When I was a kid, my dad told me that I had this ability to make things happen. If I set my mind to something, if I wanted something, if I said I would make something happen, it did. Perhaps it’s in my name - Amani, Arabic for aspirations, desires, dreams. Something you want to come true. It’s been a characteristic that’s shaped my life so far. This year, I have felt a veil slip down. I know I want to do a lot of things. But I have stopped making them come true.
This year, also, a new emotion has come to characterise my life. Anger. It is a hand guiding mine as I move, a whisper that echoes up my throat like smoke, lingers at the edge of my words. I see it in my eyes when I catch a mirror. It accompanies me on walks, to work, to the bus, up the stairs to my front door. Anger is not new, but this anger, the way I catch it, the way it sticks, is new. I am scared of my own thoughts sometimes. What I want to do, where my thoughts go. How they have turned a corner into an alleyway and led me through mazes until I am so deep, that when finally look up, I realise I don’t know where I am anymore.
If I tried writing them so that they stuck somewhere else, would they stay? Here’s one: when I think of the man who raped me when I was seventeen, I imagine walking into his first gallery exhibition and taking a bat to his paintings. Pieces of frame shattering, glass flying. I imagine his face as he looks at me, hair airborne, panting, bat in my hands, and the force of my gaze nudging him a step back.
Here’s another: I’m in a bar in New York, and by chance, or by fate’s hands weaving our strings into another point of convergence, he walks in. He sees me at the bar counter. There is a bottle next to me. I feel his eyes, and my head raises. When I see him, without thinking, the neck of the bottle is in my hands, the body smashed against the counter, my feet are on the floor. His features have rearranged themselves from recognition to surprise and finally released themselves in fear - not at the jagged bottle in my hand, but at the expression on my face.
I know that my mind is powerful. I have made so many dreams come true. I am now coming to realise what happens when my mind comes up against itself. This reflection is a terrifying thing. If I were to break the mirror, I would only see its glare returned to me a thousand times in the glass. It is something that must be spoken to, touched, held.
Someone that has been stripped of their power is a terrifying thing, indeed. There’s much to be said about letting people take your power from you, that power cannot be taken, only given away. But I call bullshit. I have built back so much of my power, I have proved to myself that I have it. But I still feel this one sliver missing. This one piece that I gave away when I was young and naive and didn’t know better. When I was able to be manipulated so easily. When I was vulnerable and thought I was offering my love.
Giving someone love is giving away power, but it is returned when the person you give it to turns it into something else. The scale equalises, then disappears. Every relationship is a balance of power. I wish I didn’t see it like this. I can try not to. Every relationship is an opportunity. Or a missed one. For a friendship, an alliance, a love. I find myself walking past a missed opportunity every Sunday, feeling strange in the knowledge that I made that choice. That two paths really did diverge in a yellow wood, and I chose one, and I’m walking on it right now, and I will follow it til its end.
And also, that I have currently stopped at a crossroads, where I have been for nearly a year, and that my brain and my heart are telling me which road to take, and that my feet wont move. Behavioural science, from what I understand, is predicated on the fact that someone has to want to do something in order for them to do it. Or that they have to dislike the alternative enough to make them choose what you want them to choose. What am I doing? What do I want? What do I not want? Why can’t I move?