Ray’s Rays Number 7
Reclaiming Who You Are
by
Radiance Angelina Petro
Perhaps the string of trauma travels all the way back
to the moment you were born—to that
exact moment when you were lifted
from your mother’s womb,
and the doctor pronounced your gender
based on your body parts, when the doctor
pronounced your health, when your parents
fixed a name upon you making it you
even though perhaps, it wasn’t.
Perhaps the first moment you ever felt
less than, like you’re body was wrong,
like your identity was wrong, like who you were
fundamentally was wrong, was the moment you were born.
Perhaps it all started there and it only threaded its way
up until this very moment.
Perhaps you are still asking who you are.
No matter your age—15 or 97, if the thread
of confusion stretches back through time to the moment
you were born and you were told who you are
without your input, it makes sense not to know now.
Despite their good intentions, they began molding you
while you were still covered with blood and inhaling the burning air,
and didn’t stop—the thread wound its way through your life
tangling the truth of who you inwardly knew yourself to be.
It’s time. Imagine that just-born-being spilling out into YOUR arms.
Imagine you shielding that child from labels, from constructs, even
from names. Imagine allowing that being to choose
their own name through you, and imagine
celebrating and supporting them if they choose
to change their name later in life—even if it’s a hundred times.
Imagine letting them tell you what gender they are—even if that changes
a hundred times over the course of their life. Imagine loving
and celebrating them no matter who they know and say themselves to be.
Imagine you taking charge over this screaming, bloody being.
Imagine cleaning them, imagine, perhaps, nursing them
whether you have breasts or not,
imagine feeding them somehow from your very being.
Turn away to shield the child from anyone who would try to control
or impose their limited, socially constructed ideas onto them.
And then realize: you gave birth to yourself.
You are your own parent. You are your own child,
and you are going to protect that child, yourself
with all the fire and fury of hell itself.
NO ONE will EVER hurt you again.