A Woman Walking Up a Hill

I walked past a picture, empty of my face

'Cause you told me I'd grow into my ugly.

I bought a camera and filled it with my face

‘Cause you told me I’d grow into my ugly.

It’s either going to be a chronology to

Your truth OR something different

~Get Out of My Internalized BS~

December 20, 2005

I was searching for something else when I found this. Some piece I had started writing about a woman walking up a hill. I had begun another story, with a woman walking up a hill, and my memory reminded me I may have written it before. I suppose I was looking for the old piece to see what changed between then and now in this imagery forming in my head. Why was there a story brewing about a woman walking up a hill? I didn’t find her…walking up that hill. I did find this piece. I had labeled an old scribble Get Out of My Internalized BS and decided to click and see if that woman was there.

She wasn’t.

I was.

This piece was one of three poems, written at some time when I struggled to like myself, forgotten by this somewhat confident woman. Always three separate poems, usually one stanza long. Hmm. Of the three, this one I did not remember. Reading it felt like some foreign author snuck into my private journals and scribbled something of her own, not me. Don’t get me wrong, I know exactly what I was talking about. Scanning the words reminded me of the intensity in that moment that became a catalyst for such purging. Then, like a closed book it was gone and had I not written it down, there would be no record of the thought.

The piece was stuck between other pieces that were published. Knowing myself, I am sure this one was too personal, too vulnerable for public eyes… OR I thought it was crap. So many things I toss go into the crap pile until one day, like this one, I stumble upon it and find a flower has grown out of the crap that lived there before. It pays to be a collector of words I suppose.

So why is this piece a flower now?

This last week, I have been working on a few pieces about body image while trying to capture some empowerment brewing in my world right now. These pieces aren’t ready for this page. Not even close. I can’t get passed this long winded diatribe of how society f-cks over women, and that’s not what I am intending on writing about. I’m trying to create a piece about how beauty is in the journey of finding our own, not in societal norms. I have no idea how I got off on the subject of a woman walking up a hill. And yet, I found this instead, a piece that reflects where I am. Where I have been for a long time and all those scratches on a page about finding our own beauty was me trying to bull shit my way out of the feeling. As if I could become an authority on finding our own beauty, I’d fine mine.

But isn’t that the way it goes? At least for me, it’s about trying to do something different and sticking with it as long as it takes, until I finally do something different…or a flower grows out of all that bull shit.

So, I decided to post this piece, giving it space to breathe. I like it. It reminds me that, though I have not gotten far, I am still committed to finding something different.

Are you trying to find something different?

~GoGo