Camilla Rocha Campos

Loving her

now the thread that leads you is self-esteem. Neglected by the trace of a Christian

Catholic education, which helps others before itself, and nourished almost daily, in the form of words, gestures and gazes, by a society whose historical project is to demerit you as a human being, I tell you: love still exists. Paralyzing is not a voluntary option. Love has opened up to you as a social mobility, if observed heteronormatively and interracial. Love shone through you as comfort and security when exercised to control your routine and to ensure your gender submission. For love you were raped, for love you are exposed to deserve sexualized praise, for love to your children you were accused of neglecting responsibilities in work environment, for love you are seen as passive and apolitical, for love you believed it is ok to wash clothes and dishes, for love you are read as an emotional deprivation of people from higher social classes than ours, of white people, of men. Love appears even though by no means it is guaranteed to you. To show love to people and non-people you got sick. You forgot to notice yourself. Love needs self-esteem. Love abuses in being stereotyped, it abuses love in order to stereotype: both with the objective of representing a certain reality and, above all, functioning as a disguise and mystification of social relations. “Love went up on the roof”, poetry from your adolescence. “Love as a practice of freedom” text from the beginning of your adult life. Your daughter asks you why most of the songs that exist talk about love. The love is important. For whom? Watch out, love: a word of symbolic grandeur that deceives ways of life to keep bodies that have lost their connection with themselves under a constant system of violence. Love has appeared to you, dressed in romance, undressed. A love letter to remind you of you. May the right word delay to come, let your ancestorsremind through your body this feeling, the word could not be bigger than its meaning. Thank yourself for the time for making it possible for you to live the loves you have lived, for having matured after so much.

I crown you woman of yourself.