Here, we are having a postal vote about marriage equality- equal rights for same sex couples. It’s been a nightmare, triggering abuse from strangers and bringing up terrible memories. Both Rose and myself come from backgrounds where who we are and how we love was not at all okay. There’s deep wounds there. It’s hard to understand what that feels like if you haven’t lived it. So here’s a small extract from my journal, recently.
I’ve no words for this, no words
No persuasion, no speeches, no points strung together in sequence
What I have is a strangled cry
Tears I can’t weep
I’m frozen and desiccated
An old tree curled over itself
Here is where my heart broke.
This is me, as a child, curled on the floor
Weeping and silently screaming as I beg god
To make me other than how I feel.
This is me, wanting to die
In my body is still the memory of that shape
Laying on the floor, wrapped around myself
My hands like claws, the taste of vomit in my mouth.
My body at night remembers the shape of that pain and returns to it
I lay on my side, curled around a self hated so deep, a terror so profound
I have no words or even tears, just the deep grieving in my bones
The void in the pit of my gut
The sickness in my heart, a kind of keening
Oh, oh, ooh
Let it not be
Let it not be like this
Let me keep my face turned from those days
The voice in my head that tells me I’m worth less and should die
Don’t make me look at the fear and loathing in your heart
The darkness in your embrace, the disgust in your eye
The purity of your sacrament that is not for me
Let me keep my arms around the peices of my heart
Don’t tear me open like this
Don’t tear us open where
All your hate falls out
All your brokenness.
How am I to bear it?
I’m asked to speak
To write, to share, to show
We are normal/sane/loving/safe
To lead from fear to hope but
I’m not here anymore, I’m long gone
I’m the little girl on the floor and I don’t have those words
I’m stuffed with darkness and the night and the violence of your rejection that leaves no bruises
I’m broken on the floor while the most sacred parts of my life
The deepest and most beautiful things in my world
My love, my beloved, my children, my friends
Are tossed around me by
People who are not choking on a memory of pain so vast
It still reverberates in my mind and binds my tongue
I’m still on the floor, screaming in fear.
My little girl nurses at my breast
Through the small hours where my sadness
Demands company and keeps me awake
She will not know this anguish
It will be alien to her, outside of her
One of your voices, perhaps, but not
My voice
Not her own voice
Taken and used against her
Not set into her blood or bone
A wound from outside perhaps, but not
Swallowed and poisoning from within.
That is the world I want for her.
No hand turned against itself
No bloodletting agony or self flagellation.
Where I know your rejection so intimately
I want her to know only bewilderment, only confusion.
To be outside of it,
To have grace for it,
To know for certain that she is loved.
Sarah K Reece 
We can relate to your poem, and it is beautiful in it’s honesty, in its words describing the experience of pain that society has caused just one person out of so many, with their bigotry in regards to the subject at hand. In the destructiveness that is shown in it of how our society has dealt with the subject manner overall, as it has been.
We have to be honest, we do not understand this idea of letting society as a whole decide (vote) on whether or not other human beings truly not really any different than them, get to have the same basic rights as they have within said society, just because some of them perceive that those people love in a way that to some of them appears to be different. That’s not a decision that society as a whole should get the ability to make as far as we are concerned. Especially if they’ve never lived in that world themselves. If they don’t grasp the fear involved in being rejected by ones own family/frirends or the society they live in for something that is beyond ones’ control and is truly as natural as the rest of the biological world around them. For loving in a way that to some is a foreign concept because their ignorance or miseducation led them away from the deep realization that how we love each other is a small (and varied) thing that is as diverse as our own DNA, unique to each person but at the same time still very much overall the same.
That to give them the decision and power over the fates of other peoples’ lives is not a good thing, because humans by nature are not kind, they are not as naturally empathetic as we all would like to believe they are. Some of them are cruel, selfish, mean and wrapped up in warped hateful rhetoric and belief systems set up by default by organized religions that are as hypocritical in what they teach as they are meant to control society, not to teach people the most basic truths….that it’s not up to us to judge each other, that love is love, and it doesn’t matter who you love but rather that you do love, no matter what gender the other person happens to identify with, as long as both are consenting adults, and treat each other well.
There are problems in this world that as a society we should be working together to change. Whether or not same gender couples should have the same rights as everyone else is not one of those things. It should not ever have been an issue up for debate. It is a most basic right of being human that should never have been allowed to be questioned at large by anyone. It is ridiculous to us to allow any group of humans who hold more power in society, due to the hypocrisy of that society in the first place, to perceive that this difference, so tiny and basic as who one ends up loving, should be up for debate, especially by people who by their very privilege do not see this fact.
We had a similar vote in our state in 2000. Our state voted disappointingly to make same sex marriage illegal. It took the Supreme Court 15 long years, enough time for a lot of children raised in same sex relationship homes to become adults, knowing the most basic protections most children have by the very fact that they generally have two people named on their birth certificate who are responsible for them until they reach adulthood, were not extended to their family. Children who likely have seen first hand the bigotry and hatefulness of other persons towards their own parents or even themselves by proxy. A bigotry allowed to exist through the voting of an ignorant society, further attempting to cement the idea that their parents were not given the same rights as all others in our society have, because how they feel in their heart is percieved by those afraid of differences within humanity, our lovely diversity, as wrong, by people with hate and fear programmed into them, often from birth forward. All of it based on a made up fallacy that some imaginary God (at least imaginary in the sense that this God would care one way or the other about who loves whom) does or does not approve of it.
Do these fearful bigoted people not realize that any God that could exist, truly wouldn’t care about this subject, as long as people were treating each other well and taking good care of each other. That they’ve all been duped and their fears of differences amongst them selves has been used against them to the advantage of cruel organized religions and the people of privilege in power within them, whose only real function was to control them and how they perceive the world in the first place? People that are that easily swayed by hateful baseless rhetoric should in our opinion, be actually considered possibly not even fit to ever vote on these sorts of things and many others, when one gets right down to it.
The martyrs of this world, those who do truly love and hold space and grace for everyone regardless of their differences, who see everyone as equals, who grasp the concepts of social justice, are always those to bear the brunt of this cruelty by other, less advanced thinking individuals, as we drag them forward, miserably putting up with their ignorance and it’s awful effects on our lives that should not be allowed.
What treasures await those of us affected negatively while on this earth by this miscarriage of justice? Do we get to sit at the side of their supposed judgmental, and hateful God that most of us can’t even believe exists, and judge them when they die for all of their transgressions upon others, that were not fortunate enough to be the ones in power, while they were stuck on this bizarre planet, while they were pretending to know the mind of this God they have not even met yet? If they knew this was a possibility, do you think they’d reconsider their hateful fear filled thoughts and learn to just love one another without judgments? The most important tenant that all of their holy books preach when it comes right down to it, which is also apparently the one most of them cannot fully appreciate or aspire to.
We are so disappointed that we have to have to have a vote or debate of any kind related to a subject that should have never been an issue for society to deem necessary to work out in the first place.
We hope that the society you live in over there is able to see clearly within their hearts what is most essential, as it appears to be not obvious to the eye, from what we have witnessed. Deciding the rights of other humans is not really something that society as a whole should be allowed ever on any subject, we are mere mortals and we are not objective or loving enough as of yet in our opinion, to be making these sorts of decisions about those who are by their very nature equal to the rest of us in every way!
Sorry for the rant using your blog platform, but this idea of society at large voting on same sex couples rights or any rights of other humans oppressed within our society, very much chaps our hide and as you can probably deduce, is a very touchy subject for us! There is too much at stake in these decisions to leave it up to society at large to be voting on! We all have the same rights as every other human on this planet, and the illusion that some humans are more deserving than others is completely false; furthermore the fact that anyone could even believe that in this day and age is only further testiment that we should not be letting society vote on such subjects. These should just be basic truths that were never up for debate in the first place!
We are thinking of all of the people in your country affected by this vote and truly hoping that people can see clearly by now that these are not the “problems” we should be focusing our collective energies on. That climate change is far more of a threat to our basic survival and the fact that some persons in our society are continuing to feel the need argue such things as denial of the most basic right to be able to marry the person we love regardless of how they and society perceive their gender, which is a no-brainer, is simply more proof of how humans are most likely to become extinct at some point based purely on our own stupidity. Ugh!
May love prevail for you all over there on the other side of the world! 💕
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