Do you know what fear feels like?

It’s like I’ve only ever stood at the window looking out at it, but I found myself in there. Like landing in a new country, I never knew that this is what fear felt like.

I had been depressed and anxious and so dreadfully scared without rest, that I actually thought dying would be nice. I thought I knew what fear was. Amazingly, I didn’t.

this was fear.

I was so scared, I was outside my own body and emotions. How can you be apart from your own emotions and still be alive? Maybe I wasn’t alive.

I thought I was in love when all this was happening.

Maybe love transported me somewhere from my pain, maybe I found hell. If this just sounds like a scream in the dark, it was actually that bad.

But I’m still here telling it so maybe people are really strong and that means something. This thing cripples me and also gives me strength because it was an opportunity to find myself.

The really weird thing is that the pain started after high school and didn’t stop. I thought I found rock bottom but it just got worse and worse, until my 20’s were over, but now I remember those miraculous moments of strength or meaning, the unexpected compassion from a friend who seems cold, the things you realize in the solitude of the mind. I look back and it was so oddly my unique life, as if I invented new emotions and they were hues on a colour palette or new ice cream flavours.

I guess I said yes to the pain and fear and hatred because, I didn’t know I wouldn’t like it. I couldn’t find that warning in any map or book of knowledge or wise person. I guess I found that women had a place in history and another kind of place in the future, and I was so deeply, deeply inside that story of the world.

How can a woman be or not be a feminist? A feminist is the existence of a women, it is her life as she perceives it and whatever she values.

Lately I like listening to latin songs, there’s a beat that’s really clear when you hear it: boom-ch-boom-boom. It’s called dembow. The songs are sentimental but the beat makes you dance with so much movement and energy that you don’t know if your heart feels the love or your body does.