is exactly that I want to be the focus of my project. I’ve been thinking about what makes me “me” – there is far too much. Externally, I am South Asian. My skin and hair and eyes glow brown in the sunlight, my jewelry starkly contracts that with a sharp silver shine. I am not very tall, and often opt for shoes that give me some height (Is that compensating for something? Aren’t I enough the way I am?). Internally, I cannot even begin to encapsulate.

There are a million people in my mind. A girl who loves to entertain her friends and partakes in things that she shouldn’t. A girl who has trouble deciphering right from wrong for herself, but can read everyone else like an open book. A girl who has too many voices telling her what to do so she sits in the silence of her room and lets them engulf her in their wishes. It’s hard for me to grasp that I am one person because it feels as though I have been many people my whole life. Someone who hated where she came from, someone who eventually accepted the beautifully different parts of herself. This body has stayed with me, changing, growing, evolving to keep up, but it feels so foreign.

I am loving and attentive and angry. Angry at injustice, angry with myself, angry when I don’t feel seen. But can I ever be fully seen? Can each piece of me ever be known? I’m angry when I don’t know what I feel, because how could I expect someone else to know? I mistake anger for passion, “she has a lot to say, but she doesn’t know how to say it,” I feel like I’m just about ready to explode with every emotion. I think of Diggs’s reading of TwERK, how language is such a powerful vessel for emotion. I am still unsure of a lot of things, but those become clearer with time.