Girls Write Teen Takeover

How the Black Lives Matter movement gave me a common passion between my split personalities

BY ALORA YOUNG

I have a brain that works in dichotomies. Depending on the subject I am either disabled or a prodigy in the psychology community they call people like me “twice exceptional.” Both learning disabled and gifted. For the longest time, I called it being broken. I’ve always known my brain was wired a little differently. It was the way I read thousands of pages without breaking a sweat but couldn’t remember the order of operations. It was the way I wrote operas but I couldn’t remember where I left any of the four printed copies of my paper on Italian theatre. It was the way I skipped two years of math, despite lacking basic mathematical ability, because I had mastered every function of my ti84. I’m bilingual, I’m bisexual, I look biracial, and I’m a relentless optimist with a pessimist inside my head called OCD. My mom says it’s because I’m a Gemini.

If you cut me in half down the middle of my mixed-up identities, I doubt they would be friends. And I’m almost certain they would only have one thing in common. They are angry.

This summer, for the very first time the world looked at me and actually saw me standing there. The black lives matter movement forced the issues I’ve been fighting for since middle school onto the front page of every magazine. Another thing you should know about me is my thoughts almost always rhyme. I used to call it thinking in poetry. But now they’re rally chants, and battle cries. Ask any black person and they will tell you how old they were the first time they realized they were being held to a different set of standards. In my house, they call it “black tax.” It’s the notion that a black person must work twice as hard in this country to get half as far or half the respect.

I still remember the day in fourth grade when my teacher read out each question and then put up on the screen who got it right and who got it wrong. Several times prior she had skipped a question only one person had missed in order to not embarrass them. On the very last question, which only one person had missed, she shared the name, and it was mine. I remember sitting there in so much shame and rage as all of my classmates and my teacher made fun of me. That day when I went home on the bus I told my mom, she told me it was a life lesson. That for us, being good enough meant having to be better. I cried every single time I had to go to math class for the rest of that year. Despite my mixed-up identities, I’ve never been confused about that lesson.

I’ve known who I was since I was two years old and told my mom I wanted to be a songwriter. But being the only black student in all white honors classes often serves as a confounding factor to those around you. My very presence challenged a preconceived notion of an honors student, and I ended up lost in a sea of questions I never needed to ask before.

We are always surrounded by labels. In every business, in every school, every person or item comes with a label. In our classrooms, every test you take determines how you are viewed, and when it comes to black students you must engage in active combat against the stereotypes you face in order to be perceived as an individual as opposed to the representative of your entire race.

Every black honors student faces the same dilemma. Assimilate or isolate. Me being both me A and me B chose to do neither, and both. Depending on the day of the week. This did not end well.

I’ve come to realize that people seem to think the halves of who I am could never coexist. Like I had to pick a side and deny myself to myself. Being mixed up is a tug of war, except contrary to popular belief, you’re the rope. This summer I gained a purpose. I found that because I can never “pick a side” I see both pretty well. I was able to create poetry that bridges the gap between the worlds I exist in. whether that’s explaining why

black women object to this year as being considered a centennial of the women’s right to vote, or its bridging the gap between the publics’ understanding of what it means to defund the police, and the understanding held by actual police officers, which are rather unsurprisingly completely different understandings.

I think in poetry. Which, like most art, is feeling in translation. my intrusive thoughts play like refrains. Words In my head jive and wop and come down like rain. It’s the chaos of a symphony with my own notes in my brain. And that’s hard to explain but this tug of war inside of me is more the viola and a bass. They are unalike but create harmony, filling the space inside my skull. Behind my eyes, I am constantly creating bridges between galaxies.

Black Lives Matter taught me that to say being mixed up makes me broken is a fallacy. The thing about dichotomies is they are separate parts of the same whole. And I like to think all people are bits of the same soul. I have learned that bringing them together is my mission, my goal. And if what it takes to make a difference is being made of contradictions, I will gladly pay that toll.