Othering

We are not even a we. We are still a “them.” The cause of all their problems. Everything malevolent stems from us, whatever us that remains. We are a fracture in their myth of unity, the crack they pretend not to see running through the flag, the hymn, the dinner table. To them, we are still a them like a shape that doesn’t fit, a presence that doesn’t fold.

They speak of us as if we are disease: creeping, foreign, contaminating what they believe was once clean and sanctified. We are the shadow blamed for the storm, the ghost accused of tipping the scale.

They call us evil not because we are, but because we refuse to disappear. We are made strange in our own skin, our names mispronounced even when we whisper them gently and beautifully. Every sorrow they feel must be traced back to our existence, as though we are the root of all unraveling.

We are the flaw in the tapestry of the universe. We are taught to apologize for breathing too loudly, loving too boldly, dreaming too freely. They fear our difference as if it were a contagion that infects consciousness.

But we have never asked for their permission to be. We do not need to be loved by those who cannot see us without distorting the lens. We love ourselves and that is sufficient. We are not a mistake in their system, we are the proof that another world lives beyond its frame.

We are not the curse; we are what survived the curse and kept walking as the blessing way.

And as we walk through this exercise and experience of difference and differentiation, we are them and they are us. We are inextricably divided; we long to belong.