by Naa Asheley Ashitey
I’m not giving up, but I won’t lie to you: I’m starting to get really tired
It feels like we’re going backwards. No, I know we’re going backwards. Everyone believes we’re the generation that’s going to fix this, but I don’t think we will. I don’t think we ever will.
My dad might still have his November 2008 copy of the Chicago Defender, and I am still able to walk freely in the halls of these ivory towers because Brown V Board passed barely a decade after my father was born, and yet every single day I wonder if all my fuck ups are going to be the reason why the next incoming class in my med school might have no Black students.
The bold, defiant tone I speak with is somehow more hated by third-term Obama liberals I know as my fellow peers than the white man that called me a nigger when I went to pick up my chipotle order the other day. How broken must we be that when I scroll my social media I see more people crying over the fact that we will likely never live under an institution ruled by another Black war criminal. How broken must I be that I, who openly calls that man a war criminal, am still willing to waste 270 characters defending said war criminal in a tweet, because that term has been reduced to another dog-whistle; another word and phrase that I’ve come to hate, alongside “well-spoken,” “educated,” “polished.”
“Akata.”
How broken must we be that we’re going backwards because my people have always moved forward; that we are capable of occupying the spaces built by our own blood, at the cost of the morals and sufferings of our past ancestors being used in speeches about inclusion and progress, as we are now able to participate in imperialistic bombing campaigns and rewriting laws that if we had not undone, we would not be able to be the ones undoing them because we’d still be blocked.
I still hold sympathy for my people who once believed we could change the evil of this world, only to find themselves complicit. Even as I watch families torn apart and children born beneath rubble, I’m still getting text messages from my classmates who are more concerned with the language I use to fight oppression than recognizing the privilege of never having to have fight for the basic civil liberty of sitting down and studying for fifteen hours straight to take a poorly written med school midterm.
Hush little baby please don’t cry, I want you to dream of lights and stars tonight.
When I was a child, I used to have this nightmare about a dinosaur chasing me. If my mother wasn’t shaking me awake, it would often be my sudden jolt and eruption of sobs that would cause her to wake up. My dad would rush in from the living room to help my mom calm down my non-stop babbling about how I don’t want the dinosaur to kill me. Eventually, I would fall back asleep, clutching my favorite brown teddy bear, hoping she would absorb the nightmares.
When I’d wake up the next morning, I could feel how puffy my eyes were. Sometimes as an extra present, I’d have more snot than usual falling down my nose. Though most notably, once I truly was awake and aware of my surroundings, I could recognize physically and mentally that something had shifted; I felt this notable disorientated feeling. At age four I did not know nor use that word, so in four-year-old terms, I felt “crummy” and “bleh.”
Sometimes, my mom was still asleep in her bed or the couch (depending on where I was sleeping that night), or she was already in the kitchen cooking breakfast (or lunch if it was a really bad cry that tired me out). I slowly walked to the bathroom, aware that my vision was slightly worse than normal, especially when I’d bump into the corner of the brown dresser in the room. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was more terrifying to see how a silly dream that I made up in my head could put me in such a state in which I looked so awful. I felt like I was looking at a shell of myself. I was one year shy of seeing Evanescence’s “Everybody’s Fool” music video but it’s almost uncanny how I created the mirror scene on my own—minus smashing my hand and cutting myself. I’d touch the bags under my eyes, thinking if I pushed down hard enough, the bags would deflate. I’d try to smile and bring back the image of myself that I was used to seeing; one that wasn’t this disheveled. It was futile. The smile would dissipate, and it felt like I was looking at a horror scene. I knew if my mom saw how I looked, she’d worry. So I’d splash cold water on my face (I didn’t know about the ice-cube/spoon-in-freezer trick yet) to reduce the puffiness. Once my mom was awake or done in the kitchen, I’d call her to help me brush my teeth and get ready for the day. She never really asked me more about the nightmares. In retrospect, I’m glad she never did; it almost felt quite nice to leave the nightmare behind and simply move on. She’d walk away to get an extra towel for my bath, but in the seven seconds she was gone, I’d look back in the mirror, touch those eyebags once more and turn away.
I couldn’t swear away nightmares, but I certainly wanted to do whatever I could to avoid them. So, my bright idea: constantly do things that made me happy in the day. I would beg my mom to let us go on a walk in the park across the street or head to the playground two blocks away from the Jewel-Osco we bought groceries at. It was the distraction I needed. If we couldn’t get time to go out, I’d reread some of my favorite books (while complaining to my mom we needed another dollar tree or library run) to my teddy bears and barbies till it was TV time and I could watch Cyberchase. Ultimately, I was distracted, and it felt freeing. I felt so sure that as long I kept this routine up, the nightmares would cease.
And then I joined the gifted program in kindergarten and learned that nightmares could happen in the day and come in the form of other kids. In 1st grade, the arguments turned into yelling, and I started to fall in love with silence. In 2nd grade, I looked for new coping mechanisms and found sharpening a pencil and digging it into my right arm gave me the relief I needed. In 5th grade, I started hoping and begging my mind to give me the dinosaur nightmares in place of watching my home fall apart, and the fast-growing apathy and hate I felt towards myself.
I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid to see what I looked like in the mirror. All I know is that I started to become grateful to wake up and see my disheveled state.
It meant that I was still alive.
I want to be a mother
I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me, but that I don’t want my daughter to end up like me. I want my daughter to never think about the number of calories in a frappe. I want her to never fear telling me how she feels. She should be able to complete her sentences and not just fall into silence, keeping her true feelings to herself. I want her to always believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, maybe not forever, but longer than age 6. Maybe till she’s 10. That might be too old. I don’t know what age you’re supposed to stop believing in those things, but I know I didn’t believe long enough. I want her to walk in sneakers and heels, or whichever one she likes more, I’ll get her as many as possible in all her favorite colors. I want her to never wake up with the walls of her bedroom rumbling from audio vibrations, if so, it must only come from the TV, never from my voice or her dad’s. I want to nurse all her tummy aches, sing her songs even after she’s fallen into REM, and dance with her even when I don’t want to get up from the ground. I hope she never finds my pill bottles. I hope she never asks about the girls in old photos of mine that I don’t know anymore, and I can spare her from learning the complicated dynamics of friendships and the heartbreak that it can come with. Maybe she’ll know how to make friends better than me, so she’ll never have to learn how to heal from losing what you thought would be life long-friendships. Maybe she won’t have to learn that it will take about a year before you can talk about those people and recall memories without feeling that ache in your stomach and tears welling up in your eyes. Frankly, I hope she wakes up from nightmares about dinosaurs and unintelligible objects, and never from the things I said to her, or the things she says to herself in her head. I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me. I just don’t want my daughter to wish that her mother would’ve taken SSRIs and believed in therapists as much as she believed in the Lord. I don’t want my daughter to end up writing stupid prose poems at 11:28pm on a Saturday about how she hopes she doesn’t fuck up as a mother, not because I think my mother fucked up. But because I am fucked up, for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons just happen to include my mother.
Dread without the Jenga Pieces
1:23am:
I can sometimes be a scaredy-cat. Isn’t everyone? No, well, okay then. No, it’s fine, I might as well just be honest here. Yes, I am a scaredy-cat. Anytime I play Mario Kart with my cousins, I request levels that don’t have any of the chain-champers or whatever those fucking creepy blocks are called that fall on your head. Thwomps? Thwamps? Whatever. It is not even fear in a jumpscare manner. It’s just, like, seeing a face turn angry and move quickly to attack that freaks me out. I’m not explaining this right but whatever. Overall, I’m not into scary games or scary movies, though I know a lot about the Five Nights at Freddy’s games from watching all my favorite YouTubers play it. Their reactions to the jump scares are funny so it seems weird that I can handle that type of content, but I can never play any of the complicated Mario Kart levels with the things that scare me or I’ll cry.This is a really stupid confession. I don’t know, I have so many other things that I’m scared of, but I feel like they are things I bring up that inevitably separates myself from people. I’d rather confess about Mario Kart than all the intrusive thoughts I’m fighting back acting on every single moment. But it’s so hard, you know?
You’re supposed to be able to talk to your friends about how you’re doing. I want to tell people that I’m not doing okay. I want to tell people that I’m not really suicidal. I’m not suicidal, like, I’m not. I guess there are times that I just want everything to stop and be silent, but not in a dead kind of way. Or sort of in a dead kind of way. I know they say to reach out to your friends and be honest, but I think I share too much that it scares people or stresses them out. I become the stressful friend, instead of the strong friend confessing I’m having a rough time and I just want someone to know I’m working on it but I’m struggling. I don’t want to push people away, but I also don’t want to keep being open and honest with people about how I’m doing, just to wake up the next morning to discover I’m blocked. It’s a double-edged sword. When I keep everything in, I get hurt. When I decide that I need to free up some gigabytes of storage, I let the choir sing, echoing in a long, empty hall. I share, I laugh, I sob, and end up alone. I get even more hurt waking up to find out that the people I thought I could trust decided I was too much and completely deleted a relationship like it was nothing. Like those years of laughs and hugs was all for nothing. Like my honesty was some kind of contagious disease people needed to protect themselves from.
I just want to be like everyone else who has these struggles but can maintain friendships. What is wrong with me? Was there just some unspoken guideline everyone else got at the beginning of adulthood that never got updated for me? I really want to tell others how I’m doing but it’s nice having people to text and I don’t want my phone to go dry again. Please, I just need someone to tell me what the fuck I should do so this doesn’t dissolve once more.
“…… [chat gpt generating a response].”
Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.
Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.
Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.
Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social