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April 29, 2015

The Red Tape Will Not Trip Me And The Glass Ceiling Will Not Stunt My Growth

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I cannot remember the last time I was truly rejected. How do you remember rejection when you live in it? When you have to constantly remind yourself that you belong? That the red tape will not trip me and the glass ceiling will not stunt my growth.

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Feels like I am stalking an ex. But instead I am stalking past bands. Let’s not confuse my rejection for delusion. I was raised by this country to believe that everything I put my heart into, had the talent for, worked for and reached for would be mine. But it looks like my parents taught me right. I did not take into account the politics of the human mind.

How we want others to do well, but not better. How video might have hurt the radio star, but it was ultimately pictures that shot it point blank in the head. A picture may say 1,000 words, but it will never let me hear you sing. I know what, “not being a fit,” means.

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For a moment I was made to believe that I had no right to blues, no right to jazz and sometimes being tone deaf and screeching ads value to a song. I was made to believe that the banjo had no ties to the banza. An instrument brought from Africa by slaves. An instrument once considered to be in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “proper to the negros,” is now an American staple. When I hear the banjo I am reminded of the red tape I have to push away and the ceilings I have to bow my head to. I must consider myself lucky for if I stayed my essence would have been stolen. But I am sure that your idea of what my essence should be is enough to make you interesting, so you will just keep on going. As you have before.

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For a moment I was made to believe that the things I ran away from in my youth concerned with spirituality were to be hidden. We hide them, because they are real. We hide them, because they have the power to hurt and the power to heal. We hide them, because we have seen things that cannot be described. Things that cannot be unseen. And as I push the tape away and bow my head I see others bragging about the things that make me who I am.

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I cannot remember the last time I was truly rejected. But I do remember every single time I was truly affected. Who am I to say that something belongs to me? I was raised in an island where my hips moved to the beat. It knew where to go. I did not need to sit and write down its notes. The music I grew up with needed to be loved. It needed to be danced to like a child needs a mothers hug. Not torn apart from its home to be given up for adoption. To people who might learn to read its notes in a way I never knew how, yet will manage to raise a lonely child. Disconnected from it’s roots.

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April 8, 2015

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I Am A Liebster Award Nominee

I was nominated by the very Kind and talented Camille for the Liebster Award. It is an award given within the writing community. I am honored to be nominated for the 3^rd time, however this is the first time I have participated in the award and I wish I would have participated sooner. This means that others are reading, applying and engaging with my writing. What more can a girl ask for?!

Q&A:

Q: If you could give advice to a crowd of people, what would it be?
A: It is humbling that I have recently been asked to be part of a talk from one of my readers and am in the process of sorting my speech, so this is the perfect question to ask. To simplify I would say the following: Be your own parent, find inspiration everywhere and fall in love with progress.

Q: Why do you write?
A: I write for many reasons. To voice an uncommon, yet universal opinion. To connect and help others feel connected. To analyze my life and learn more about myself in the process and in turn learn more about the world. The more I know about people and the world, the more I can do to help it. To live with eyes wide open.

Q: Night or day?
A: Night. It’s when the world is at its most quiet and alive simultaneously.

Q: What’s your favourite joke?
A: “I’m pretty but tough, like a diamond. Or beef jerky in a ball gown.” – Unbreakable Kimmy Shmit

Q: How do you want to create a positive impact?
A: By living by example and encouraging others. By teaching them how to encourage themselves. By trying to integrate integrity back into our modern culture.

Q: Is there a movie that means a lot to you and has shaped your life in any way?
A: Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, I am a fan of Horror movies and Anime which tend to be very dark, but Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium gave me the childhood I never had by reminding me to believe in myself, help others, that I am the creator of my life and thus also my environment, that normal is boring and to accept the world around me with childlike wonder.

Q: What is your favourite childhood memory?
A: Playing rounds of video games with my 3 brothers and 3 cousins. The 7 of us created our own club. We would later have my brother Henry read us scary stories, then we would draw, play with action figures and make ridiculous music. We lived in our own world and we loved it. When asked on the first day of school where I went over summer break I can say that I went nowhere and everywhere.

Q: What was your favourite subject in school?
A: Chorus. When I am singing in a band or choir it’s when I feel the most alive. It is a beautiful and intimate experience. It makes me feel like I belong in the world like nothing else can.

Q: Summer or winter?
A: Spring.

Q: What was the happiest day of your life?
A: My 26^th birthday party when I realized I had finally become the woman I always wanted to be. I have always felt like five different people at once. I have many groups of friends. One group of guy friends, a group of friends from my goth/punk days, a group of artist friends, a group of shy friends, a group of materialistic friends, crazy friends and friends from the hood. But this was the first year where I felt like all of the pieces of me have created one enormous puzzle that took me years to build and I am very proud of the completed puzzle called Ana. I can now frame it.

Q: Is there somebody you want to thank for anything right now?
A: Valerie Rochon my 6^th grade Dance teacher from Mirabel Sisters Intermediate School IS90. She was the first person to truly believe in my talent. She heard me sing in dance class to “Dancing in the street,” for one of our dance shows and told me I should sing more. She put me in chorus class and allowed me to have two electives at once which was forbidden in the school. She had me sing and used the rest of the class as backup dancers. At that point I was only a studious valedictorian. She broke me out of my shell and through example taught me to be my own parent and look for inspiration in others.

11 random facts about me:

I am the youngest and only girl in my immediate family
I used to be a tomboy. I ran fast, played video games (still do) and wore 1990’s track suits to school.
I used to take anger management courses. I have learned to harness it and use it for good, but sometimes I surprise myself.
I grew up soo poor that every Christmas my brothers and I would each get $5. We would put the money together and use that money to trade in a video game.
My spirit animal is an elephant, but my favorite animals are sea otters
My cat is named after Tom Cruises daughter. This way I will never forget how old she is and I think if my cat was a human girl she would act and look just like Tom’s daughter.
When I lived with my family we had, 2 turtles, 2 ferrets and 4 cats in the house at one point.
My middle name is Jessica. My dad wanted to name me Jessica, my mother wanted to name me Ana. My mom got first pic and my dad got the middle name.
I learned how to swim at the age of 23 in Spain.
I have Synesthesia. Sometimes I can taste words and hear colors.
From the ages of 3-5 I spoke to my teddy bears and arranged them in a specific order. They each had names and specific personality traits. Some of them did not get along. My favorite was a giant frog I carried him with me everywhere.

Here are the rules a nominated writer needs to do in order to accept the Liebster Award:

Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their website.
Display the award on your website — by including it in your article
Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
Provide 11 random facts about yourself.
Nominate 5 – 11 writers that you feel deserve the award.
Create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.
List these rules in your post

I Nominate:
1. Christopher
2. Lizzie
3. Roopam Jain
4. Valorie
5.Christine
Questions for my nominees:

What do you value most in a person?
Why do you write?
What helps you go on every day?
Who inspires you?
Do you prefer to wear dark or light clothing?
How do you want to be remembered?
What is your biggest pet peeve?
Realist, Optimist or pessimist?
Favorite pastime?
Do you consider yourself to be simple or complicated?
What do you value most in yourself?

April 1, 2015

comments 17

You Are Not A Secret, You Are Here

Be yourself, and if you don’t know yourself then go find yourself. How do you find yourself? Do you chase yourself like a dog chases its tail? Do you wait for other people to tell you who you are? Or do you latch on to your parents’ identity and hope that if they were great artists then somehow their hard work and talent through life experiences have rubbed off on you?

Children rarely care what the world thinks of them. They know they are here just like anyone else and believe that they deserve everything their hearts desire. Teenagers strive to be normal. Even when non-conforming we can find the loneliest of loners conforming to a non-conformist group. Most adults either know themselves or think they do. The latter is both extremely common and dangerous.

You cannot know something fully without loving it first. I never truly knew myself because there was always a part of me that I did not accept. Acceptance is the foundation of love.That is until recently. Last week I had a housewarming/birthday party. It was then, while looking around, that I realized I was an adult. Everyone in my apartment was there because I wanted them to be there. Everyone had a blast. Not because anything interesting in particular happened, but because they were amazed by how relaxed and open the atmosphere was. The atmosphere was created by the people in it.

There were some people who tried to invite themselves and I took their hints and threw them out. It is not my job to make my life even slightly uncomfortable to ease the insecurity of others, and no one can bully me into doing or thinking otherwise. My heart and mind are open, but they are also experienced. We mustn’t take our experiences with the world and others to heart, but conversely we must never disregard them.

The words guilt and enemy are no longer part of my vocabulary.Yes, there are those who try to hurt, but they are not enemies unless I make them out to be. What they are is insecure. The only way to fight back against insecurity is with confidence. Rather than make them my enemies I went back to the drawing board and came up with something different. Rather than thinking in terms of good or bad, smart or dumb, I am now able to see people in terms of aware and unaware. I am able to see past how things and people make me feel and find the truth of what and who they are.

The best thing in the world is to be able to look at yourself and know that you are not a secret, that the person you are and the person others see you as are the same. There is nothing to hide from the world, no issues left unresolved, and no dirty secrets hidden under the rug or skeletons in the closet. After growing up thinking I wasn’t good enough, seeing evil before I got the chance to know anything else and not knowing where I belonged, I have finally reached that place in life and it feels like a gift from god. I belong wherever I go. Evil’s greatest weapon is insecurity and good’s greatest weapon is confidence. When you know how to decipher where insecurities lie and equip yourself with confidence the world becomes a different place to live in. A better place full of all the things they told you were there as a child, but became cliches instead. A world where rich people can be miserable and poor people can live a life of bliss. Where likes and beauty will never make you envy the other person. Where your mind that was once a cage is now your escape, because it is the only place that holds the truth.

The world is inconsistent and most times people act out of insecurity, but the one place you can control is your mind. Aim to be indestructible,make integrity the most important human trait, confidence the most powerful and insecurity the most dangerous and one day you will be.

March 17, 2015

comments 8

If You Are Not Fighting For the World, You Are Fighting With Yourself

From a very tender age there was a war within me. There was always something that could be better. There was always something left unappreciated that I wanted to congratulate. However when you are young there is not much you can do without support. Thus, I fought with myself. But I always made sure that the fight wasn’t detrimental to my future.

We all need a war to fight. It is human nature. Even when searching for peace in a world that is ruled by greed, you are fighting a war. Making sure that you raise a decent human being in a corrupt world is a war. Anything that requires your effort and takes up your energy is a war. There is no such thing as being either a lover or a fighter, because it is love that drives us to fight in the first place. You either love and fight for the world or you are fighting with yourself. But as humans we cannot do both, as we have a limited amount of energy.

In our youth we mostly fight with ourselves, but as we get older we learn about the person we are and the person we want to be. If we take the time to learn about ourselves by accepting and changing our faults along the way we see how we can benefit the world around us. But if all of your energy is spent on fighting with yourself, then the opportunity may never rise, or it may walk past you while you are too busy bickering with your subconscious to even notice.

As adults we no longer look for friends. Friends we already have enough of. We look for allies. We look for soldiers to fight in a unit without a general. We look for likeminded individuals who are there to support us while they too do what they can to aid in your war.

Unfortunately, insecurity can cause others to be ungrateful and take over and there will be times when before you know it your unit has an ulterior motive that distracts you from your own battles. And much like the wars that are fought by our countries, our own wars begin with a purpose you can stand behind and sometimes lead to a personal gain you were unaware off.

Those who choose to lead a team that does not ask for a leader often use the excuse that they were put on this earth to lead while the rest are here to follow. And much like my lover and fighter argument, believing that you are either a leader or a follower is a misconception that devalues you as a human being. Whether you consider yourself a follower or a leader in your life, you are leading. Even when you follow, you are leading because following is what you have chosen to do at that particular moment. There is nothing stronger than being able to step down from your personal throne to allow someone else to let their light shine through. There is nothing stronger than calculatedly taking a step down so that someone else can have the light shone on them just enough so that they can look up and notice they’ve been wearing a crown the entire time. There is nothing stronger than grace.

With all of the chains society and others put on us we still have a choice in our thought. In our minds we can choose to be free. Living in a first world country gives me the privilege to choose my battles. If you have the privilege to choose your battles, choose to fight for the world, not your ego.