I feel safe in these pages–and in the pages of all the beautiful books. It’s me and my thoughts. So free. One of the few places I can say and be exactly what I want.
Journal Entry, Age 31
Three years after writing this journal entry, I experienced a series of life-changing losses—starting with the traumatic death of my 65-year-old mother—that shattered my sense of self. My state was worsened by having to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and toxic academic spaces as a low-income, first-generation-to-college, Mexican American woman. To cope, I retreated into reading and writing. At the perfect time, I read Remember Raptured: The Writer at Work.
In this essay collection, bell hooks (1999) seamlessly weaves the personal, familial, historical, spiritual, intellectual, and political. She, like other women of color writers, demands a space where all these selves, our whole selves, can breathe (e.g., Angelou 1997; Anzaldúa 1987; Arafat 2018; Cooper 2018; Febos 2021; Ford 2021; Gay 2017; Gyasi 2020; hooks 1999, 2003; Hurston 2020; Lorde 2012; Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015; Rendón 2000; Walker 2004). Bell hooks argues that this space must stem from self- and transformative love. It is a love where we connect our shadow selves—our insecurities, our fears, our hurting and silenced parts—to our present selves. And in merging these past and present lives, we move toward loving all parts anew.
She recalls this process beginning in journal writing as a young girl: “It was for me the space… where I struggled to understand myself and the world around me…. Nothing had to be concealed. I could hold onto myself there” (1999, 5). Unlike bell hooks who destroyed her journals, I kept mine. This WGFC scholarly call for essays permitted me to read my journals with a new lens and to view my confessional writing as critical truth-telling.
My journal pages reveal a mixture of dreaming, doubting, loving, self-criticizing, struggling, surviving, healing, understanding, awakening, and striving. I witnessed quick shifts in my writing, from reflecting on how “books make me happy” and berating myself for being “too selfish and sinful” to asserting that “I AM A WOMAN” and praying to “God” to give my family “security and stability.” I am a beautiful mess of a young girl and later woman working hard to imagine new possibilities while the hardships of “race, class and gender impinged upon” her (hooks 1999, 48).
Still, in the beautiful mess, there is an arc. I grew up in a poor, loving family. Witnessing the wounds of poverty, I sought to alleviate my family’s stress by striving to be perfect. I tried “to make [things] better by not asking for anything” (age 15). I learned to excel in school, relating academic success to the only way to help “my family get through endless bills” (age 16). I vowed to “work for it” so my parents could get “all they deserved” (age 22). Though never asked of me, I learned to stake my worth in being good, smart, and obedient. What this meant was that I hid parts of myself at home for fear of burdening my family and at school for fear of not seeming “smart” enough.
My journal is where I held onto myself, where I could be honest. I wrote about my desperation to maintain a 4.0 and about doubting my abilities. I documented sexist, classist, and racist messages that intensified my feelings of inadequacy. As a young girl, male peers ridiculed me for being a “bookworm,” and I wrote obsessively about not being “pretty enough” (age 11). In graduate school, I wrote about “feeling stupid” as a low-income, first-generation woman of color and longing to be “somewhere else where I [didn’t] feel so incompetent” (age 26).
Reading my writing now at age 37, I have so much compassion for the pains I carried and still carry. Pressures of what I “should” do still overwhelm me. Though they bring immense joy and purpose, sometimes I feel so pulled by my obligations that I lose sight of myself. This coupled with consecutive life-changing challenges in the last three years—the loss of multiple family members, the painful separating of friendships, and toxic interactions in the academy—unraveled me. I felt myself breaking into fragments and it was terrifying.
It was in this darkness that bell hooks’s writing saved me. She reminded me of the healing power of writing as “self-discovery and self-recovery” (1999, 5). In rereading my writing, I’m rebirthing my girlhood space (hooks 2003). Because, even in the midst of all the doubt, self-criticism, and conformity in my writing, there is resistance. I told myself to “be more confident” (age 16), to “assert myself” (age 22), to “follow my gut” (age 26), and to “shine again” (age 37). My younger self and bell hooks taught me that writing is an act of liberation. Writing is where I reunite all the fragments of my being, where I unlearn the “should,” where I reclaim my voice, and where I transform. My younger self—so creative, feeling, brave—knew how to live and love. I love her for that and for showing me a way back to myself when I needed her the most.
Writing is a truth-telling, loving force that binds souls across time, space, and experience. One year after bell hooks earned her doctorate at UC Santa Cruz, I was born; 37 years later, I write this essay to you as faculty at UC Santa Cruz to confess how bell hooks, a woman I never had the honor of meeting, saved me at the right time. She—along with all the community of women of color writers, thinkers, and creators—taught me to trust myself more in all the spaces I exist. She taught me that to love, connect, and give to others means I also have to carve out space for myself beyond the private pages of my journal. This essay is one courageous step toward creating more spaces where I can “say and be exactly what I want.”
References
(but really a healing list)
Angelou, Maya. 1997. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Arafat, Zaina. 2020. You Exist Too Much. New York: Catapult.
Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Febos, Melissa. 2021. Girlhood: Essays. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing
Ford, Ashley. 2021. Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir. New York: Flatiron Books:
Gay, Roxane. 2017. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Gyasi, Yaa. 2020. Transcendent Kingdom: A Novel. New York: Vintage Books.
hooks, bell. 2003. Communion: The Female Search for Love. New York: Perennial.
____. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Henry Holt.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2020. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Prabhat Prakashan.
Lorde, Audre. 2012. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 2015. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany: SUNY Press.
Rendón, Laura. 2000. “Academics of the Heart: Reconnecting the Scientific Mind with the Spirit’s Artistry.” The Review of Higher Education 24, no.1: 1-13. Project MUSE.
Walker, Alice. 2004. Now is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel. New York: Random House.
Grazer, Brian, and Charles Fishman. 2015. A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Smith, Zadie. 2016. Swing Time. New York: Penguin Press.
LaSalle, Peter. 2017. “Conundrum: A Story about Reading.” New England Review 38 (1): 95–109. Project MUSE.
D’Agata, John, ed. 2016. The Making of the American Essay. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.