Personal Narrative-Restlessness And Revolution

Restlessness and Revolution In my teenage years, the things and decisions that influence my daily life, may seem altogether more stressful and far reaching than they likely are. Teenagehood is a time for facing pressures head on, to grow up and think of your future, yet to also remember your age and your place in the world. Teenagehood is a time of restlessness and helplessness, of knowing what you want, but not being old enough to accomplish it, of seeing something that is wrong and not being able to fix it. I remember the time I felt this helplessness the most about a year ago, during the 2016 election. I sat on the living room floor, just in front of my tv, into the early morning, watching that election as the president was expected to …show more content…
It is easy to become numb and indifferent to the world around us, the more it looks as though change is impossible. This was the condition I had found myself in following the election. Tiredness crept upon me and the restlessness and helplessness became more unnerving, rather than motivating. Over time, the headlines and statistics blurred together and I noticed myself becoming desensitized to the world around me. My restlessness had to battle with my sense of defeat, and left me wondering, what the point is of caring at all if caring can only do so much under limited ability to act. I often reminisced on the ignorances of childhood, when the world did not seem as grim as it does to me now. The world was ripe and full of ample possibilities and opportunities for everyone. I believed that everyone mostly acted with the best of intentions and those who didn’t were difficult to find. I trusted police officers, believed the people that ran the government were honest and moral, and idolized the president, who at the time, was Barack Obama. I was raised in a town where racism was subtle, but present, but my eyes and ears hadn’t been trained to notice it yet. I internalized much of what I saw and had a preference for whiteness as a young black girl. I was never told that I should hate myself for what I looked like explicitly, self hatred embedded itself in me. As I grew older, into the person …show more content…
If I still lived a life that remained unexamined, if I blindly followed what I was outwardly taught to believe, would it be enough to keep me sheltered from the realities of our world? I would like to think not. To wish for childlike innocence is to coward away from the world. As tiring and frustrated as feeling helpless at an age where your voice is seldom heard and my opinions are dismissed is, I would not trade my awareness for ignorance because ignorance often leads to indifference to the sufferings of people and the flaws in our perceptions. I now know that as a black girl, this country was not created for me, nor my mother and father and their mothers and fathers. This is a country whose foundations were laid in white supremacy that is still alive today. I know I was taught to hate who I was by standards deeply ingrained into our society. I also know that this same society that tries to put us down, murders us, silences, us, and tells their own version of the truth over ours, then picks what we created out of ourselves apart, and takes what they like, profiting off of us. America is a country that loves black culture, but hates black people. Where people are only comfortable with blackness when it is contained, when black people are filtered and black people and all of our history and pain cannot be seen. This is evident in the white women that can profit off of black culture in this society and with the white boys who sing along