By Lexington Rivera

“Anarchy” stemming from the Greek word anarkhia meaning without ruler. Anarchism is a punk political belief that rejects the idea of hierarchical society. Growing up with a grandfather who was part of the socialist party of Puerto Rico you could say it’s to be expected of me to be who I am. It’s easy really, to be the perfect pretty petite doll that people wanted me to be. All I’d have to do is turn off my brain, people do it every day. But realistically that’s not me, never has been. As I grow I realize how right my mother was, “You stand for something, or you fall for anything.” Her, not being an activist is effectively cancelled out by her being a Puerto Rican woman who grew up in East New York in the 70’s /80’s because that means she’s accustomed to the fight. Activist or not, she was a master survivalist. Between the racism, poverty, violence, and blatant roughness of the time period she came out pretty good. A couple life saving tricks up her sleeve that she passed down to me and my sisters. It helped, made it easier. Wasn’t an escape though, she was not an illusionist. I couldn’t escape from was the horrors of the world that slipped between the cracks. I couldn’t escape the post 9/11 world or the financial recession or the mass school shootings or the dying children or the rise in homelessness or the zombie like drug epidemic or the robbery around the block or the empty food stamps card or the maggot like bottom feeding vampires that plagued the government or my own home. Unfortunately, being born of the revolution is not a pretty ordeal.  

I wanted to be pretty, for a long time. Pretty was a ticket, a prize, a doorway into being seen. If you were pretty, then you didn’t have to be anything else. When I realized I had an interesting face, not ugly by societies terms but not Megan Fox pretty, I realized I needed to be other things. I needed to home in on skills that did not depend on my looks. Instead I was the funny girl, the smart girl, the “girl’s” girl. I swallowed books whole, watched “films” instead of movies, had obscure Halloween costumes that I had to explain. Captain of the softball team, the volleyball team, one of the founding members of the Gay Straight Alliance, and got a 97 on the English regent, I was stunning. Until I wasn’t. All these things, as important as they seemed, never filled the right void; never satisfied the itch or the urge to be better. Then the pandemic happened, I lost all my high school friends, and I realized it was all bullshit. All the time wasted running from who I was meant to be. It never even worked, I wrote every week, every day. There was a fountain of words just waiting to fall out of my head spilling onto the page dirtying it with ink every second. Fuck being pretty. 

It was all downhill from there. Like a rolling snowball. Everything I wanted was fake and everything I had done had led me right back to the right path. All the little pieces of my life collected into a crystalline orb that lights the way. I am a romantic who believes in love and soulmate and putting in the work. I am against the U.S military, and yes that includes my two marine uncles and my three marine cousins. I believe healthcare is a human right and homelessness should not be criminalized. I don’t smoke, I hardly drink. I know how to use Narcan to bring someone back from a drug overdose and I think harm reduction works. I don’t think the U.S the center of the universe. I hate pink, I love barbie. I don’t wear skirts often and when I do, they are long, but I like when women wear what they want despite assholes. I probably won’t be a vegetarian and I understand pushing vegetarianism is inherently racist and classist. My boyfriend works in a labor union. There was nobody else I was meant to be. I could go on and on about all the different parts of me that intersect but we would be here for approximately 1234567890 hours, and it would bore the both of us greatly. My magic trick is survival, much like my mother. My best and most everlasting astonishment is that I believe in a better world despite. I believe in a brighter tomorrow and I work to make it happen. I am best a thriving between the broken gray sheets of concrete my own personal rose. Let this light fill up the room, water my plants, take a deep breath. Tender hearted and tender soul; I make no apologies for that. What’s more punk than the indominable human spirit?