I have kept myself hidden so many times that the world would have nothing precise enough to aim at,
I have kept myself hidden so many times and dressed that hiding in the language of humility as though giving it a noble name could change what it actually was underneath the dignity of the word: a slow and practiced surrender to the fear of being fully seen,
I have kept myself hidden so many times and rationed my visibility carefully releasing only what I trusted the world to hold correctly and terrified of the verdict that arrives before the evidence is even finished being presented,
I have kept myself hidden so many times, did the quiet actually protect anything real or did it just make my slow disappearing easier for everyone including me to overlook and accept,
I have kept myself hidden so many times, so consistently and so carefully that somewhere along the way I genuinely forgot what size I was supposed to be to begin with…
I have felt the offhand dismissal land somewhere deeper than thought before I even had time to understand where exactly it came from or why it was aimed at me,
I have felt the offhand dismissal those words find the soft and unguarded places I was so certain I had hidden well enough behind the finished surface of the work,
I have felt the offhand dismissal those words settle in and stay long after the person who delivered them had already moved on and forgotten they had ever said anything at all,
I have felt the offhand dismissal, why does the single voice that doubted me always arrive louder and stay longer than the ten voices that saw something worth believing in,
I have felt the offhand dismissal words quietly rewrite the story I was still in the messy and uncertain middle of trying to finish on my own terms…
I have built the unfinished and half-formed opinions of people who only saw one version of what I made and felt the weight of them without also feeling like I was dismissing something that deserved more consideration than it earned,
I have built that wall and then moved my whole life into it as though living behind it was the same thing as being thoughtful and careful and safe,
I have built a wall and spent years convincing myself that existing behind it protected the work when what it really did was keep the work so safe and so still that nothing new could reach it and nothing inside it could reach anything either,
I have built a wall, is there actually a meaningful difference between protecting what I have made and quietly starving it of the exposure it needs to ever become what it was always capable of being,
I have built that wall so thoroughly and so well that even the ones who arrived with the most genuine love for what I made could not find their way to the center of it — circling the edges of something real and beautiful and completely unreachable…
I have stood at the edge of sharing something honest and real and raw and pulled it back at the very last possible second,
I have stood at that edge and given all of my attention and authority to the loudest voice available even when that voice was living nowhere else but inside my own head,
I have stood at the edge and told myself the work wasn't finished or ready yet when the deeper and more uncomfortable truth was that I wasn't ready to stand there and be judged for it,
What would I actually allow myself to make and release if I knew with certainty that the loudest and most careless voice in the room would simply never show up,
I have stood at that edge so many times and for so long that the standing itself began to feel like a destination I had somehow already arrived at but standing at the edge and living at the edge are not the same thing. One is fear. The other is just fear with furniture…
Watchwords:
Small enough that nothing sharp could find me,
The quiet made my disappearing feel acceptable,
One doubt always outlasting ten who believed,
Living inside the wall like it was wisdom,
Standing at the edge until it felt like arriving
Here is Tikatarot, who dares you to answer the question, “Who am I?”..
As and will always be reminding you to dream: