There has never been a time in my life I did not feel I had something to offer, and alternatively someone to receive what I had to offer. I have often felt that the humans who need to hear what I had to say were the ones who chose not to listen, but it did not prevent me from wanting to share.
Oftentimes, we are not heard. What we say and do happens to be delivered to an inconsiderate, inappropriate, and insolent at times, audience. While we are left inconsolable, our audience is masterfully achieving pleasure for once again creating disdain within us.
I have always seen more than I share, knew more than I divulged and captured opposite knowledge than the average human in my space, in life experiences; no less. Somehow, I do not believe that should be wasted, and I also believe that allows one to be on peak with intuition.
After you have swam through a football field of garbage, you ultimately can smell it from miles away after it is placed in your past. While swimming in the garbage, you are not focusing on the scent, you are more concerned about survival. You are more concerned about your next move after you have eradicated the gross stench that lingers in the parts of you that you have held as precious. After you have spent years creating a world where you protected the parts of you that was worth protecting, you are then exposed to indignant and wretched human circumstances and you are left only to survive. So no, there in no intuition happening in those moments, minutes, weeks or in some cases years.
But when you are done swimming, and you have conquered your elements of cleansing, and you reformat your mental prowess, and you chart out avenues to lead to self-respect, self-worth and self-actualization, you then should be able to say, I have a voice. I have something to say, I have experience to lend to a situation, I have hours to impart, there are things I gleaned, there are fragments though irreparable, that have been healed.
One should, after all is said and done, be able to not just have a voice... but also to have an audience who listens and who cares and who, if not in possession of an ability to act, can justifiably, listen while being silent and be empathetic about one's journey and do no harm!
(In steadfast support of the Black voices that defines so many fragments of who we are, we use ours. This moment calls upon us all to speak and act again racism and injustice of all kinds. We stand in solidarity with Black communities everywhere.)