I am not a happy person.

Also here's the link for bookclub tonight ly <3

I hate that TikTok was once a place that made me happy.

book club link at the bottom of this email!!

I went on there to tell fun stories and learn things about strangers. There are no weird and cool places on the internet secret enough to still make internet friends. I didn’t have access to wifi at my mother’s house until I was like… thirteen? Everything else had to be on the ethernet. Technology stresses old people out and poverty ages you. Also keeping up with tech is exhausting. I don’t wish to be so easily accessible through social media. I still wish we had a landline.

I am behind my posting schedule because I thought I needed A Schedule(TM) so that I could just write things and be entertaining. I am not an entertainer. I do not have a desire to keep folks fucking entertained. I am telling you stories because there’s a creator from Colorado that I love that said a lot of things that make me go “oh wow yeah my friends from the city do not understand what it is like to be poor outside of a city.” I am telling you stories because I saw Black academics be themselves in a way they say they used to be on twitter on TikTok for one brief and flaming second because most of their peers aren’t on TikTok yet and we still enjoy intergenerational friendship and I said oh Thank God, people that aren’t my age!! I started telling stories because people left me comments like “my kid loves you!” And their kid was like seven! Or fourteen!! Or five!! even two!! BABIES? I love children I miss children so much. Why am I alone? Why do people in the city hate kids so much ?? Jesus. Fix it Jesus.

I had to move away from my family that has many kinds of people in it because I could not stand the grief and it followed me. The last two years have made me a permanently different person. I smoke a lot of weed and I think about the dead and dying a lot. I forget to eat. I can’t hear right anymore from being in the club. I drink the same pot of tea all day. I am turning into my dad (this is to say I am the same as I have always been). No wonder he keeps begging me to help him write a book on all the people he has helped ease into death. We’re here grieving around people that keep quiet about their dead. White folks keep very fucking quiet about their dead and you think it’s weird. There’s a reason why they don’t say shit. They look at me so weird for disintegrating unapologetically.

I also feel a need to be responsible and let people think I am relatively well put together. I am not. What I am a therapist publicly so I do not think I can talk about my self medication in earnest but being around my family I drank a bottle of champagne by myself when I said I wouldn’t drink. I cannot talk about being pro-drugs and be this unambiguously Black. I am supposed to be pro-licensure and pro formal prescriptions. I am not. Some of us really do not want a fucking paper trail. If those things are for you, amazing. My father who I have conditioned myself to never mentioned was never going to go get a paper trail to talk about some goddamn emotions when he could just talk with old people for the same community and unpacking. a PAPER TRAIL. Some of you have never been hunted by the state and it shows!!!

Anyways. TikTok was once a place that made me happy because I remembered what it was like to talk to people that were not in graduate school. It made me happy so I was happy on there. I think I have given people the wrong impression.

I am not happy. I have never been happy.

It is not on my goal list at all to “become happy.” It’s such a boring question. And no one ever wants to know why I’m sad because they’re curious. They want to know how they can help me stop being so sad. that’s fucking frustrating. I never really introduced myself.

My name is Nadalyn Gwendolyn Ismatu Bangura and of the four names I have on my person every day, one is spelled wrong on my birth certificate because my dyslexic mother had to fill it out alone, one is a name I insist people call me because it is not on my paperwork at all, one is a name that is easy to say right if you just asked me, and three of the four names I say and hear every day belong to people that died in my lifetime or died before they could meet me.

My politic is one where I read and thought “yes, this is what I see as well” and not “I had no idea.” I did not find out that poverty is genocide because I read Wretched of the Earth. I found out poverty was genocide when people kept dying while I went to Northwestern and my rich white classmates looked at me like oh yes, that poor African girl whose people keep dying. Like as if that’s… just how things are supposed to happen to me. Low life expectancy does not mean everyone dies at 57. Life expectancy is low because we are from a circumstance where it is not unheard of to die at any time, from a huge array of things. I am so shocked I lived until adulthood. I did not want to live to see this day so bad. Do you know how much work grieving is? My poetry professors were surprised I had this much “grounding'“ in my work so young. Dead people love poetry. All these words are good for is my dead people and the folks around to name them to me. Your dead don’t speak. Is that why you don’t realize you’re being hunted? Is that why you think that poor people should just stop having babies as if they’re not surviving state-sanctioned genocide? These internet ass hoes called me stupid! White people never sit there and call you stupid because over the internet I cannot break your teeth on my mug! If college bitches or high school biches just came out and said “you’re stupid” I would not have graduated either of those institutions. You noodle goose no-neck fleeting moments in time think they are going to discourage me from having a baby after I’ve carried these names for generations. No one has ever smacked you on the fucking mouth. I am having a daughter and I am naming her after grandmothers and after me just like my mom did and I have been writing her letters since I was fourteen. My God. You don’t have kids around you? Y’all don’t care about making the kids that watch you proud of you?

Mines are proud of me. When I finish on this earth I will either have made them a place here on this earth or I will have died trying. You people just don’t like your dead. You don’t like your dead and you don’t like children and it’s fucking weird. Your dead don’t speak and that’s why you’re out here creating a public paper trail of you saying that poor people should just die already. Where are your people? Y’all do not care about being embarrassed?

I don’t want you people to think I am happy. What I am is happily medicated. I came home and I forced myself to do it sober and what I found was that I am in a lot of back pain from stripping and a lot of personal pain from people leaving so I careen on through my days and I don’t want to ignore the grief anymore.

I am not happy and for some reason you people don’t know that and do not know why. TikTok is no longer I place where I can tell you stories. Lots of people here followed me for my chewing through my own politic and if that’s why you are here, nothing has changed. But if you were here because you wanted to hear stories from me and my loved ones : I am here writing you essays and making you podcasts with myself and my loved ones here. I have so much I would like to show you and I hope you will be willing to listen or read with me.

-ismatu

Ismatu Bangura is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

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