Days

Today is the day.

Today is the day I stop believing lies about myself. I will stop listening to the voice inside my head that promises that we’re just being realistic here when we judge the sum total of our face and our hair and our rolls as determinedly unattractive. That voice promises that I am hideous and useless and truly unloved and it has gone a bridge too far. Though I can do better and be much healthier, that voice doesn’t speak true. Today, I start believing in myself again.

Today is the day I stop fighting my body. My posture and gait are as important as the food I eat, the beverages I drink, the stretches I do, and the exercises I plan. I have to begin listening to the creaks and tears of my brain and body, because I only get the one and I need it to last. Today, I start taking care of myself.

Today is the day I stop doing anything less than my level best at my job. It’s the day that I stop taking internet breaks to click that link or check this form of social media, distractedly, obsessively, and over and over again. It’s the day that I stop staring at my computer listlessly in the face of challenge and start creating, making, problem solving, and learning. Today, I start trying again.

Today is the day I stop making excuses for myself. Those little lies and flimsy reasons are just brambles that hold me back, snares that slow me down and keep me from moving forward. Excuses grow into arguments against action and I am finished with inaction. Today, I take responsibility for myself.

Today is the day I stop pretending to want things I don’t. I don’t want to settle down right now. I don’t want to back myself into a career just because I think I should. I don’t want to settle for a nice man, a picket fence, and consolation children. I don’t want to stay comfortable, relegated to the well-understood back corner when there is a world of wonderfully thorny problems out there, waiting to be solved. Today, I start looking for the something more I’ve been yearning for.

Today is the day I stop apologizing for myself. The questions I ask, the words I say, the space I occupy, these things are not offenses or outrages to the people around me, nor should they be.  I’m not going to hide the fact that I’m a capable woman so that others can feel comfortable. I will delve into the subjects and ideas that fascinate me without concern for intimidation. I will work with confident dedication. I refuse to let my fear of disapproval dictate my choices. Today, I start acting independent of the inhibitions of others.

Today is the day I stop waiting.

Today is the day I stop quitting.

Today is the day I stop lowering my expectations.

And today is the day I begin living again.

Because I have been given much and it is ridiculous that I have wasted my privilege and my power to live in comfort rather than to help others into better lives. I have the ability and the opportunity to make a good and lasting difference in the world. I don’t want to waste the lifetime of chances that I have. Today is the day that I start living into the rhetoric of my soul.

And tomorrow is that day too. 

Tow Truck

I was going to tell you about the phenomenal mess my life is but then I thought better of it.

I want to tell you about my best friend.

So, you know that time in second or third or fourth grade when everyone had friends but every girl needed a best friend? Maybe you don’t because maybe your childhood wasn’t filled with Buzzfeed-flavored nostalgia, complete with trapper keepers and Lisa Frank stickers and Nickelodeon, but for some of us, we understood that having a best friend was a necessity. It was a line on an elementary school resume, a way of proving to future friends that you had it together because you had a best friend. Allow me into your social circle because I have the ultimate reference. That’s how best friends worked when we were kids- you had sleepovers, you giggled, you watched movies together and passed notes and were, officially, best friends.

My best friend from back home moved into town in the third grade from Minnesota. I’m not a mega-social person and I wasn’t a socially-savvy kid, so bringing up memories that specifically involve people is like dredging the lake for sunken buoys, but it’s OK because as soon as I’m home, she remembers something and tells the story like there should have been movie cameras following us around. We sound epic or at the very least more interesting than I’m sure we actually were. There was always orange juice for me in the fridge at her house and I feel like I knew the inside of her pantry just as well as she did. There was a fort to explore (there's a new road there now) and when we grew up, music to play and hours of things to talk about. And whenever I’m back visiting her, it’s like no time has passed. I can sit and listen and laugh more than I have in years, I feel like, and it’s the most perfect thing.

I live a life of cliches and tired old acts, so of course the two of us went to different colleges in different states and developed our own lives, with our own new best friends. Of course we would- we’re independent women who spend plenty of time dreaming, and honestly, even high school took a toll on us, between separated by band and theater and going to different churches with different youth groups. When you’ve done the Millennial Shuffle*, you know that everything in life is malleable, including friendships. It’s not all Dawson’s Creek or Boy Meets World. Mr. Feeny isn’t going to move to college with you and your friends aren’t going to drop out and/or transfer to be near you. That’s a pipe dream.

So when I come back home from my job in a different part of the state and we talk about bands we like or shows we watch or things we’ve done and find that we’re still so much in sync, it makes me miss what we could have been. I have other friends, great friends, friends that I could start whole new blogs about, but sometimes I think that I could have lived in a house in Charleston, roadtripped with the windows down listening to Zeppelin and Cake, waited tables at the country club, and laid out every night for a semester watching the stars down in Chile. I mean, I’m happy with who I am and I can’t discredit the wonderful and lovely things that I’ve done, but I know that there’s a corner of my soul that could have been happy doing something else.

And then there’s nights like tonight where we went to a bar and had a couple of beers, listening to my best friend and her mom tell stories, while a second best friend listened and laughed and swapped anecdotes about teaching languages. We played songs on the jukebox and smiled at the people who walked in and mentioned things that her fiance would notice in a loud voice so he’d come over from behind the bar and spend a few minutes with us. Then, on my way out of her apartment complex, in true classy fashion, I misjudged the turn on the hill and ended up needing a tow truck. But my best friend, she’s been trained to never let them see you sweat, and so we assessed the damage, found a guy to come out and help us, and spent the intermediate half hour watching a British sitcom and laughing at the narratives behind the decorations in her temporary home. When the tow would only take cash and I had none, she never even batted an eye. My car got unstuck, I now have a list of new pop culture to bring into my life, and despite having a substantial problem, I feel so much better than I did before. All in all, it wasn’t a bad night.

So I’m going to hold on to that as I go on about my days. There’s a glorious freedom in knowing that life could have gone completely different and it wouldn’t have turned out that bad at all.




*The Millennial Shuffle is a complex dance staged for the children of families privileged enough to be thinking of higher education for their children, a dance full of angst and an over-abundance of encouragement and unfulfilled promises. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Get good grades. 
Step 2: Do a sport. 
Step 3: Pick four extra curriculars. 
Step 5: Become a leader in at least one of the organizations you’re involved in. 
Step 5.5: Exhaust any and all energy overachieving at the high school level. 
Step 6: Apply to college. 
Step 7: Graduate by some miracle. 
Step 8: Find a job. Or, more reasonably, don’t. 
Repeat Steps 6-8 until the music runs out.

Dispossess

So what drives me crazy- well, really, what bothers me in life- is that when you stereotype someone, that stereotype becomes their identity to you. And a stereotype, you know, is something very shallow. I mean, think of the stereotypes that you know of, not necessarily ones that you hold, but ones that you know about. Are they in-depth analyses of the historical culture and general life experience of any given type of being? Does it allow for details specific to anyone’s life story? No, of course not. It's a stereotype. Stereotypes are a societal shorthand, and a sloppy one at that. So when you stereotype someone, when you make that often-insulting assumption that you can blame this characteristic or that on a person’s gender, race, religion, or country of origin, you’re limiting your knowledge of this person to a small number of choice adjectives or nouns that the stereotype allows.

I don’t say all that because it’s new information or because I want to point fingers or anything like that. We all stereotype. It must be useful because we use it all the time, and you know, people associate different stereotypes with different types of people for a reason. I say this because I am more often than not frozen into inaction because I’m afraid of being stereotyped. I’m afraid of being judged without any chance to defend myself.

We process a good plenty of information in any given day, more now than ever before. We’re bombarded by story after story, image after image, video after video, and with all that information to process, we need a shorthand, and the shorthand we pick tends to define us to other people. Oh, this story is from Fox News. This one is from CNN. This is from a left-leaning blogger. This is from a young mother. This picture was posted by a teenager. This one’s from someone I know from back home. This movie was made by a producer that I respect. This one was made by some Hollywood exec I don't recognize. This came off of Pintrest. This was posted by somebody I follow on Twitter. I can almost color the things I read and see and absorb based on their sources and my opinions of them. Nothing good can come from Nazareth.

I know that I do this. I see it the things I choose to read, the links I choose to ignore, the information that I accept with a smile, the claims I secretly roll my eyes at, the news story I post to facebook, the one I don't. And if I know that I do it, I have to assume that other people do it. But not just to some faceless person on the other side of the internet. I have to assume that people do that to me, out in the physical world.

How do I escape that? How do I run away from the people who want to rob me of my depth? How do I dispossess them of their impression that I’m another millennial who can’t put down her phone, or just another one of those awkward sci-fi fans, or the Christian girl from a small town, or the hometown girl who went away to one of those liberal schools and changed? Because, you know, I am those things and some of those stereotypes hold true.

But, no. You’re not allowed to limit me to your idea of what I should be. You don’t live in my body or think with my mind. You can’t tell me that I can’t be just as good as, if not better than, my male counterparts because I’m a woman and you can’t dismiss me as a feminist because I don’t sit quietly in a corner when women’s issues come to the forefront. You can’t just label me based on my politics, because you don’t know what I feel or why I feel it or the push I experience every day to make a positive difference in the face of such negativity. You don’t know You don’t know why Buffy resonates with me or why The Empire Strikes back will always be my favorite movie or why I will never say no to watching Moulin Rouge- despite your best guesses, you will fall short of analyzing the complexity that is me. And so will I in analyzing the complexity that is you.

The thing is, though, the infuriating thing, is that you’ll try anyway. I’ll try anyway. And then we’ll miss each other’s points and pigeonhole each other and in general misunderstand our needs and wants and desires and hopes so profoundly that it’ll be a wonder, an absolute wonder, that we’re able to accomplish anything together, unless it’s the fulfillment of a need or a want that we share.

So that’s why I haven’t gone to Moral Monday. That’s why I haven’t written anything substantial (that, and the fact that I’m uncomfortable writing about work). That’s why I stop conversations mid-stride or I leave arguments unfinished and stories unshared. I don’t want to do anything outside the norm because you will judge me and label me and do such a complete job of removing the depth of my personality and existence that I’ll wonder why I ever thought there was anything more to me in the first place.

I have the luxury of that kind of angst and I exalt in it. I let it paralyze me and hold me down with its insinuations, because as long as I have it to blame, I don’t really have to try. I don’t really have to attempt to move forward. It’s even better than not having to justify my actions to others- I don’t have to justify my actions to myself. I can stand at the bottom of the brick wall of Fear of Judgment and shrug my shoulders and say, “This far was I meant to go and no farther.” I can walk away, safe in the conviction that I tried and I was stopped.

That conviction is wrong. It’s time to dispossess myself of impressions of me.

So here’s to tearing down the wall. Here’s to understanding that fixing problems with my body and my mind doesn't make me a health nut or a nut job. Here’s to embracing the tightrope walk of holding onto my opinions and conclusions while lending an honest ear to yours. Here’s to holding a sign because I believe in certain unacceptabilities. Here’s to learning and thinking and above all doing with reasonable abandon. I've always been one to stop at walls, but I think it’s time for a change.