To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land

Walking home from the coffee shop balancing my old roommate's handmade dishware in my arms, I tried to channel what I imagined being a waiter would feel like to balance opening doors and holding my coffee while also making it up two flights of stairs with out dropping these precious gifts she left behind for me on her way out to LA to start a new life. A memory bubbled up, as memories often do, and I struggled with my conflicting emotions as I navigated doors and years of doing hard labor and ironwork along my path.

My freshman year of college, I was moving back to Sarasota. I had been born there, and some part of me knew I would be going back. One of the top art schools in the U.S. sprawled along the beaches there, and I had been accepted - it was the only school I had bothered to apply to. I have vague pictures of a house with a window between my older brother's room and mine, where we would signal to each other after everyone went to sleep. My mother took me to dinner at The Columbia in St Armand's Circle, where she had been a waiter during my infancy, and eventually met and fell in love with the father of my younger siblings. She had worn a bow tie and slacks like the men and refused to be called a waitress, and told me later that they had to leave in part because they couldn't avoid run ins with the Cuban Mafia for much longer, possibly because of my step father's drug trafficking and addiction.

My mother recognized some of the waitstaff during this precollege visit, exclaimed excitedly the name of the latino woman who brought us water. As my mom described who she was, I saw a pained recognition crystalize across the other woman's face, and my mother gestured to me, bragging about bringing her daughter here for college, asking about the other woman's daughter. She barely glanced at me, with my blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, choked out a few words in broken English and walked off as soon as her task was completed. As my mother giggled and crooned about how they used to do coke together when I was a baby, I watched that woman signal a different waiter to attend to our table, and I sat in contemplative horror at the strange innocence that so defines my mother. How was it not obvious that this other woman was embarrassed, possibly for still being in the same work environment, or her own relationship with her children and college, or maybe her memories of that time are darker than my mother's, who was able to walk away and not have to face starkly different fears about surviving, how could none of that flit through her mind, somewhere behind her somewhat vacant eyes?

On the way out my mother had an extended conversation with the Maitre D', while I stood on the sidewalk and watched from a distance, trying to figure out what felt familiar and what was fabricated in my sense memories of this place. As she collected me and we left she told me he had offered me a job if I ever needed one, and she threw her head back and laughed good and hard at the thought of me being a waitress, like I was too soft to be able to handle something like that.

I have thought about that moment a lot over the years of being on and eventually running construction crews, almost every time I get on a forklift, so many strange moments where I have exceeded the limitations in my mother's view of what I could be capable of.

She obsessively hoards all of the awful student work I tried to throw away, bad ideas or overworked and with tiny arms and such, the beginnings of all artists. My siblings tell me about the paintings lining the walls of my childhood home that I hope to never step into again. My little brother even stole one of those paintings once, to my glee - and he received the strangest, quietest phone call from my mother who claimed it was worth some obscene amount of money ($15,000 I think?). I don't know what picture of who or what I am lives its rich life in my mother's eyes, all I know is that anything that undermines it is a threat to whatever narrative she has crafted, and it amazes me that someone could move through their lives or look at their children with such an overwhelming blindness.

I think it makes some parts of my natural expression harder to lean into, picking up a pencil to draw carries with it the weight of potentially fulfilling my mother's blind desire for me, like it is not truly mine somehow. And I fight to be noticed for other kinds of physical prowess with a ferocity that is somehow related to needing her ideas of me to change, to recalibrate around something real - battles I bring in every day to work but are being fought for a ghost, an idea of what a Mother should be, for a child I buried in my body a long time ago.

I can't even do simple tasks without thinking about the box she thinks I live in.

Set from MFA Film Thesis I did Production Design for.

Of course, that's what water does.

I.
everything is changing
like, more than usual
I used to prefer it that way
I knew myself in chaos,
because I was a wall
rooted to myself in such a way
that I always knew up from down

but I gave that job away
cause I had other things I wanted to be
and it was getting in my way

I know myself
what I'm worth
what I believe
better than I did
this time last year
maybe up and down
are relative

I realize
this is probably
why people have mothers

in a class last week
I was asked to orient to the ground
as I rolled from my side to my belly
I was so focused on being
a conduit for forces
the idea of holding an intention of movement
at the same time seemed mysterious, foreign,
a revelation

this is how we are meant
to move through life I realized
how exhaustingly huge.


II.
in the shower it struck me, as I recounted my day
that I seem to collect Taurus employers, Captains of Industry
and as bizarrely secretive and possessive as my mother

also a Taurus

forceful, emotionally demanding, tricky with the information they share
molding the people and world around them into a landscape of their liking

to their advantage

also unwilling to ask for a certain kind of help, a safe space to expose
their weaknesses unless it is a ploy, to help protect them in the long run
Scorpio is the Sorcerer, a mover of people and matter

I am an ideal helpmeet

Just like Ariadne, keeper of the keys to the labyrinth
which leads to the bull at its center, waiting for human sacrifices
given as tribute from the surrounding villages

I finally understand who the Minotaur is

who do I give my gift to
this thread to find their way back from my depths
after killing the monster the haunts me?


III.
once, in the throes of puberty
my self disgust manifested
as physical punishment and I knew
I needed something so I stood in front of my mother
paralyzed, voiceless
she put her arms around me and I was stone
in that embrace but before any part of me
had time to melt she pulled away
yelling at me because of some weird insecurity
maybe she felt rejected
I just needed her to hold on long enough that
I could turn from stone to flesh again

I think it was around that time that
I started to shut down
my stepfather's eyes and words were so often on my body
like it was a thing that didn't really belong to me
and I was starting to understand that my mother
wasn't going to protect me from what comes next
he was institutionalized before it got that far
but the next decade or so was a blur
of out of body sexual experiences

A weird disturbance arose today, low in my pelvic bowl
a whisper of what might be considered a period cramp
something I've never dealt with in my entire bloody life
I usually get migraines instead, blinding, nauseous, debilitating
every 28 days or so

sitting on the subway, mulling over this little, pulsing, precursor to pain
I thought about my recent fling with a handsome foreigner
a stunning project we all worked on together, and how utterly female
curvaceous and powerful I felt showing up to work alongside him
a part of myself that I've hidden for as long as I could remember
reveling in my own femininity, tasting another human being
with nothing but pleasure in mind for the first time in my life

were those migraines a manifestation of those things I cut off
since I first began to bud
blinding, nauseous, debilitating
what does this new pulsing sharpness mean?

Tabula Rasa

While binge-watching a tv show about the history of a particular Viking hero, and researching the exploits and overlaps referenced in this semi-historical narrative, there came one of those moments - a life changing realization through the eyes of a mostly fictitious character arc. A child is introduced to him, with the clear blue eyes of a person that meant a great deal to him and was killed in a jealous rage by one of his other companions. In the blank, innocent look of this child-of-his-lost-companion, this great Viking warrior paused and gently touched his fingertips to the boy's face. I felt, with the sharpness of a cut, the history of those two figures, made manifest in the presence of his descendant... and I understood for probably the first time the intensity of looking into the face of one's child or grandchild, or that of a close friend. How in the eyes of those-that-came-before-us, we are also a culmination of so many preexisting circumstances, a physical manifestation of a million little moments and rainy days and hard choices and secret shared smiles and successes and failures and how-are-we-going-to-survive-this; we are all creatures born in the crest of a wave, in the dynamic tensions of a butterfly that flapped its wings on the other side of the world, like the stars and Aphrodite, merely an expression of the teeming currents moving invisibly in the darkness underneath and before what we can actually see.

John Locke had it all wrong, maybe what the bible was trying to say was actually a poorly worded version of something more true. Less 'The sins of the fathers being visited upon the children', more how so many of our actions and gestures we perform every day, and the threads we may confuse as our own may be habits and patterns that are discernable across many generations, part of the primordial stuff that we come into being inside of, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

Just as we often envision ourselves as truly individual beings, I think it is hard to have a really clear sense of our parents and their parents in a context before we transformed them into something else, an identity that they can never discard. What dies to make room for this magical induction, this double baptism, for this new name they will take with them to the grave? And what of those parts of myself that are so like my primary caregivers that I am so angry at and ashamed of? I am not so interested in the person my mother is currently trying to convince everyone that she is, since it is an elaborate defense against choices made when we were both young, and no one is around to hold her accountable. I do however wish I could dig into some of her earlier feelings and experiences, separate from her intensely obsessive and controlling reaction to me as her offspring/pawn/property, and her insistence that I'm just acting like an angry, adolescent brat, rather than a human being who deserves to be listened to, considered, who may be emotionally intelligent or possessing a valid argument about how her choices have realtime and lasting impacts on the children who were left in her care and won't go away until she is willing to be in the pain of addressing them with us. How do I learn about this person and the ways we are similar, without triggering her many layered defenses? Her father used to call her 'the Hulk', her rage was so uncontrollable when she was younger. I suspect my Grandmother fiscally supports my mother because she feels so deeply guilty for what she stood by and allowed to happen in the household my mother grew up in, and I've heard from my sister that Grama told her just how much like her father my mother is. While I may have found a container for rage that has been incredibly fortuitous for me professionally, I know, sometimes more than others, how that taking over/taking control/unable to turn it off mechanism is a direct channeling of the woman who raised me.

'Hollow' is the word my little brother used, describing to me what trying to talk to her is like. It is deeply unsettling to me, this person who calls herself a mother, but has never once asked any of her children how they feel about anything, or why. That someone in her place could be so uncurious about our hopes and fears and choices. But maybe that is what was modeled to her, maybe there is an unheard, neglected child buried deep within her being that is so hungry it makes her blind to us. Is it possible to go unarmed after all this time and anger in search for my mother's soul, locked so deep in the fortress of her stories, and not get lost?

I don't know that I'm quite brave or strong enough to fumble around in her darkness to untangle our shared threads, but I can feel the places in my body where I've ignored pain have created weaknesses in other compensatory places, and I've begun to chase those uncomfortable places to look for what lives on the other side. As strong as I may become though, only she can choose to wade through her scar tissue and liberate those pathways between herself and the rest of the world.

Between herself and her children, who have been waiting our whole lives for her to make that choice.

   

Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura.

 

 

'Was it a bittersweet goodbye?'
'Happy to see your brother but happy to have your space back before the next person?'

My friend sent me those texts as I sat on the bus after dropping my little brother and his friend off at the airport. Part of me was deeply offended that I could be so misunderstood, that someone would blow off something that lived its deep rich life inside of my blood, beating inside of my heart and flowing through my veins and his at the same time, in a sympathetic rhythm, more resonant than almost any connection I have in this lifetime. I thought about where that hurt came from, as I flipped back through the twinges in my heart, equal parts emotion and image anchoring them to physical sensations, concrete places that reside in various corners of my body.

A midnight phone call this last year, his voice heavy with tears. In his final year of college, his future bright and clear as dawn breaking and he had broken up with his girlfriend of four years. They had grown so much and so different from high school to then, and he knew it was time. I remember being like her, scared of the unfamiliar, clinging to a person to sustain me because I didn't know how to sustain myself. But he had someone to teach him how assessable the world was, he had me. I had no one when I was his age, so I felt for them both, in different ways. Unmooring himself to prepare for leaving our hometown, the womb of his university, the familial warmth of his childhood friends to be an advocate for his own future, something about leaving her sent him reaching out for me.

I know when it is time to be a mother. I know who he was calling for. Me and more than me, because our mother is unable to hear us or relate to us, lost in a world of her own construction that has no room for anyone else's needs. I saw what he couldn't, he has so embarrassed deep down, because he didn't want to be with her, but he didn't want her to be with anyone else. His childhood and his manhood lived inside of her memory, he had given all of it to her with time and circumstance, and I could feel his fear that those parts of himself might evaporate when she holds another man's hand. That they wouldn't mean anything anymore. That like a breadcrumb path in the woods, a rejection of his past might make it hard to find his way home. So he called me. Of course he called me.

Bittersweetness is the knowledge that I was receiving these midnight moments that belonged to someone else, that this rush of love and tenderness belongs to the person who birthed the voice on the other side of that phone. Bitter because I was doing someone else's job, Sweetness because of how much I loved doing it. Anger at the incompetence of our mother, coupled with the fierce Joy of knowing that unlike me, he had someone.

'How is your visit with your brother going?'
'How did it go?'

Another friend, another text asking me to qualify my experience with my baby brother in superficial terms. Both individuals I was texting with are people whom I share intimate, intellectual relationships with, whom would never want to hurt my feelings, yet seemed to have inadvertently thrown a punch that landed. I'm still out of breath from rereading that last text in particular. 'Good' is a stupid word that has no place in my experiential vocabulary. It isn't true or real, its a label, a box, a dead end.

That is the opposite of what this past week was for the both of us. His visit was a celebration of leaving the last bits of his childself behind, a specific rite of passage into his future. I knew he was coming to me, because I was Mother and Father, his degree in Construction Management may have something to do with my own career path, and he had no one else to talk to about learning how to use tools and gaining favor from the various trades working around him. To honor his passion I sent him a gift to help him build his first tool kit. My mother is trying to start a business doing reiki and tarot readings, feng shui and meditation, promising to help people find their 'authentic' selves. She has never been curious about who her own children are and what makes us our specific selves.

Years ago, when I tried to communicate to my grandmother what my mother is underneath the character she is playing, my mother got to her first, and no one will answer the phone when I call anymore. She tells them whatever she wants, and no one is curious to know me or about me in my own family. Like I have no childhood, like I was always an orphaned adult, I watched my past evaporate into artificial constructs my mother uses to support whatever her current character happens to be. My grandmother is telling everyone that I have an undiagnosed mental illness. But amidst all the yarn being spun, my younger siblings have managed to cling to my back as I escaped, thank god its so fucking strong. My best feature, really.

I knew he was coming for the mother part of me, but I didn't realize until the moment I saw him that he was coming to slay her.

After this previous summer working on his first construction site, he had developed a thickness in his chest and arms that will eventually become a barrel containing his beautifully articulate heart. There is a quickness of response and a depth in his awareness that tells me that my job here is mostly done. I am released from holding myself inside of an archetype that I have been forced to wear, and even though I have loved wearing it, my little brother came to set me free from my own real life fairy tale. To meet the person behind the Mother.

He is like pure sunshine, he could have stayed with me forever if he wanted. But I am not sad that he left, because I am something different now, because I was sending him out to be in his clear, bright future, and thankfully, neither of us are afraid of this dawn.

I guess it was a good visit.

colonizing a star is tricky business

*Logo process 



 

*Final logo design

 

 

 *Rough Album Cover Design

 

Post class reflection for Process Work on Conflict in a Relationship @School of Making Thinking:



The movement exercise began with the left hand, which embodied a relationship we were in conflict with. Letting the energy of that individual fill the gesture of the hand, we facilitated the movement that arose, allowing it to grow larger, more specific.

It was clawing and grasping, my whole torso was a hungry mouth that my hungry left hand was trying to feed and it was filled with a muscular and bottomless possessiveness. It couldn't cover enough space in each sweep, so my left hand grew frantic, trying to pull from everywhere at once, ripping my body through space to find, to feed, to claim, calling more and more of my back body into action to fill the yawning cavern of my front body. Grunts fell through my clamped teeth, my lips in a thin, frustrated line like hers, letting my sense of her fill me completely, controlling my movements, motivating my breath, senseless with the helpless, blindly destructive quality of her existence.

Slowly the action dies away, coming to a stillness from which our right hand will eventually move from. There is a way in which embodying that dark force makes clear the feeling and motion called up in my right hand.

The right hand represents Me in the relationship, and yawns open like a flower unfurling towards the sun. I always end up seeing a little girl, when I do explorations of my self-definition in this particular class, but in the exercise, I AM that little girl, not just leaning down to talk to her as she stands in front of me. Focusing on the feeling of BEING this right side selfness rather than reacting to my left side darkness, I radiate cool white light as I turn my face up to some imaginary sunshine, and I scoop up what is inside of me, offering it up, reaching my right hand out hoping to put my hand into someone else's, curling my fingers one at a time around the hand that is not there to receive the gift of myself.

Letting the right hand expression slowly diminish, the left had is invited back in. As a conversation begins between the two sides we are asked to alter the intensities of right and left to explore the ways in which these essences overlap and respond to each other. Eventually my two different gestures begin to register in a dance that moves with the rhythm of breathing - the grasping consumption of my left side seems to be what give my right hand the ability to reach out, to offer myself up, to desire connection to other that lives just beyond my fingertips, just beyond my faith. The taking in and the giving away eventually lost their sequential relationship and like respiration at the cellular level, became a constant function of being alive, in and out from all directions at once, carrying me fluidly through space.

In the stark contrast I can see how I filled in the blanks for my first, most primal relationship, developing reactions and awarenesses in the places where my mother was blind or inefficient, so became a hyper functioning half of a Unit that could never allow me to sustain myself as a singular Whole. In the toxicity of my relationship with the Mother Principle, the only way to stop everything from being taken from the endless exhalation of my spirit was to sever the tie completely. So I cut it out. But without those unexpressed muscles in the form of another person, and a protective shield built up around that tender, bloody part of myself, I can only remain a hyper functioning half of a person, until I reach into the pulp and scar tissue and find a way to push the blood through, to inspire movement - to allow myself to be hungry instead of ashamed and embarrassed by it, so I might one day know fullness, so that I may give because there is plenty, not at the expense of myself. to learn how to inhale for every one of my cells crying out for breath. to inhale because I deserve to. because I need to, NOT because I am selfish. Because it is part of my job on this planet, in this moment. right now.


In a different class earlier that day, I had encountered a similar edge, but having spent most of my life proving to myself and the world that most boundaries don't actually exist - I slammed headfirst into a wall I didn't see coming. It seems I function the best inside of a fight response, it is pushing against these walls that taught me what I am made of. To counteract the boundary-less form of my mother, I have become a wall, a vigilante force, the boundary that no one else will give her. Constantly braced for impact, but without purpose when I am not going to war with a person, an idea, an edge, I throw myself into storm after storm, a necessary call to arms to fill me with adrenaline and bloody precision, only to lose focus and determination in the calm. In class the attempt at reaching out to explore with hungry fingertips disrupted my ability to function. Caught between a push and a reach something broke down in my sense of my self, which I had thought was limitless until I found this internal barrier, this wall of shame and fear, this place where I was not allowed to go and it took all of my body to contain the snot and the sobs that wanted to fall out of me.


In a developmental movement class this morning, watching babies roll around, and considering the different constellations created between caretakers and the infant axis they rotated around, it became clear to me that if I can only see my own troubled childhood in their little bodies and faces, than I cannot possibly see them, their individual expression of selfness. I must detangle myself from these life myths and elaborate defenses, or I won't be able to see past the colors of my experience to what actually lives inside of every creature that falls under my gaze. I don't want to wander forever in a field of my own ghosts.






"Interpreting the past is like trying to sketch a picture of the Grand Canyon from space."

I never thought to find you in my madness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sitting on a bus, watching the sun rise over manhattan, I got distracted by the graceful, meticulous movements of the steering wheel, and shifted my focus to the bus driver. Dark, lean frame, he only moved as much as he needed, just as there was no excesses in his figure, in his expression, in his words. Every 5 dollar bill he folded perfectly, matching corner to corner, tucked into its one special place on the vast dashboard. He was master of that little tiny universe. People got on and got off, his spine stayed straight, his execution unbroken, he was the same. A rock. A perfect human machine. Practically invisible.

While walking my dog before work last week, a shockingly beautiful toddler stumbled over to interact with her, and the two regarded each other tensely for a second. Her mother watched from nearby, a mother that was so young and pretty it rooted my feet to that place, and when she started to talk, bursting pride of her smart, strong little girl, I felt compelled to witness her strength and clarity of vision for what she had created. From the hood, with her ghetto accent, she explained to me her search for the kind of daycare that would feed her little girl's mind, her efforts to provide as much information about colors and letters and numbers, to give that little girl the building blocks to have a mind as strong as she was pretty. I didn't ask if there was a boyfriend, or a parent helping her, but I listened, just in case there wasn't anyone to tell her that she was doing so good. That what she was providing was powerful. That for how lonely being a parent must feel sometimes, her priorities were directed so fiercely and positively for this little girl's future, all chubby cheeks, exploding curls, long eyelashes, chatting in gibberish to my dog beside me, and up at me with complete, unbroken trust. Because of her serious respect for the task of motherhood, in the face of economic and personal limitations, this little girl was going to be ok.

I was fabricating for a steel shop a few years ago, and we would go on regular runs to drop off our product to get coated with an industrial finish (powder coated). The factory was just over the bridge, almost exclusively manned by latin American women who managed to make it through the day in that non airconditioned and dirty space with full makeup and clean, brightly colored, feminine clothing, while I left black with the steel grease of the products I was handling. I watched all sorts of things roll past us to be coated - dvd player parts, xmas tree stands, household supplies, car parts... and these women would hang these various things up in a carousel shaped assembly line to rotate through a spraying machine, covering the handmade, raw material with a machine made finish, effectively erasing the history underneath each metal piece, masking the subtle differences in construction, the sputter of blown out gas from someone's welder that caught a draft, the muttering of hurt or anger or fear or frustration from a person who was screamed at by their boss, who wasn't given the raise they needed to support their family, the fight they just got in with one of their offensive coworkers, of laziness, of learning how to weld for the first time, of burning sweat rolling down into eyes... to the delicate tinkling sound of a real carousel. That sound still haunts me, an actual circus carousel song echoing through that massive, dirty factory, that we assume everything is made by a machine, that we consume blindly without any real awareness of where products come from, and that a human body may have constructed the things you have no respect for. I have been that steel worker that overheard someone write of something that I had fought for respect in a shop to be left alone from harassment to just do my job and valiantly create what he blew off as made by a fucking machine like I didn't bleed and cry to make that thing.

Waiting for the dryer to complete its cycle, I watched the woman folding clean laundry - in NYC many people drop their clothes off to be washed and folded, because we aren't usually gifted with washer/dryer set ups inside of our apartments - and I thought about the intimacy associated with folding laundry. There was a mountain of laundry in constant rotation in my house growing up, and it was often the chore I had received, and it has been a task I completed for a lover, once upon a time, with very specific opinions about how their things were washed and folded. My dog would come with me while I laundered, right after we rescued her, and I would carry her shy little body home in the hot laundry, so now, whenever I do laundry, she buries herself in the bag and refuses to move until its gone cold, to relive being rescued/finding safety over and over again. I wondered how many other mother's children this woman folded clothes for, if she had children, if anyone of those people whose clothes she folded ever looked her in the eyes, or thought of her when they filled their drawers with meticulously folded underwear and pants, or caught the smell of a clean shirt while they were moving through their lives and thought of the person who made it that way. Is she an exstension of a machine, or is she an overlooked artist, a protector of our personas? I watch her unfold a shirt and refold it, because it was not up to her standards the first time, and am almost jealous that someone is taking such care of those clothes, those personal belongings that we will drape our bodies and souls in. She is shaped somewhat like the Venus of Willendorf, and I realize suddenly that I had been unaware of the powerful service she provides, that she is no different than a priestess performing a ritual, of household magic, washing away the dirt and history that clung to those things - and none of the people whose clothes she has folded, so perfectly, will even feel they have a reason to look her in the eyes.

Exhausted from a week of doing construction during the day, and painting a set during the nights, I walked into a coffee shop at dawn to feed my broken body. The ladies behind the counter started cooing and gushing at me, asking if I was an artist, because I had paint all over me. I was suddenly filled with rage, that the hard ways in which I use my body, often to make the things that hold us up, whether in schools or at events are nothing in the public eye, compared to the romantic notion that I may have made some vague, un-useful 'art', that making something motivated by ego, that may never affect anyone was considered so romantic in people's eyes... that the hard effort of my body was insignificant compared to things they can't approach, things that merely sit on a wall... and then she made me a beautiful, well crafted cup of espresso and steamed milk. Art couldn't smell or taste as beautiful as the cup as I brought it to my lips and tried not to cry in relief, that after a week of making for others, someone made something, just for me. I cannot reconcile this cultural distinction, that we revere the things we don't need, but ignore the people that craft every particle of our day's existence, that human labor could mean so little, because we are taught that it is not romantic, but common. I have never had a more intimate relationship with my body and the world around me, and I think it is a huge disservice that more of us aren't required to do labor as part of our education, that the kids who go to college think they have some say in the economy when they know nothing about those of us creating as well as consuming it. People react with confusion bordering on disdain when they talk about how I'm wasting my talent, like I'm too good for menial work, but why do we glorify the things that inherently mean and affect us the least? Did machines build the roads that connect us? the sidewalks we walk on as we rush through our so-important lives? The buildings we live our lives in?

Just as culturally there is such conflict in priorities and our concept of valuable and desirable in relation to jobs and the work we do, I find myself in a strange place as a woman who falls outside of gender norms and cultural expectation - i'm too strong and too smart, my conversations too intense, my hair too short, my build too thick and solid to be what men learn is valuable in a female partner. The things I am most proud of and consider to be most valuable in myself negate most of the things a man is expected to provide or be proud of in a female counterpart, I don't naturally inspire tenderness or protectiveness in my coworkers and potential mates. I have come to terms with the fact that I will not experience love in my youth, that frivolous and lighthearted courting, the vigorousness of being wanted passionately are not things that I will have the firm elasticity of flesh to give to. At this point, I've witnessed so many embarrassed attempts from men who have no capacity to fathom my needs, that I would rather embrace the parts of self that are strong, and let go of the things that make me feel inadequate, less than, a failure, like all these aborted sexual encounters. I experience such a deep intimacy with coworkers, myself, building structures, trusting each other and our bodies, I would rather know that strength and relish in it, and build things that hold others up, whether they see it or not, and come home to just me and my dog for the rest of my life, than be boxed into culturally misguided notions of what is 'romantic', and be forced to give up the things I value the most about myself to fit inside of it. To be proud of what I am rather than ashamed for what I am not.

 

 

Some people say a man is made out of mud
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said (well a bless my soul)

You load sixteen tons what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one morning it was drizzling rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebreak by an old mama lion
Ain't no high tone woman make me walk the line

You load sixteen tons what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

If you see me coming better step aside
A lot of men didn't a lot of men died
One fist of iron the other of steel
If the right one don't get you then the left one will

You load sixteen tons what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

 

the river tasted me once, spit me back out, so i'm not afraid of her.

The devil? He exists. I've seen him. He lives in the shadows, and fills the holes in our being caused by self doubt. He lived in the words that found me on the playground, whispers from my peers that fell from the lips of their parents, the PTA, who saw we didn't go to church, didn't follow the rules, didn't attend bake sales or fundraisers. Satan worshipers they called us. But he also followed me home at the end of every day, as I trudged as slowly as I could through the thickness of trees in my lush little town, past houses, each one with a different personality to be considered, until the foreboding of turning the corner into my own neighborhood. Often, as I was growing up, I awoke in the middle of the night to the devil standing in my doorway with my light on, watching me as I slept. In the guise of Stepfather, my voice had no meaning, for the devil distracted my mother with lust and laziness, and my fear and words and needs were insignificant to the soul she traded for the ease of darkness, and the wickedness of idleness. As I grew into my voice, and my strength, I would have killed him, beaten his now fragile drug infused bones to a puddle of hate, with no remorse, but it didn't matter how hard I tried to protect my family, the greed and hunger for an easy life was still a flame in the remnants of my mother's soul. She slept with the devil to acquire things without the effort that honest people earned with the hard work of their bodies. She gave away one of her children for an afternoon, traded the innocence of my little brother, as well as her own body for a piece of my Stepfather's inheritance money before it was lost in drug trafficking and prostitutes. The devil drives a peacock blue 350Z and carries a duffel bag full of money.

I did not get a chance to kill him, and he changed his form to fit my evolving insecurities. Donning small, sweet breasts and a sassy upturned nose, he inflicted a pain so close to my heart I mistook it for the fire of being in love, and I lost myself in the urgency of feeling that ransacked my body for three years, the scar tissue building up so fast it obscured everything important in my life. 'Worthless', she screamed at me, so many times those three horrible, lost years, I had that word for breakfast everyday, I drank it from her lips when we fucked in the shadows and I believed it. Nothing fans the flames of abuse like honest intentions. My goodness and trust were the knives she used to flay me open to the spine like the center attraction at a pig roast, skin charred, and the devil invited everyone to grab a plastic fork and cheap off-brand barbeque sauce to sample the texture and flavor of my beauty and innocence and moral integrity.

I thought I had put some distance between me and the devil, but I glimpsed him the other day, lurking in the eyes of my coworkers in the shop, in the poisonous words that have suddenly poured slick and stinging from the one person who had my back, whom I shared my triumphs and accumulating dreams with, as well as my fears and insecurities. It doesn't matter what I do, good or bad, if I have to defend myself from verbal abuse, or I fight for someone to get a raise, or take on responsibilities I won't get paid for, simply because it needs to be done, the guys in the shop will whisper over the table at the lunches I have been ostracized from about how all of those things merely prove that I am the reason seasonal workers have been let go in the past, that I am the reason people who don't work get addressed by the bosses for not working, that raises are withheld as well as handed out because of me, that failed crops and plagues are dictated by my whims, that anything I receive: respect, accolades, raises, authority are born solely from the whiteness of my skin, rather than my competence  rather than my own strength and ability. And I watch smart, capable people choose ignorance over growth, to spit the devil's rime rather than recognize the truth and beauty of the people around them. It doesn't matter if I have no awareness of things that are happening that I get blamed for, but they are still my fault, and every gesture I make with good and honest intentions gets twisted by these people I use to love, into cruel, evil shadows of themselves. The only way to protect myself is to become a ghost again, when I have been trying so hard to become real.

All of these occurances feed off of the depth of my insecurities, my need for validation, my earnest desire to see people treated fairly and getting what they deserve, good intentions and open, honest conversations, and the more of myself I give away, in love or in fear, the more I fan the flames of hellfire that scorch the souls of my feet and stumble on my path. I am a different person than I was three days ago. I can no longer blame my childhood for the setbacks and confusion of my adult self, or use it as an excuse for my lack of awareness of the darkness that waits in the shadows of every action of my physical being, of every word that falls unguarded from my mouth to be twisted and misunderstood and used against me. I am solely responsible for what I give away of myself, and what I allow to dog me. Self doubt and insecurity are the doorways that open to the devil, and the only way to escape is to eradicate all self doubts and insecurity. The only way to survive, is to wholly, without question, trust your instincts, trust your intuition, and ignore your fears. YOU HAVE TO TRUST YOURSELF COMPLETELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION. Yourself and no one else.

Then the devil will be blind.

because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

It feels like I've been waiting my whole life for a sense that my being leaves a wake in the ether, a ripple in the universe. I have always watched certain people who seemed more real then others, who carried a seismic force of character, the virility of their atoms leaving a residue on the world around them and a tremble of tectonic plates beneath their footsteps. The groove of a wrinkle declaring its owner's history, ancient cowboy boots worn smooth by chain motor grease, the unapologetic expression of one's self, they all make my heart stutter a bit, drawing myself as if around a fire to glean warmth, only what I hunger for is the essence of realness, of deep and true knowledge, the ability to mould one's reality... in the hopes it will somehow rub off onto my physical presence. Typically I have associated these elements with men far older than me, adding strange kinks to my romantic and professional history, but recently have found people possessed of this sense of weight in knowledge and fearlessness that are close enough to my age that it has completely redefined my sense of reality and how much easier it is to manipulate then I had ever realized, that I am having to unlearn everything I ever knew to be true. 

From a young age I put myself in the category of survivor, of rising above the negative elements of my childhood, but when I came across an article about child psychology and being raised in different circumstances, how it affects us as we mature, I found that I fit an entire description of lacking major survival skills. In the article I found myself, the difficulty expressing needs, a stunted emotional vocabulary, inherent fear of authority, lack of feeling validated in my judgments, all the things I wrestle with every day in my professional life, that wracked at my adolescent spirit in grade school. This article touched a nerve I never knew was raw. My younger sister had experienced a vehemently painful senior year in high school, but being away at college, I had a hard time resonating with her trauma, and it wasn't until almost 5 years later, meeting her in her adult incarnation that we spoke as peers and I could finally grasp what had happened that awful year for her. She too fit the description of this article, and trailblazer that I suspect she has always been, she had become aware of our reality and its circumstances before she had the emotional vocabulary to explain it. She was choking on the truth.

My mother lied. Like Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, parents lie about what is real. Children believe because they respect authority, and we trust our parents to have our best interests at heart. What if you suddenly woke up and realized your mother was not so different from the mother who sits at the subway threshold with a baby to further elicit your sympathy and guarantee the silver change right of your pocket? Having been raised by con artists, I feel like a child of the court of miracles, having never witnessed capable adults, moral adults, real adults it was a shock to find a bright fierce world, instead of perpetual semi darkness and living at the edge of survival on purpose, because it is easier to elicit pity change. Hearing the infantilizing way in which my mother spoke to my adult sister, and her vague attempts to force me into an emotional stranglehold, I suddenly realized that we had all grown up, so she no longer had purchase on other people's emotions, she couldn't be the single mother raising four children to beg and borrow money for milk and pot, and now desperately attempted to invert our relationship with guilt. No, you did not give everything you had to us. How dare you say that to me. You chose to live a substandard life and are trying to blame your laziness in developing individuality and respect ON us. How dare you call yourself a 'child advocate' and teach child development courses, or talk about the survival skills you gave us when you raised your children to consider it NORMAL to live with a crack addict and convict. Remember how you paid for tickets to Germany for you and my little brother? What do you think that teaches your daughters about how much or how little their bodies are worth? If actions speak louder than words, any values you have ever claimed are null and void the face of your actions, and the supreme selfishness in which you have not only lived your life, but subjected your children to have taught us that you believe in nothing but instant gratification and superficial desires. Like a child of the circus, it's no wonder that I am constantly striving for nuances of what is real, having spent my life in a grand charade, where my young eyes witnessed the adults around me with sagging and cracked faces act out the kind of immature pantomime I was born too old and responsible to ever partake in.

Suddenly I know what my sister saw years ago, and I only regret that she had to swallow the truth, that it writhed inside her, alone and misunderstood for so long.

So I have moved like a ghost through my own life, in a desperate search for gravity. With lovers, friends and work, I have evaporated, cheshire catlike, leaving nothing but an echo of laughter, and no true knowledge of who I am, nothing and no one rooting me to this time and this place. Without a discerning eye, and having developed no clear concept of truth from my childhood, often it has been too easy for people to take what they want from me, without my voice rising convincingly to declare boundaries for itself, so I have been poised for desperate flight for what feels like an eternity. But somewhere in the rush, I have found moments of blinding truth and values that have risen fully formed from the core of my being. The deeper and farther I go in eradicating the blood ties and emotional strangleholds that claw at me, the more I know what I truly believe, what I am derived of, people can SEE me, instead of through me, or project upon me.

I am tired of the pantomime, tired of this mask of sweetness and laughter, even when my insides are aching with anger and bitterness. I want someone to know me. To know the softness under the exoskeleton, the steel under the fear.

Now it begins. For the first time in almost a decade, I unpacked all the boxes. I threw the cardboard away. I claimed the walls, I made a space, and it is mine. Not pieces of other people. I have a family, and while it includes my siblings, it is not one of relatives, but one of my choosing, consisting of people I respect, because to me, love and respect are indivisible. I cannot love what I don't respect. I am finally ready to build an identity, to be something tangible, definable. To be real.

"What is REAL?" asked the Velveteen Rabbit one day... "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When [someone] loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept."

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand... once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”