Bird Watching

I can’t believe I read about Her again. I don’t like Her. She is arrogant and entitled and represents so many of my childhood peers. Watching Her, though a stranger, succeed is like watching my bullies continue to taunt me through the newspaper. Watching Her fail with mean tweets as the only consequence is like watching Them all get away with it again and again.

Outrage is not much of a deterrent, I guess. I’m terrified of putting too much baking powder in my pancakes, but She parades her self-entitlement across magazine covers, social media, and television.

I no longer want to lend my whisper of a voice to the outrage. I would rather be different.

I think a lot of people are already being different and I can’t see them yet. I have tunnel vision for the abusive types. Not the violent ones, but the woodpecker ones that hammer down your self-worth.

She writes words like they’re nothing. She throws them around like plastic confetti, letting them litter the streets. Words don’t rot away like compost; they overwhelm landfills.

Her incompetence (or is it ignorance?) has that effect on me. It sits in my mind, heavy and unnatural. As repulsive as compost can be, at least it changes form; it serves a purpose. Plastic just changes form and shape and color and loses all function, like the corpse of a memory.

I read about Her and People Like Her because it enables me to shut down from my emotions or at least steer close to Annoyance Street between Miffed and Irked Avenues. I don’t like Her or Him or Them. Move on? I can’t.

Or, I won’t? Such a classic dilemma.

I want to write. I don’t. I read about Her and become resentful that She writes. I still don’t write.

Maybe, if I didn’t read about Her or Him or Them, I would write something, anything. Even now, I’m writing about how I don’t want to write about Them. I’m stuck in a never-ending loop of adding meta layers to my issues without finding any resolve.

I create distance, but perhaps I need to walk straight towards my resentment and bitterness. I’d like to tell off those parts of myself off though that has only gotten me here. Maybe, I’ll stay a while; here, where I write about Her and Him and Them, but not for Her, and Him, and Them. I don’t know what this space is: between inferiority and superiority. It doesn’t feel like equality when I think of how much She has in terms of opportunity and wealth and connections and access. Yet, don’t I have words too?

For all Her, His and Their power and influence, I’m still writing about my discontent. I’ll never be published, but I won’t be silent either.