Reflections

TaLynn Kel
4 min readJun 3, 2020

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From 2019:

We flat-out live in a society cultivated to ignore nuance, honesty, and accountability in favor of extremism, false dichotomies, exploitation, and the illusion of goodness. Where we prioritize our need to feel good about ourselves above actually treating each other with kindness, respect, humanity, and autonomy.

Everybody wants the pretty picture, but nobody wants to learn to paint.

So we lie, cheat, steal, torture, and kill until the illusion becomes the norm and the graveyard created to make the illusion sits covered in pretty flowers that we’re convinced only exist because of the body count in which they are rooted…

We are fucked up on a microscopic level and destroy those brave enough to fucking admit it. I fluctuate between the illusion of hope and utter despair because I watch too many people who claim to want to change the world for the better, destroy one another on their quest to sit on the throne.

You don’t want a better world. You want a better position in this one. And it hurts me to know this, that your claims of best intentions are lies to placate those who may rise against you and your quest for power.

I live with this conflict, unsure of what to do. Unsure of how to address it, knowing that every time I do, I make it easier and easier for people to dismiss me as some melodramatic wanna be soothsayer when really, I’m just scared and disappointed at all the things I cannot change.

We all need to stop lying, stop self-soothing ourselves with bullshit. We need to recognize and own who we are and take our monsters by the hand to either tame them or kill them because we’re rotting from the inside out and it’s destroying everything…not to create a better tomorrow for others, just to create a better tomorrow for ourselves.

We need to look in the mirror and see who and what we really are…

But you aren’t ready for that reality, are you.

Same Day 2020:

I wrote this last year and I still fucking agree. I’d just returned from QuirkCon, which was a cool event but the hierarchies were visible. Very often I was the fattest person in the space. The darkest person in the space. The oldest person in the space.

I was one of few who refused to center white feelings, who didn’t make space for the “good” white people. I saw people trying to be pro-Black without being anti-white.

And while I am against false dichotomies, white people manufactured this false “superiority” specifically to dehumanize Black people. They made a global cult that fetishizes and rewards their melanin-deficiencies and openly attacks everyone who isn’t a member. That fetishization provides opportunities to receive less extreme violence but the price is increased anti-Blackness in both word and deed. The more you hate Black people, the more access you are granted to their less important spaces.

And they have defined that as success.

If you want the world to be a better place, you gotta let that definition of success go. You gotta redefine everything you value because being pro-Black is fucking anti-white and it’s gonna disrupt everything in your life.

It NEEDS to disrupt everything in your life.

It’s gonna be hard. It’s going to feel impossible. I literally live with and love a white man and some days I look at him and see nothing but the embodiment of all this fuckshit that white people thrive on. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries, that shit is going to be an issue for us because you cannot compromise that view. He is dangerous. Anyone who is willing to accept and support the status quo is. He doesn’t always believe that I will die for and from this and that it’s his people who are killing me. Just like men don’t believe that patriarchy is killing womxn. Just like capitalists don’t believe that capitalism is killing everyone.

Some people can’t understand that it’s your choices that make you great and that our societal definition of great is corrupted beyond measure. The people who fall into that camp are sleeper agents of your destruction and living with that truth is a hell that many of us cannot accept. But it’s still your truth, whether you believe it or not and many of us found that shit out the hard way. Many more are finding out the worst way, and it’s murdering them.

So there’s this year’s dose of reality. Black people and whiteness cannot co-exist because whiteness won’t allow that and has created multiple pathways for you to self-mutilate to get closer to their ideal. Now you gotta figure out whether you want to stay on that path and what you plan to do to get off of it.

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TaLynn Kel
TaLynn Kel

Written by TaLynn Kel

Fat, Black, Femme Geek. I’m a writer & cosplayer. My blog is www.talynnkel.com. My books: Breaking Normal& Still Breaking Normal http://amzn.to/2FW5kl3

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