SLOAN HAMPTON

For years, I concocted special recipes and homemade remedies to convince myself I belonged. I sauntered through corridors with my head held high because the cataclysmic destruction my soul endured every season had to be worth it. With blood in my mouth and sweat on my brow, I affixed thanks to my lips and fell to my knees in worship. I forced myself to be perfect. To gain entry, I spent money I didn’t have only to make myself a bigger target for the greedy to torment.

But truth is, I am an impostor—the misplaced child walking into rooms meant to destroy him, playing by rules designed to exclude him. Calling my obstacles lessons meant to better me and not engineered acts of warfare against my mind and the flesh of my body. Believing that pain was a necessary evil shared by all when the rusted dagger was only in my back and the heavy world only on my shoulders; trusting that the contradiction was the creation of an unknowing mind when, in reality, it was a duty assigned to me without my consent.

For too long, I painted myself a duck to cover my swan feathers and I sat in classrooms taught by those with minds emptier than deflated balloons. I am the fraud who shrunk to fit in a world too small, too ill-equipped, too unworthy to cage me; I am the masquerader who doesn’t need man-made “things” to identify or explain me. For I have done god-level work: I’ve created universes in dark rooms with no tools; I’ve resurrected my dead and breathed new life into dreams deferred; I’ve walked on water formed by my tears, and I’ve made wine out of the vitriol hurled at my feet. I am made of Egyptian silk, baby, I’m hand-crafted. And here I am—yet again—questioning why I’m stuck at the bottom of a waste basket. I am too good to grow here . . . no, I am too excellent to belong here. I am the impostor, the divine embodiment of power, strength, and brilliance walking among men created from and destined to nothingness.