THE CALL OF THE UNIVERSE IS,
"DON'T DISAPPEAR."
First breaths.
Lashes part
merging consciousness with flesh.
The sun forms secret whispers on the wall
like morse code from the stars,
“It’s ok to wake now.”
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The blinds,
left cracked for the moon to visit,
now form a cage of ribs on the ceiling,
sun bending the darkness.
She steps out of slumber
and steadies herself against the shadows,
finds ways to be soft
though she’s made of fire.
She rises,
moving her skeleton down the wall toward me,
gentle but focused.
Her cage of ribs now covers
my cage of ribs,
blurs the lines of sight and touch.
I too am being steadied against the shadows.
I am soft, I am fire.
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I rise,
lured by her movement forward.
The whispers,
gentle but focused,
bend me through my darkness.
I write,
“It’s ok to wake now.”
First breaths.
Every spring, the cherry blossoms remind me of my wedding. It was a small, outdoor ceremony. I was barefoot and nine-years-old. My best friend carried the wicker basket full of petals down the aisle, tossing them to the ground like wilting cares we were too young to have. After saying I do, we reset the stage and I did the same for her. We took turns getting married in my driveway for hours intermittently arguing about who had to pick up the discarded petals so we could re-walk the twenty feet beneath those pink trees down to our imaginary husbands. That spring was the last time I remember dreaming about my wedding day.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in North Carolina. In the early ‘90s, Christian communities weren’t focused on creating an ethos committed to bringing in strong women with suggested capacities reaching further than “pastor’s wife.” That isn’t to say those women weren’t seen as full people with ideas and merit—they were, my own mother included. But they were often reduced to someone’s spouse. There was a clear, pre-paved path for girls like me: Graduate high school. Go to college. Get married. Have Kids. I remember knowing I was to be a wife before knowing what it was to be a human.
My parents intentionally chose a church community for our family that supported things like electing women as deacons and board members. They raised me with enough room for curiosity to exist in an otherwise black and white world. In my senior yearbook, they wrote, “Remember who you are and whose you are.” It was a gentle release into the world with permission to lift the veil and explore what their world couldn’t give me. I was lucky.
As a painfully introverted teenager, the concave way I moved through the world allowed me to exist in mature spaces rather innocuously. I often found myself nodding along to conversations about life experiences I hadn’t yet had, soaking up information about layered, complicated lives. A subtle thread began to weave itself into an involuntary attraction I felt toward older women whose lives didn’t fit into my predicted timeline. Bless your heart is a phrase people in the south use when they want to sound sympathetic while talking about you behind your back. I was particularly captivated by those women whose hearts were…blessed, whose experiences didn’t pair well within
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our bible-belt culture. Divorced. Career-driven. Childless. I wanted to know those women—the ones who were born in boxes that didn’t hold them. They were light and had a knowing. When I was with them, I had it too. I was looking for a mirror—anyone I could see myself in. I wanted to discover who she was.
I wouldn’t come to name this woven thread of mine out loud until several years later when a friend asked me why I loved them. Without hesitation, I said, “Because you make me feel free.” I’m not sure I realized then that I was beginning to pull taught this singular desire that had always been my true center and my deepest longing. I wanted to feel free. And I was finding freedom within people who echoed my own love back to me.
On my sixteenth birthday, my dad announced to the entirety of the Wednesday-night supper crowd that I was “Sweet-sixteen and never-been kissed.” Time of death: 20 minutes ‘til choir practice. The next calendar year my actual first kiss happened when a date dropped me off at my parent’s door after dinner and driving aimlessly (and silently…like, there were no words spoken) around overgrown country backroads until my curfew. We had family visiting at the time and my grandpa accidentally witnessed the unexpected, ineffective and dissatisfying moment that relinquished my sixteen-year-old title only to replace it with, “Seventeen: She’s been kissed, but she’s mad about it.”
The idea of belonging to someone has always bothered me. Being male-adjacent created a mental barrier of what I could and couldn’t do, who I could and couldn’t be. I feared I’d suddenly disappear into a we. Seventeen is too young to disappear. Many of my friends ended up pregnant or paired up by graduation and their lives irrevocably changed by their commitment to their other half. I didn’t know myself well enough to stay visible in a mirror, much less whole in a relationship. At that age, love felt like a thing outside of me, and I wasn’t sure how to find my way into it.
In college, my favorite class was Women’s Studies. It taught me about the feminist movement, my rights as a creature born anatomically female, and how the media was sure to ruin any positive impression I had of myself. Every week, we unpacked a new layer of identity-infused messaging I hadn’t realized I was swallowing. We delved into subjects like birth control, abortion and choices I didn’t know were mine to make as a human inside a woman’s body, living in a man’s world. This class was the first time I’d heard unique opinions from my female peers and began to realize that vastly different realities all existed under the same sun. There wasn’t one way to be in the world, and that excited me.
Four years later, I had my heart broken by the person I thought was going to give me the title of “wife.” Given the predictable narrative that becomes your early twenties in the south, there was a constant loop of condescending comfort from dozens of newlywed friends, “Oh you’ll find him when you’re not looking.” They were well-meaning sentiments followed by me laying in my bed confused because I thought I was supposed to be looking. Twenty-five felt too early to give up on institutions like church or marriage, but too late in discovering I actually was making my own life choices. I felt backward and lost, but a small part of me felt like I had been given back to myself. I began to realize the “straight and narrow” might be the popular path, but it wasn’t necessarily the most truthful.
I found myself going back to what I knew—seeking relationships with women who weren’t scared of the unpredictable way life moved through them—desperately wanting to feel their reflective light on my skin. I watched as uncertainty lead them to the expression of their own internal truths, and I slowly found mine. Old enough to have experienced loss and disappointment, confusion and feeling derailed, it was my turn to decide who I would become. I mimicked their fluidity until I could hear the natural cadence of my own voice speaking to me. Ease returned to my thoughts and I felt the rhythm of my choices moving me forward. I was remembering who I was, and I really liked her.
For a happy, busy, unattached woman in my thirties, the world is very practiced at kindly reminding me of all the ways in which I am lacking: Don’t you want a job that gives you this? Don’t you want a spouse so you can have that? Don’t you want children so you can feel this? I read magazines that beg me to buy into a love story that is purchasable.
I watch movies that place value and status on socially constructed ideas about what identity, success, and happiness should look like. I scroll through my own social media wondering what narrative I am trying to tell, and to whom am I telling it?
I can fall in love in a cinematic moment with the best of them. But it’s never been the driving force within me. I experience the same free-falling feeling when a certain chord progression moves me to tears, when a butterfly picks my skin as its landing surface despite a literal world of choices, or when one of those déjà vu moments hits me in the middle of a dinner party surrounded by all of my favorite people. It’s a feeling of being complete, of being whole. I am lured by the balance of witnessing my own evolution into freedom while harboring that very human part of me that actually does want to belong.
The beauty of age is learning that nothing is written in stone. I’m still not sold on the idea of spending exorbitant amounts of money on an event where I am to be the centerfold, vulnerably unveiling my deepest and truest passions to my love for the sake of satisfying a hunger in other people’s eyes. Maybe I’ll meet someone who changes that narrative. Maybe I’ll meet someone whose narrative I will change. For now, I sit on the north side of the home I now own, as hundreds of fireflies flicker under the cherry blossoms. They rise, speaking their existence with light, and I am reminded that what my nine-year-old self was looking for was something she already had.
Love is freedom, and I am free.
I recently started going dancing at a local venue that hosts “Motown Mondays” every week. I initially went with a friend on a whim. Then I just kept going back. I thought I was doing it because I loved the music of that era, which I do. But it has actually been about reclaiming the literal rhythm of my body.
I didn’t realize until adulthood that I didn’t know how to trust myself. I got baptized because I thought I was supposed to. I went out with a boy in high school I didn’t like because he deserved a good girl like me. The first day of college a fellow student asked if I wanted to join her group for dinner and I turned to ask my parents who were no longer there. I chose my major because a guidance counselor told me I would be good at it. I stopped eating food because the world told me my skin took up too much space to be loved.
For two and half decades, I tried to disappear into a holographic version of myself—a spiritual being whose body didn’t actually have any needs. Do not be a bother. Do not get in the way. Do not feel. Every thought born in my heart traveled to my head which told me to go to a book, then look to a pastor who would point me to a God who would lovingly look “down” and say, “You already have you everything you need.”
My highest intuition told me that was actually true, but the reverse process of those words coming back to me siphoned through the pastor and the book and the thoughts who were starting to think their own things came back more like, “You’re good right? I’m here if you need anything, but just don’t need
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anything.” My heart stopped feeling on behalf of itself. It still beat, but for what other people needed. Most people I know can file this into the ever growing “me too” version of their own experience with an evangelical consumption of ideas and disembodiment. I’m still really learning what that means and shedding the layers of it but these words from @iamjamieleefinch capture a big part of it. “I lost god to gain myself.
I’ll lose you to keep her if I have to.” Personal freedom for me is a deep desire to discover the most expanded version of myself. Right now she wants to feel, she wants to move; so we dance.
There is this thing about being human. This way about us where we tend to feel that the present moment we are in, is the one that will define us forever. We “know” that’s not the case, but it becomes an unspoken guide to whether or not we are “ok”. If we are experiencing something that feels positive, we attach ourselves to ideas of being good, worthy, capable, productive and free. Conversely, when we experience something that feels negative, we insert our being right in the middle of it and are sure the world is ending. When external realities are the sole metric by which we allow defining feelings, our sense of identity shifts into a reflection of the outside world and the absence of certain factors feels devastating.
In a world where everything is accessible NOW, we are quick to self-destruct and impatient to allow healing. We will move twelve steps toward a thing and then want to get out of it in just one. But the more focused into a feeling we get, the more of it we create. One negative thought, then another, and another. We wake up feeling swallowed, suspended inside a moment we are sure will end us…rejected, isolated, abandoned, dismissed, misunderstood, uninvited. These REAL experiences are blighted with ideas about scarcity and feelings of fear. “Now” Is all we have, but it is not all we are.
Sometimes recognizing that you want something different simply sounds like, “I can’t do THIS anymore.”
Zoom out. Soften your gaze toward the thing you have been creating so much of. Bring yourself back to a position of observing the thing, instead of feeling like the thing IS you. Release the tension of resisting what is and allow it to just be. Clarity. Find a new thought that feels better. And another, and another, and another. Your momentum will shift until the belly of the thing you thought would end you, becomes the womb from which you are born.
You are always becoming.
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I gave up alcohol for a hot minute. I wasn't overly drinking, but I was constantly sluggish and uninspired. I was reaching for ideas and desires that required me to rise into a new version of myself that I wasn’t able to access or embody.
Every time a craving for a familiar pattern comes up, I look at it, hold it. 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds. What is it about. Is there something I want to mute, ignore, hide from? THERE. I have a tired mind, so I sleep. THERE, I am anxious so I write. THERE. I am insecure, so I focus on my breath until I am centered. And then it dissipates - turning a solid road block into vapor.
The space from which we consume anything gives rise to how it will affect our body, mind and soul. The perspective from which we see is based on the emotional frequency we carry at any given moment. If we are on a high playing field, we are less affected by lower-moving energies in or around us and have more clarity to decide if we want more or less of something. If we are entering an altered state at an already resistant level, our experience is much more likely to carry our conditioned state further down because the blur feels like relief. And it is, until it isn’t.
It’s how any addictive pattern happens in us—repeated frequencies building momentum. As our cells adjust to our new “normal”, what once registered as negative or depressing starts to feel like familiar comfort. Our default state becomes detachment from ourselves, and attachment to the things that are keeping us “comfortable”. Feeling better is often a harder choice because involves a level of awareness we can’t find from where we are.
I thoroughly enjoy a glass of wine, especially in the company of close friends. But I’m really grateful for however long this moment lasts too. I was living into a habit I was less aware of than I care to admit, and the release of that is empowering. My head and my heart feel connected—a legitimate struggle for an #enneagramfive.
We all tend to have a thing. A tool we use to numb out or escape. Next time it comes up, look at it long enough to see it. Then choose if you want it or not...and don’t be afraid of the answer.
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I am drawn to thoughts about light often. What it is and where it came from. How I use it and how I waste it. The ease of it, the power of it. Poems and hymns have tried to capture it; bills are paid to pretend to own it. It floats inside lightening bugs, flickers in a fire, decorates a home and grounds the sky.
Light travels in waves, but we ignore its pulse even when we are bathed in it. It is constantly moving, speaking the same pure existence over and over. In this dualistic world, light’s contrasting partner is darkness—a thing we are taught to fear. We’ve determined that dark means “bad” and light means “good”. Light provides the path of least resistance, the experience of ease, and the historical lens of the universe. But without the shadow of darkness, we would be blinded by pure light. It’s why we can only stare directly at the sun by looking at the moon.
Light serves as a guide, points, and gives clarity. Darkness provides the definition we need to create boundaries, the depth by which we measure growth and is the landlord of rock bottom. You can’t go up if you don’t know that you are down. Darkness offers knowledge, light brings wisdom. And yet, we fear our capacity for both because we judge the experiences that sharpen our gaze enough to give us clear vision.
Humans glow in the dark. Literally. We emit visible light from our bodies 1,000 x less intense than the naked eye can see, but nonetheless magical. Every day we stare directly in the faces of that light. But we have created external conditions by which we determine who is good or bad, light or dark. We shame, dehumanize and imprison anyone who doesn’t conform to our conditions because we think it lessons the chance that we won’t belong.
We would rather be right, than recognize sameness in someone else. We would rather punish another person for not seeing the sun than admit we’re looking through the moon ourselves. Every human already has the one thing we try to measure them against, the other half of the equation by which we see:
“This little light of mine…”
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I am envious of people who grow up knowing what they want. Those rare hearts who journey down to earth and burst through their mother’s womb with a focused sense of the life they are coming here to create. They wade through their very human childhoods with some part of them keenly connected to the source within them that knows of the thing they must do or risk sacrificing their happiness for. It doesn’t always look like fame. It doesn’t always look like monetary success. They don’t always bloom early in life, but they know they will in fact, bloom.
These dreamers become pillars in our lives. People we look to as altars of belief – “If they can, then maybe so can I”. In our admiration of their perceived success, they become our inspiration. We take them with us in our pockets, we speak to them in our times of confusion, we listen for the answers of what they would do if they were in our shoes. They become our teachers, our guides and the source of what we deem possible for ourselves.
But at some point, you must allow your admiration to turn inward. Wasted inspiration eventually becomes dormant imitation. It never truly finds the original form it is intended to take in you. You realize the courage, the freedom, the responsibility it took for those others you held so high to climb the mountains they did to turn back and teach you how to do the same. So you start walking, and it is terrifying. Because now the altar of belief you seek is within yourself. The possibility you seek is your own. The potential you fear missing is waiting, for YOU. Your inspiration becomes the art of finding yourself. Because she is what you were looking for all along.
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Traditions are patterns, habits or beliefs we place value on, become attached to and pass on because of how they make us feel. There is a deep beauty and an ease in living inside ways of life that tell you who you are and how to be. It’s easy to get frustrated when circumstances or other people interfere with our traditions because it feels like they are taking away something valuable from us. But what do you do when valuable traditions no longer allow your full expansion?
I no longer have a “church” community (for many reasons), a routine and rhythm of life I lived inside of for almost 30 years. The values inside this “way” I held for so long are still mine because they are internal. They are sacred practices of peace, community, growth, accountability, solitude, learning, love, commitment, honor, truth and beauty. I have had many encounters with people who don’t understand how I (daughter of two ministerial parents) could be “ok” not going to church. The absence of that habit makes them feel I am missing something, hiding something, or that something needs to be fixed.
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I have learned that their questions tell me that church is an important tradition to them. I have seen the beautiful ways in which they have found and placed value on their time, commitment and beliefs. I have felt the unease of their bodies in my presence because my experience does not fit into their perspective of “what is”. What I know is that their same traditions instilled deep values in me that matter. What I know is I still practice those values. What I know is it is ok that my practices look different and are less certain. What I know is fluidity has boundaries but not edges. I am grateful for the ways that our horizons continue to cross. I will be honest when the boxed corners of beliefs meant to be sincere hurt me or others. And I will move forward with where I came from as the wind in my sails, even if the ocean takes me farther than they can yet see.
I love witnessing the evolution of humanity into more and more freedom. We are not fully there, but the moments we do allow each other to be our fullest selves are breathtaking. Those spaces have a magnetic energy that cannot be ignored. Those spaces elicit awe, reverence even, at the sheer magic of a collective of people demanding to be celebrated simply for who they are.
A star forms as the denser parts of its core collapse under its own weight. We too don’t become the purest versions of ourselves until we allow our innate gravity to pull us back to our center of being. I saw so many different types of bodies this weekend at pride. Bodies telling stories—some defined, some in character, some still being written—all articulating truths as ancient as our galaxy siblings. Communicating the sum truth of our souls actualizes our light and becomes the source by which others can see themselves.
Happy Pride, Nashville.
You are a stunning display of the cosmos.
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I walked by these pencils in Art and Invention one week before I boarded a plane to New York City. I immediately thought of Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail and the charming way she describes New York in the fall, “...bouquets of sharpened pencils.” For some reason, that visual stuck with me for years. I stood there looking at these ordinary no. 2 pencils and had a flash image of me holding up my own “bouquet of sharpened pencils” to take a picture on a street full of apartments like the one she lived in. I laughed at the way the thought of that experience made me feel like a five year old sneaking an extra ice cream sandwich when her mom wasn’t looking. I left the store for dinner with dear friends and released that happy vision into the void.
Three hours later, one of those friends pulled the pencils out of her pocket and handed them to me. “I saw you looking at them and it just felt fun to get them for you.” I ugly cried and tried to find the words to tell them why I was losing it over...pencils.
That tiny, lighthearted day dream actually held the unspoken questions I didn’t know I was asking. “Am I seen? Does what I want matter?”
In the months prior to this moment, I had been finding the courage to see several truths about myself and creating the momentum I needed to rise into the space to speak them. By daring to imagine I was worth asking the questions, I opened myself up for the answers to find me in a way I couldn’t have planned: I was seen. It does matter.
It was spring, and my bouquet wasn’t sharpened, but my flash dream came true. I stood somewhere in the upper west side awkwardly taking pictures of pencils with the words “stay weird” etched in gold and it was pure magic. In a city of 8 million people, I was still seen. I felt old versions of myself falling away and thanked them for carrying me to this moment. I recalled seeing a future version of myself and realized she was already here. Whether anyone else ever saw her, I could. And I, was finally enough.
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I hate lilies. They are beautiful, but I hate them. I hate the way they smell. Like death.
There was an open casket at Carol's funeral. The one and only open casket I’ve ever peered over the edge of. I kept waiting for her to open her eyes or start laughing. I say laughing, but I was really kind of terrified. At 7 years old, I didn’t have a context with which to see or understand death. Come to think of it, I’ve been terrified of it ever since. I remember the dress she was wearing, how her hair was fixed, the natural, yet unnatural expression on her face….and smell of lilies so overwhelming it almost made me sick to my stomach. Death is a part of life. Loss is a part of strength. Sometimes you expect it, and sometimes it freezes you.
She was always my favorite aunt. I don’t really know why. I didn’t see her that much, or really know her that well, but I only have good memories of her. She always made me laugh. She had a big personality, but not the obnoxious kind. When I was little we used to go outside at my grandma’s house and pick these tiny, periwinkle colored flowers from the yard. Sometimes my crazy great uncle Jack, a tiny man who always wore a trucker hat and had more gums than teeth, would come with us. She came to visit my family once, got locked out of the house in her robe and had to ask the neighbor for a key. Another time, she and my mom and I sat in my grandma’s kitchen and shucked corn. Or maybe it was peas. Or maybe it was my other aunt. I don’t really remember, but when I try to, I find myself hoping she was there. She loved to sing and she was really good at it. Outside of my own musical family, I’d like to think that’s where I got my love for it, my thing that would connect me to her, though I never actually heard her sing.
I don’t remember what her voice sounds like anymore. I’m sure there are a lot of things about her I don’t know. And many I never will.
She was a bit of a prodigal. She made some significant decisions in her late-high school
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years that would shift her path far from what those who knew and loved her had envisioned for her. She challenged her parent’s authority, demanded her freedom, and my grandparents painfully allowed her to go. They experienced deep hurt and feelings of helplessness during those years—disappointment, fear, anger and forgiveness—confusion at how often they had watched her open acceptance of others, her generosity, and her knack for giving advice to others, for it to then be her that was struggling. She spent Christmas with us all most years, and remained in contact often, but she never “came home”.
I didn’t know any of this growing up, as people tend to shield children from the awareness of some realities as long as they can to protect the purity of their minds. I only know what I now know from being privy to family memories and conversations as I got older. And I’m grateful for that. The person I have preserved in the still-Edenic parts of my memory is the larger than life, made me laugh, literally walked through the flowers in the garden in the cool of the day with me, beautiful and life-giving woman who for unspoken, intangible reasons was always my favorite. And still is.
My aunt had a heart attack at age 39 and died in the back of a 7 Eleven gas station, where she had been living for some time. Maybe she woke up, saw her reality, and felt she couldn’t go back because she didn’t think she deserved to.
If you had met her, you might have judged her, and that would have been a shame. It would have made me angry. It still would. But it would more so make me sad. Sad that you might choose to see her circumstance instead of her worth. Her battles with darkness instead of her love for the outcast. That you might miss a piece of the beauty of humanity in the uniqueness of her to do things that you never would, because it came in a form you thought it shouldn’t or that you didn’t understand.
She wasn’t just somebody’s aunt…she was my aunt. She had a family that loved and supported her, and wanted the best for her. She wasn’t irresponsible, but she felt ashamed. Not because she was doing horrible things, but because thought she was too far gone from the love that held her to come back.
Every time I smell a lily, I cringe. I’m 7 years old again, saying goodbye again, feeling separated and confused again. I don’t know what my aunt thought about, what she dreamed about, if she wanted different things for herself. But I break inside wondering if she knew the value she held just by breathing, and the hope she brought to other people, even if she couldn’t feel it. I wonder what haunted her, and why she couldn’t overcome it. I wonder when the shift was…when she gave up because she was exhausted from fighting.
The funny thing is, she got it more than the rest of us. She understood that the lonely, the different, the messed up, the broken, the hurting, the ones who struggle to stay in the light…the ones whose eyes are so used to the dark that it is painful at first to see….those are the ones who need people the most. Need love the most.
Because when we learn to see people for who they really are, then we allow them to be who they really are. And while she was reminding everyone else of that, maybe what she couldn’t see was that she needed to hear it too.
Abortion is a sin. That's what I grew up believing-that things are black and white and what we choose determines if we are "good" or "bad". There is one path that is best for everyone, and those who choose not to follow it should be punished. OH was I ever wrong.
My favorite class in college was Women’s Studies 50. We studied the feminist movement, human rights, and my prerogative as a woman to publicly burn my underwear to make a statement. (To do it at home would have been wasteful.) I tried not shaving my armpits for a week to see if I had what it took to become a bra-torching liberal, but it started to feel like spiders were crawling in my shirt and my deodorant was clumping. I decided to exercise my right to be smart instead of shallowly defiant, passed the class with an A, and went back to shaving.
At UNC (Chapel Hill), most of my classes had recitations—smaller groups of students who met outside of our regular class of several hundred to discuss in detail the lecture, and any reading assignments we had that week. My WS50 recitation held some of the richest and most memorable discussions of my school experience. I’m a creature of habit so I always sat on the same side of the discussion table, and in 1 of 2 seats for the entire semester.
There was a brown haired girl, very organized, who sat a couple of seats away from me who was always very quiet. Part of our grade in the class was determined by whether or not we contributed vocally to the discussion each week. She, like me, would wait for a single moment to interject a thought when she knew the facilitator was paying attention to prevent getting called out unexpectedly. Her comments were challenging and outside of my (then) conservative box, but delivered in such an honest and gentle way that I couldn’t help but be intrigued. She otherwise blended in. And then one day she shared her story. We were studying the impact birth control made when it splashed on the scene in the 60s and some offshoots of that same topic—cultural ideas surrounding sex, abortion, religion. Me being the naive and well-intentioned baptist girl shared something about being a well-intentioned baptist girl and the different things my church culture had brought me up to believe: abstinence, purity, being pro-life, etc. I had no experience with any story outside of what I knew, and no reason to have understood another side to the issues at hand. Yet.
When she started talking, everyone in the group stopped. Pens were put down, phones that had found their way out of pockets were dismissed and people listened--as you do when someone starts a story with, “The first time my father raped me…”; that was only the beginning. Compelled to dispel some of the comments and opinions that were circling the room, she quickly raked through the history of her late-teenage years:
How her father had repeatedly sexually abused her. How she became pregnant by him.
How she had an abortion so that her mother wouldn’t find out.
How she left her house as soon as she could to find a job and an apartment.
How she was raped by a stranger who watched her in a parking lot and followed her to her car after a late night shift.
How she was too scared to tell anyone, so she went home and tried to forget it ever happened.
How she was so haunted by the loss of one child inside her that when she discovered she was pregnant by her rapist she couldn’t bear the thought of another abortion.
And how she stared in the eyes of her then 4 year old daughter, and was somehow grateful for the chance to be her mother, even though she had her father's hair.
It was bigger. It had more sides and angles and nuances than you could see at one time. More questions, more disbelief, more silences than one room could hold. More hurt in that one girl’s body than the rest of us would probably experience in a lifetime.
A shift occurred in me that day. A realization. Everything I knew wasn’t lining up with everything I was experiencing. What would have been taught to me to say or feel about this girl’s reality and her choices wasn’t at all what I was feeling. I couldn’t know what it was like to live with an abusive parent because I never had one. I couldn’t know the fear she felt and the deeply painful reasons that she could. not. carry her first baby. I couldn't understand how a girl so broken, wounded and abused by everyone who was supposed to take care of her could find the strength to keep her second baby.
You don’t tell a girl like her to "practice abstinence."
You don't give her a prayer that begins with, "God our father."
You don’t look at girl like that in the eyes and say, “everything happens for a reason.”
You can know, that you know, that you know something your whole life, and a brown-haired, soft-spoken, secretly fighting for her life girl can shatter it in one 6 minute story.
Our beliefs about humanity have to be more than a set of rules, more than a list of “if-then” statements. Our beliefs about any kind of God have to be more than a recycled projection of humanity's written experience thousands of years ago. This life has to be more than a ticket to a dualistic idea of an afterlife where everyone is expected to come through the door of a house some don't even get the materials to build. The world is not black and white. It is fluid, it is moving. It is evolving and expanding. It’s who we are and how we love. It’s what we say, and the look in our eyes when we say it. We all belong to the same table. And we have got to start making room for each other.
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I arrived about five minutes before the event started. With a nearly full theater, I walked straight up the steps to the farthest and highest corner like the calm of a low tide. Move too fast and people look. Noticing the heat, I immediately adjusted to an acceptance of this less comfortable spot for the sake of anonymity–a process that has become as quick and unconscious to me as breathing.
Become quieter, smaller, less.
Throughout the two-hour event, I became increasingly aware of the imminent final experience of this night where the host, Jeremy Cowart, planned to take a portrait of everyone in attendance as an idea or experiment, a reflection in itself of the purpose of this night. I spent far too much time in the afternoon mentally preparing for this moment. Having anyone but myself take a picture of me is somewhat of an anxious process. My brand of living is very controlled in what I allow others to see (or think they see). I took into consideration his words about not participating in this portion of the night, but having made a promise to myself in recent days not to let fear or discomfort hold me back, I stayed.
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Feeling invisible is not a new feeling to me, nor one I am uncomfortable with. I’m a wall flower and I live intentionally in the shadows. Partly because of how I’m wired, and partly out of habit. The last several years have shattered me for various reasons and the dust has been settling for a few months. In the quiet of that fog, I have seen pieces of my future self reflected back to me–asking me to open myself up, to walk forward and give myself permission to use my voice to speak who I am into the world.
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You can imagine the shock and slight panic when it was brought to my attention that despite the hundreds in attendance that night, it was MY picture posted as the first on display Jeremy's Instagram. Today, the universe took me by the hand and said, “Yes. I see you. When your hair is sweaty and you sit in the back corner. I still see you.”
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For all the secret thoughts I have and hidden dreams I’ve planted, something somewhere is responding. I feel it waiting for me to speak. I feel it holding me while I find the words. I feel the vibration of its laughter….“Finally, she’s showing up.”
THANK
YOU
COMMUNICATING THE SUM TRUTH OF OUR SOULS ACTUALIZES OUR LIGHT AND BECOMES THE MEANS BY WHICH OTHERS CAN SEE THEMSELVES. THANK YOU FOR SEEING ME.
