I Wanna Play by Protyus A. Gendher
My latest post discussed Family Scapegoat Syndrome, and its lasting effects on participants. Today I dug this one up from the vault. “I Wanna Play,” was one of the first pieces I wrote, when I was more pain than anything else. This is what it looks like from the inside.
I Wanna Play- by Protyus A. Gendher
I Wanna Play
No really, I wanna play!
Never mind, it’s ok
I probably wouldn’t even like that game
But it would have been nice to be asked to play.
But this is my life and I know how it works
Whether it’s because of me or a world filled with jerks
Because the farthest back that I can think
Those social moments were the same thing
I’d see my brother, four years older
With my cousins, six years colder
Three of them close together you see
Each within a year either way
But I spent my first ten years being the baby
Ten years with no one closer in age to me
No matter the game that they were in
Whether standard fare, or a new one imagined
Everyone knew I wouldn’t understand
Being so much younger than them
A shame really, because they’d love for me to play
“For now, go inside, and try again someday
When you’re older and age doesn’t matter so much”
So, I sat by myself away from the bunch
Watching to see if I could catch the rules
With no invitation coming from fools
And I’d find some patterns that made some sense
But not with the same logic to me as them
But couldn’t we cast those differences away
And maybe sometimes let me play?
You see, this theme repeats for me
Through all my intersectionalities
Stuck like a shadow to my identity
Always some reason I was picked last, see
I told myself in those early years
That it would all change when I got real peers
And I waited and waited to go off to school
And employ all I’d learned from watching rules
Maybe then they would make sense to me
If I could perform them with others more like me
So, I headed off to make my own friends
And we’d be tight as a brood of hens
“Oh my God!” “ She’s gross and fat”
They would sneer at me as I sat
Apart from them and all their games
Wanting so badly to be the same
Wanting to be worthy and allowed to play
Begging permission every day
“Pretty please, I just wanna play!”
But being fat is a social disease
Perhaps contagious, “keep your distance please”
And so it was that I didn’t fit
Kids my age really didn’t give a shit
The outcast who cannot be allowed in
So, I took to watching the rules again
I knew why their ways made sense to them
But if the rules don’t apply to everyone, what then?
There were other reasons that I couldn’t pass
Like my performance inside of the class
Kids don’t like the nerd with the answers
The smart one with ready banter
So, I spent more time with adults than kids
Which left me nobody to play with.
And what would I play with them if I could?
Because I knew for a fact that I was not just as good
The others have Barbies each complete with the Matel brand
And I had a cupie doll, acquired second-hand
Their shirts had names that I’d never heard
But between them somehow, a household word
And I instead had no tag to show
Because Grandma stitched instead of a tag, a bow
And the cool boy clothes from four years ago
Not as cool on a “girl,” now, you know?
I didn’t think we were poor, but we didn’t have
All of those fantasies in Saturday morning cartoon ads
Even when I was brave
And tried to assimilate
To the capitalist stimuli that required their mutual supplication
But my participation,
Even based on observation
Was fraud
The items they worshipped together like tiny gods
Were foreign to my mouth and hands
An unknown language barring me from friends
Just one more thing that made me less
In their minds and behaviors, I guess
Further removed I spent my time
Without a friend that I could call mine
Still watching rules as they fail to make sense
While others abide and I stay on the fence
And still I kept thinking someday
I’d figure it out, and get to play
But as childhood gave way to age
Every time I turned the page
Every time I tried again
To play in life and make some friends
Every single fucking time
There was some reason they could find
To keep me safely out of line
Committed to watching others behave
But my worldview a prison cave
Because bars of steel
Could not have had more real effect.
Each new circle, each new town
As my transient ass flitted around
And every time I’d try again
To put away my differences
And just blend in
Kept thinking I could learn the game
But every time ended the same
And I wasn’t allowed to play
Always some scheme in my head
Of some magic phrase to be said
Something spoken or something done
To make it seem like I might be fun
To make it seem like I might be worthy
To spent my time in others’ company
At one time, I thought that when I dropped out
Maybe my nerdiness would be cancelled out
And I wouldn’t be the know-it-all
Who always had to take the fall,
But I’d spent so long wanting social approval
And I couldn’t get my head round the removal
Of all of my own hesitation
Lent to intellectual masturbation, see
That kind of time alone leaves its mark on a girl
It actually changes how you interact with the world
It changes you down to the things that you think
And the lenses through which you see
Every single thing
But I thought to myself after years of surviving
And bending over backwards trying
To be enough for any one
That maybe something could still be done
That maybe if I went back to school
I could have another shot to use the tools
Compiled from years of tending to rules
Maybe it’s a different game
Maybe they’ll let me play
Community college at 25
Keeping the American dream alive
Ya right, I was a sore thumb there sticking out
Older and bolder but still no clout
Still punished for every connection
In my cognition regardless of direction
And I didn’t say things to make others less
I thought that to share an idea is a gift
But still so many things about me
That kept me at a distance
Pieces of my story that fed the resistance
By then I was too big to fit in the desks
I needed accommodations and concessions
Just to share a space that was theirs
A space that I missed my turn to have a right to
So, what business did I have, having a clue?
All Ds in high school, now straight As
I had something to prove to myself, what can I say?
And it didn’t make a shit bit of difference either way
Because I was apparently not designed to play
My religion didn’t fit
We really haven’t come far since “Burn the Witch!”
I just wanted to live in connection to this world
I just wanted to find a balance in this “girl”
But somehow those beliefs
Confirmed to others that I am a freak
Confirmed to others that I don’t deserve
To share in their structures and words
Even my phenotypic categories
That aligned me with normalized hegemony
Couldn’t buy me passage to
The game of life that others knew
Because my whiteness I despised
I could see white through others’ eyes
And I knew all the ways I was other
And couldn’t do that in turn to another
And so, my performance of dominant breed
Was evidently lacking, but freed me
To think a myriad of things
That others couldn’t because they couldn’t see
Because to them everything was the game
Even if the rules didn’t apply the same
Because, when the rules apply to you,
You don’t really question them, do you?
If I couldn’t play, then I’d make a profession
Of the rules of others, and all their conventions
My chosen fields of study?
Psychology and Anthropology.
But it became apparent all too quickly
That what psychology made sickly
Was failure to assimilate
Failure to play by the rules of the game
Failure to be normal and nice
Cooperative, and pleasant, but I’m too spicy
So, I saw how the reasoning there
Keeps the top at the top and the bottom down here
Oh, but anthropology
Such an indulgent luxury
Because from this vantage, as a matter of course
We question the positions I mentioned before
And we question the rules and we question the game
And we question why on Earth everyone is still playing
And we question the things that others can’t see
And we get to question everything
So, I thought that if I couldn’t play
Then I might just rise above the game
But the game pervades even those who know better
And even while studying it, perform it to the letter
I tried and I tried, and I learned loads of theory
But a life spent outside the game, left jumping through hoops empty for me
And I lost objectivity
I repeat, I lost objectivity
I said it twice because this part’s key
To the rift between me and a master’s degree
I could no longer study ways
People fuck each other over every day
And let it go and let it be
For the sake of being scholarly
If the game is broken for people like me
Then maybe we should be social justice vigilantes
And use all of that theory as the fuel and the tools
To restructure the players, the game, and the rules
To dismantle the players, the game, and the rules
To take the power away from fools
All these years I thought I needed
To be the one who first conceded
To be the one with all the answers
While being treated like a cancer
All these years I only wanted
To play the game, but I’ll tell you something
I’ve now learned that when I see me
I’m not staring at inadequacy
But a new way of doing things
These days I don’t want to play
I want to rescript the game
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