I Stopped Hiding Parts Of Myself I Thought I Had To Erase After Reading Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider

There was a moment in time when I looked around internally, only to find myself wedged in a mirrored corner of uncertainty. It was a blurred reflection of who I wanted to be staring intensely back at me from every direction; the mirror was framed by a border of questions that needed answers to define who I am as a person. The questions ranged from how I represented my race, gender, sexuality, and religion, to what my relationship was to others and myself, to who I want to be in life, and onward. Overwhelmed by how all of these parts of my identity seemed to conflict, I sat there with a slouched back, clenching and unclenching my fists, tapping my feet on the ground, cycling through responses to each question hoping that, like always, whatever fell from my lips was the right answer. 

Books have always snuck their way into the nooks and crannies of the mirroring barricade that lives inside my head, assisting in clarifying the reflected haze one book at a time. I could never avoid the way that literature summons me, dismembering my core to expose the fragmented pieces that were replaced with a variant of the truth. The personal stories sworn to secrecy, the muffled interjections coming from my subconscious as I reduced bits of my identity, the logic grown defiant and rogue due to suppression – all of them banding together as they beg the mirror with flailing despair that for once, the answers that fall from my lips will be the truth of who I am, rather than an obscured version of what is “right” and will make everyone else happy. 

When I stumbled across Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde at my local Half Price Books store in 2020, I bought it knowing there would be an unexpected call to dissect this classic piece of literature at some point. Did I know the gravity of how pivotal this book would be in my self-development? Absolutely not. After letting it sit on my bookshelf for a few years, it was recently selected as one of my book club’s picks (hey, Eclectix the Book Club!), putting those fragments of myself under a microscope. In the midst of reading Sister Outsider, I knew there was no better time than now to allow Audre’s wisdom to impart on my life; at 27 years old, I am determined to identify, understand, and embrace all the facets of myself.

In Audre’s essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, she probes readers with the question of “Are you doing your work?”— not for others' appeasement, but for the betterment of you. One does not have to be a self-proclaimed feminist to allow the power woven into this question to challenge them to humbly brave the outcome of introspection. Audre leads readers into this question by declaring who she is: woman, Black, lesbian, warrior, poet. These are unwavering facts about herself that no one can strip away. By concisely defining who I am in the same manner, I’ve been able to take a firm stance on the path of “doing the work” to develop as an individual, which in turn will make me a better asset to society. Since Audre identifies who Audre is, she makes it clear that any other attempts from other people (or the nay-sayer that lives in our heads) to define her outside of those things are false, until she declares that it isn’t.

I was in awe of the directness in her tone as she made her identity known, to the point that I had to grab my journal to answer the lingering question on whether I’m doing the work of showing up in the world as my full self. As quickly as I rushed to reflect, I froze. Finding myself back in front of the mirror with an inquisitive expression awaiting my identity to declare itself. In that moment I understood what it meant after all this time that I could genuinely be anyone that I say I am, at any time in my life. That is also when I realized that not being definitive about my identity left room for swaying and suffocating uncertainty to tighten its grip around me. 

As I read on, I came across an infamous Audre quote: “If we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others —` for their use and to our detriment.” The chaos of being unsure of who I am was to my detriment. Whenever I would enter spaces holding on to protective acts, like remaining silent to prevent my Black-womaness from “forsaking me” or the occasional suppression of my sexuality to adhere to my religious practices or hiding my journey through motherhood or over-compensating for my socioeconomic status, these acts were exactly that. Detrimental. Acting prompted altering and erasure of my foundation, leaving me in a blurred state and unsure of what the wholeness of my reflection should look like… causing resistance to my true work. 

I needed to get to the deepest parts of myself to overpower the resistance. When my fellow book club members and I reached the Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power essay, discussion unfolded around Audre’s choice to use the term eroticism to describe an individual’s deepest connection to themselves, how they use that powerful connection to interact with the world and express themselves while moving through it. Audre shares several examples and definitions to conceptualize the term “erotic” beyond a negative sexual connotation; ultimately the erotic is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings”. 

Quite frankly, I’ve served as a people-pleasing-perfectionist for the majority of my life and I had to come to the reality that the tie to my erotic suffered because of it. Spending years misconstruing my passions and undervaluing the joint efforts of my feelings and logic to avoid the possibility of disappointing anyone outside of me along the way delayed my progress. Choosing a life of willingly disappointing myself through suppression did nothing for the way I show up in society except create resentment for hiding myself.

Sister Outsider speaks to the humanity of any individual and their essence in the formulation of society. The poetic delivery of Audre’s wisdom will undoubtedly stick with me and serve as a guide to owning my identity within the world. Nowadays I stretch my limbs, embed confidence in my posture, and embrace my inner makeup, embodying my identity found in the mirrored space in my head to deliberately do the work of being wholly me.