Content note: This essay contains a first-person account of sexual assault. Please read with care.
Some days I walk into a room and the room rearranges. Not loudly. Nothing so dramatic as a scene. Just the air — shifting, recalculating, deciding what I am before I open my mouth. I have been walking into rooms like this my entire life. Rooms with motivational posters and allyship statements and flags that appear in June and disappear in July like they were never there, like I wasn’t there, like the person underneath the flag doesn’t still have to exist inside a world that has already written its version of them.
Visibility is not safety. These are not the same road.
My childhood pastor used to say it differently. He’d stand at the pulpit and tell us to be careful when the spotlight shining on you burns brighter than the one inside you. I understood it then the way a child understands most things handed down from authority: as instruction. Be good. Earn praise. Become, as close as you can manage, something Christlike. What no one tells a child is that Christlike is a standard designed to be failed. That the pressure of it is the point. That you will spend years organizing yourself around an ideal that was never meant to be reached — only approached, perpetually, from a posture of inadequacy.
I understand it differently now. What he was actually saying — what the allegory holds that his theology couldn’t quite reach — is that the world will spend your entire life trying to hand you its version of yourself. The light he was describing wasn’t holiness. It was self-knowledge. Truth as something you embody and not another story to tell. The part of you that was already there before the rooms started rearranging.
I didn’t have that foundation when I needed it most.
What I remember is orange. An orange shower curtain. Laughter as friends carried me through a door somewhere after the Pride parade. The rest of the night is dark the way blackout is dark — not peaceful, not like sleep, just gone. What I remember next is a room full of people the following day, and a joke, and my name in the joke, and being told I should get tested because the person who had put me in that shower — who had cleaned the vomit off my body while I was unconscious — had a reputation. That is how I found out. In a room full of people laughing.
I knew immediately. Not from evidence. From the body. From the specific quality of the wrongness sitting in my chest when I understood what was being said. I knew what had happened. And I felt — almost simultaneously — the resistance to that knowing. The way the room’s laughter pushed back against my understanding of it. He was a boy. I was a curiosity. My body had been accessible before, years earlier, in a different context, a different time, a different version of whatever we were to each other. So maybe I had asked for things I couldn’t remember asking. Maybe the confusion was mine. Maybe I was being dramatic.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
I tried for years to give the room a version of the story it could hold. I processed and minimized and forgave and processed again. I changed the shape of my own light — not only for them but for myself — because the alternative was facing not just what he did but a world where every person in that room chose their own discomfort with the word rape over any reckoning with what had been done. The violence was visible and played out in real time and still no one saw fault. That is the thing about visibility. It does not guarantee witness.
“You gave them love. They gave you shit. You gave them you. They gave you hollywood.” (Shakur)
I gave them legibility. They gave me nothing in return.
There are those of us who have studied beauty — consumed it, dissected how it moves, understood how to deploy it. I learned this young. You learn it the way you learn anything the world teaches without meaning to: through consequence, through the slow understanding that the shape you present determines the response you receive. That beauty is often the only power those of us relegated to sexualization are permitted to wield. Not intellect. Not rage. Not grief. Beauty. The acceptable currency. And so you settle for being cute rather than corrected. You learn that protection is proportional to desirability. You lean into visibility seeking safety because sometimes beauty is the only way the violence your body experiences gets acknowledged at all.
What my pastor could not have known is that the danger he was warning me about didn’t come from ambition or pride. It came from learning that the inside light alone was not enough to keep you safe. So you manage both. You learn the register the room can receive.
“They purr at you cause you know how to roar and back it up with realness.” (Shakur)
Eventually you have to ask yourself whether the roar is still yours.
“My anxiety is killing me. Sleepless nights I must defeat. Cause nothing’s really wrong. Guess it just took so long.” (Green)
She understood something about the days that swallow you. About wanting to soar inside circumstances that keep asking you to survive. She made a decision in the dark that the morning couldn’t yet confirm. That is the part nobody puts on the banner. Not the arrival. The decision. Made without evidence. Made anyway.
What the allegory actually gave me — when I stripped away the theology and held what remained — is this: the light is not earned. It was already there before the parade, before the orange curtain, before the room full of laughter, before the years of maybe. Before any of it. The world’s version of you is loud and it is relentless and sometimes it wins for a season. But it is not the only version. And returning to your own — choosing it, tending it, practicing it the way Mariame Kaba says to practice the hard things, with “the courage to imagine, to rethink, to hold on, to care and commune; to show up; to love” (Kaba) — that is not weakness. That is the whole work.
The rooms will keep rearranging. The flags will keep disappearing. People will keep choosing their own comfort over your truth.
You don’t have to make it easier for them.
The light was there before they decided what you were. It will be there after.
Tend it. Keep going.
I gave them legibility. They gave me nothing in return.
ebonyicons 