Untethered
February 5, 2024
When there is no connection to what truth is
When we are in the midst of realizing truths are just versions of someone’s story
When we are charged with redefining what truth is for us
As a woman, this is my prayer, a journey that I know is calling from deep within to embark
To rediscover the ones who have been lost in history
And find my place.
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How do you begin to untwine and weave anew
The space in which I breathe now
Is formed of a reality that has revealed itself
Through stories told by foreign mouths
Unconfirmed, biased, and yet
With tones and sensations of truth
That send shivers down my arms
They seem so familiar,
These stories of patriarch
These stories of the worth of women
These subtle suppressions
They feel like a hammer unto my chest
A pang of a heart cut in paper cuts
This feeling of profound sadness
Of unjust
And the resentment
I allow it to wash over me
To course through my veins
To pump its heat from my chest to my toes
As it pushes towards my temples
I scream an internal scream
That melts into sobs of a life
And a worth that is not true.
And the heavy heart and mind is left with the question…
Now what?
How do you, I, begin to piece back a story of something true and untrue.
Weave together the pieces of soul,
Of identity fluttering in the air…
What is the tapestry but patchwork of a new and old perspective…
Desperately holding onto tradition
While untying the knots of suppression.
Who are we now?
I come up empty.
I know not how to be Chinese, Malaysian, Canadian, a woman, without leaving behind,
No,
Stripping away the patriarchy from within.
I have no defined answer of what it is to be all these things.
How do you begin to redefine culture, ideologies and identity without the patriarchy,
When it seems so much to be the root.
It feels like ripping myself apart
With no idea of how or what I am putting back together.
Do we dig all the way back to understand who women were in tribes?
While in part this seems to be the only path I can see, I question
Does this wipe out my own culture?
How can I honour the traditions while building
Or rather defining
A new legacy that is not bound to the binding of women?
I need wiser women.
Women not drenched and soaked into the patriarchy.
Women who can provide a more balanced view.
It is in this void
Blank canvas
That the carefully selected and filtered
Sense of truth can be imagined.
All I hold onto is the spiritual connection
Of this light that I have seen
As I mourn for those I love
Who I can no longer connect with as I once did.
Because I choose not to be
Moulded back into something
That no longer fits.
