Confessions of a libra

Credit: Here

12.05.25

When men don’t respect you, you will end up as a secret object of affection. Boys and men who couldn’t yet humanise me, were not intimidated by me, but by social conditioning. So instead, they flirted behind locked doors or in empty hallways. I’ve had times in my life where I received the sly looks in private and the vacant ones in public. The flirty texts on Facebook messenger and the blanking in social environments. The attention when it suited and the bullying to reassert the status quo. It always boggled me that people never questioned what they were doing or the message they were sending. I know black women will understand, and I’m sure many other people of colour.

When you look at me and all you see is that I am a certain race – once that is at the forefront of your mind there’s nothing I can do to battle that. You can never truly see me after that. Everything I do you begin to judge from a short list of approved adjectives. I’ve had to deal with boyfriends with racist brothers, racist fathers and struggled with the complacency. How could someone claim to love me but not defend me from the tyranny of old outdated beliefs?

Maybe my moral compass is very different because I don’t see the harm in asserting yourself with family. Whether I need to about my friends, about myself and about the things I love. That is integrity to me. Yet so often I have had to swallow other people’s ignorance, for their own comfort. Never without a fight, but what’s the point if you are the only one in the room who cares? Who is listening when they have decided that my experience is too foreign to even imagine? I’ve had to accept that some people are really overriding their empathy on the daily.

I don’t want to be a label, a project or a secret thrill. I was made for devoted attention and big bold declarations. I was made for someone who understands my intellectual prowess in real time not in retrospect. I reserve the right to not show up as you had imagined me to, through your limited thinking. I like being luminous and expansive. When I was younger I confused the secret attentions for clarity that I was always attractive. Well now with greater hindsight, I didn’t need proof from unworthy men to believe that I was always electrifying. Your limitations about arbitrary boundaries of borders is not for me, and that’s okay. I see humans, I see souls. I see shared hopes and dreams. I feel the chemistry in my body that transcends physicality. That is what I choose to hold on to. That is what keeps me rooted. That is why I will never be anyone’s secret ever again.