~April 4, 2023~
Dear Diary,
Today I woke up from a nap (still sick) with the sound of a Wheat Thins cracker snapping in my pocket and encompassed by tissues (“tissues” is actually a separate bed sheet I used to cough, sneeze, and blow my nose into because real tissues bruise my septum, which was an anecdote I was going to omit because it’s… disgusting… but I’m trying out this new thing called “unwarranted honesty”).
I’d be lying if I were to admit that I’m just now realizing I’m gross sometimes (“sometimes” is said to mitigate the judgment I have for myself because I’m gross more than “sometimes”).
I’d be lying if I said there weren’t days I wanted to romanticize the decay around me in an attempt to temporarily mask the scent of mental decline.
But I don’t have the skin, nor the voice, nor the body, to achieve the goal of deceiving people that I’m not, not ill, but that I look aesthetically pleasing while being so.
I find it unnerving that even the expression of my mental instability is dissected by the assumption of my racial inferiority. That it’s not good enough that racism has its grasp on my existence in the material world, but it must also reach beyond what is physical, into my subconscious, and subjugate me there as well.
Whiteness is the antithesis to my “grossness” because a white person’s decay will forever be masked with the scent of afforded grace that they will get better, that this is not their inherent state of being, and that even if it takes them a while, at least they can be branded as sexy in the meantime.
Like truly what. the. fuck. is a “feral girl aesthetic.”
My Blackness is perceived as innately disgusting and my mental decay intrinsic to my being. There’s no room for grace, and there’s no exemption for attractiveness because I’m discerned as fulfilling my predestined role, and I’m fulfilling it well.