I break into a sweat driving with the windows rolled down at 11am.
Droplets river and I wonder if they'll leave a salty mark on my red dress.
This is Austin skipping spring and right into the core blaze of summer.
This is Texas doing the work engrained in destiny.
Sweat. Release. Cleanse. Repeat.
The heat pulls heartaches to the surface. Old doubts bubble up toward a sun unflinching in its commanding reign.
I lift the wounds toward light. Transmuting becomes a daily practice, mostly in car rides with windows down, Spotify on, and sunglasses shadowing a forward gaze. Topo-Chicos lazily lounge in cup holders and yoga props tan in the backseat.
My skin sighs in the sun. There's a healing chanting across a landscape of skin beginning to simmer into a peace from a protest to an all-natural body wash.
My fashionista self cringes and hides the constellations of angry eruptions under sleeves shielding and feeding shame.
The eve of my 28th birthday I finally wear a sleeveless dress because the air is a bath tub, soaking shirts, and my skin still rockets in streams of revolt across the upper back and I know light, fresh air is the medicine, and that I can wear my spirit word of freedom in an off-the-shoulders dress.
So I do. The dress styles radical acceptance into the fabric of the evening.
"You're kinda obsessed," she tells me after I brave a truth to the light.
"About my skin? Yes."
Because it's never about the skin, it's about a sensitivity I use to fight, a shifting of perspective to see that I tried to perfect a body, a person, a way of being that never needed perfecting.
All the striving, forcing, pushing, and all the reroutes, the redirects, the failures, the pained rejections, the breakouts that occurred because fear operated the actions, and the actions propelled from a wide-eyed panic mumbling about scarcity, needing to prove, and needing to be beautiful to be loved. But it's the other way around. I am beautiful because I am love.
I wear the dress and adorn my body in forgiveness.
Did the rash cause the shame? Or did the shame cause the rash?
Both.
I can only heal the outbreak if I surrender skin to light. I can only expand, elevate and shine if I speak out-loud my shadow, if I alchemize the ache into bright, artistic expression, and even the writing is loud and rioting and crowding into fingertips dancing across a keyboard to give birth to aspects of self clamoring to be seen.
Speak.
My skin speaks for sun. My soul speaks for the lights of the stage. My Creative life speaks for entrance, a vibrant existence.
Speak.
My body speaks for reverent self-care. My throat stumbles on words that want to be freed from any people-pleasing so I can communicate from a core of knowing, and in that flow of speech there is ease. Let the no be clear. Let the yes be enthusiastic.
Speak.
The title of Laurie Halse Anderson’s book I read in high school, and the story rekindles into vivid memory after the trauma. After the incident, this highly verbal communicator is startled into the realization of how difficult it is to speak. The details of the incident remain in police files and not in the ears of people who love me because the repeating to police exhausted my wearisome sharing of the story. Now there’s a refusal, a block that prevents the exact re-telling.
There are other ways to speak, to honor a truth, to find a remedy through the language of body, the whispering song of the breath, the emotional exuberance of impromptu birthed characters on stage, and influencing the speaking mind to affect the radiance of my energy.
Speak.
The spirit word that shouts for my attention, calls to be claimed. I resist, at first, because speaking up and speaking the truth and staying impeccably true to my word challenges, and there's a weary, eyebrow raised part of self that feels like I've been doing a lot of sweating of misbeliefs and mistruths, and I want to go easy, but I can learn to go easy with speak. Speak can teach me to trust and voice my gentleness in fierceness, and my fierceness in gentleness.
And spirit words always surprise. Speak will present monologues and reveal scripts that I cannot yet foresee, so I'll be open and let speak set the platform for my 28th spin around the sun, and I commit to the dresses, drinking the Topo-Chicos and letting the sweat speak out stale stories released and now ready to be sun-kissed into a brighter rewriting, a summer sweet becoming.