"lying is done with words and also with silence" - Adrienne Rich

i've covered up so much for other people, it's very sad, looking at my life being about to end, to realize that there is nobody who really knows me at all anymore.....

at an anti war protest against the war on Iraq, when Mrs. Bush refused to let some poets into the White House and a group called "Poets Against the War" held a rally outside the White House, I held up a poster I made, on pink poster board (since I was part of "Code Pink" then), with a postcard of Adrienne Rich and a quote from one of her poems. I have a picture of that. I had a wheelchair with me since I was doing a lot more physically than I could do without one at the time, so, anyway.....I guess what I mean is, I don't know anybody now who knows me well enough who would understand that picture if I showed it to them. Nobody. Except maybe my brother but I never see him. Anybody else I meet doesn't know that I have ever needed a wheelchair, that I care/cared about politics, that I'm a feminist, anything.....people really don't know the first thing about me.....I have no close friends...you can be around people but when you have to hide who you are all the time, you might as well be on a deserted island

Then there are the people in my family who, if they did know things like that, would use it to say, oh she's nuts, or she's a freak, she doesn't want to be normal like us, etc....etc.....etc.......

Anyway, what I mean is, I myself have grown up a lot since then. At this time, I would not, since my own survival is too difficult to maintain without worrying about saving the planet, go to any protest at the White House, nor do I care how egotistical that sounds. However, I sometimes miss being able to feel like my real self, able to do something that felt like "me", like I still had a personality, like my whole life wasn't about running around in terror of a million things all of the time, and moving and having to be in poverty and always always always so afraid........

Back in those days when I could go to protests, I was not terrified all the time. I have been ever since then.
The whole past two years.