For over 10 years this blog has been where I shared my random thoughts, speeches and musings on social commentary. Damn near everything was based off of my past as a trauma survivor. I wrote about the trauma of being a childhood and adult sexual assault survivor. I wrote about state sanctioned murder of black bodies. I wrote about the caucasity of whiteness and the harm that comes from living as an BIPOC Queer person in America.
2020 marks 15 years as a spoken word artist, where I shared the intimate most parts of myself with strangers as a form of healing. 13 of those years, I curated spaces for people to be seen and heard as their authentic self via my passion work called VOCAB . The past 5 years I have been on the front lines of the social justice movement in Indianapolis. And yet to my core, I am ready for a change.
If you are looking for any of the writing that I just mentions, I have left my most popular pieces here for your reading pleasure. You can find the rest of my speeches, poetry and essays that once lived here at my other website www.tatjanarebelle.com/rebelles-words .
Even prior to COVID, I knew that 2020 was going to be a year of massive change for me. 2019 brought about the loss of my last grandparent and with that I felt an immeasurable shift in how I saw myself in the world. It also was the year my 2nd of 3 children graduated from high school. My bittersweet child, as I like to call him, moved to Arizona at the age of 13 to live with his father. It was on the trip to AZ that I made a commitment to spend more time in the outdoors. I’ll be writing about that more later but it was on a mountain between Sedona and the Grand Canyon that I cried. It was on the North Sea during my Oma’s burial that I promised I would make myself a priority in my life. It was the shutdowns of COVID that I was forced, like the rest of the world, to slow down and evaluate what was important to me.
That may sound like a pretty simple concept but as a childhood trauma survivor, I have lived my entire life literally never learning what my needs/desires are. I became a parent at the age of 20 and performer at the age of 25. I’ve not known life focusing on my needs and giving myself space to even find out what that is.
Which brings us to this place. This space is where I will share the recent shift to my commitment to myself. A commitment that started on a mountain and solidified on a sea. I purchased a 1995 GMC Rally Styx from a family friend and will be hopefully hitting the road in 2021. I’m ready to spend hours converting a van for no one but myself. I’m ready to travel across the US and eventually North America to find myself. I’m ready to write poetry about beautiful things that are thousands of years old. To see sunsets and oceans. To walk through deserts and sleep amongst the stars.
So with that I make another move to creating space for myself and sharing because I believe life should be shared with others. I don’t know what will become of any of it but I do know I’m ready.
Rebellesword's 