28.
“Before I Die…” was written on the card in my hands. I was at a retreat, and these cards were passed out for us to finish the rest of that sentence. I grabbed a pen, and without thinking too much about it wrote the first thing that came to mind.
“Have a family”
I stared at those words with disbelief, a furrowed brow, and a singular tear. Never before have I wanted a family, and in many ways, my life and actions have been propelled by the absence of that desire.
And now, a family? In that moment, those three words acted as a still frame from the heart of a girl who never stops moving. And I can’t say for sure if those words are true, because if you were to ask me if they’re true for me right now, I’d say no.
This feels like a good place to start. Because if last year’s birthday blog was a zoom out on my life, this one is a zoom in on my year — a year of conflicting stories and desires, a both/and kind of year, and one that I’ve spent digging even further into the stories I tell myself about life, love, relationships of all hues, and purpose. I’ve spent this year being unapologetic about who I am or what I like, and I’ve been resting in the contradictions and tension of my Self when they arise.
For starters, I still hate Bohemian Rhapsody and probably always will. This is the first time I’ve ever admitted it because it seems like everyone’s supposed to like it. I don’t know why I decided to start with that. Probably because I’ve been keeping that a secret the longest.
I feel things fiercely, and where I might have once apologized for it, I am now no longer sorry. So often I find myself thinking about what it means to be alive, and I’m ok with the answers I have and the ones I don’t like.
There are times where I catch myself just before sleep and think “I hate that this has to end; I love this, I don’t want this to ever end.” There have been just as many days where I find myself whispering under my breath “my 22nd year was my hardest year,” a reminder that nothing will ever be as bad as the day I got a call from my dad saying my mom was dead — and a prayer to make it so. Sometimes these days are back to back.
I began asking myself what is True, not just in my grief — I’ve gotten pretty good at that — but in all aspects of my life. In doing so, I’ve been able to uncover stories I tell myself and the ones I want to let go of and rewrite. Because that’s the beauty of art and the beauty of being alive — we have, at every moment, the ability to redefine ourselves. In my experience, doing it isn’t the hard part: it’s realizing we have permission to.
And even as I write those words I’m confronted with parts of my identity that are in question. My van is broken and I don’t know if I’ll fix it. It’s forced me to ask: who am I if not a van person? if not a traveler? if not someone who finds a home in everything but a house?
And yet, it’s undeniable. For the last year or so, I’ve felt a soft pull away from the travel life and a glowing fascination at the settled one. I go into people’s homes with soft beds and think “Wow, there is nothing better than this.” I can sit on the couch all day and work, and write, and ideate, and there’s no stranger asking me to use the plug, there’s no wifi outage from too many people using it, there’s no packing everything up just to use the bathroom and walking back out to see that your table is claimed. There’s a beauty to home life that I saw so wonderfully during my time in San Francisco, and that was subsequently torn apart so completely by my time in Oakland that I’m only just now starting the entertain the idea again — that living in a house can be good, and easy, and even fun.
I’ve spent so much my life fighting back against the boxes people try to put me in; this year I spent much of my year giving up the fight and just inhabiting new boxes and making new ones when the one I want doesn’t seem to exist. If you asked me half a life ago if I would one day be an artist I would laugh, but lately that’s what most people have been calling me. I’m ok with it.
Grief theses days looks less like drowning or a whirlwind; it’s now more like a soft breeze over a scab. Back in May, I was playing volleyball when I dove for a ball and scabbed my knee pretty badly. A day later I was walking and a breeze flowed across the wound. It stung. “This is what grief feels like”, I thought- an open wound that doesn’t really hurt unless touched or with the threat of being touched. The pain is deep, electrifying all parts of your body, but only when it’s messed with. It’s like dental work, or touching a bruise, or having really cold liquid running over your teeth: pain that makes your body shiver, that hits a nerve in a deep, visceral way. It’s the kind of pain that comes out of nowhere, but you know that pain is accessible and that’s the most exciting and scary part — that you can access that pain at any moment, but so can others. To feel is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to risk rejection.
Already I can feel the scab poke coming. In April, after watching the show Queer Eye, I decided I needed to finally go through my mom’s things. My friend Jasmine is coming to help and I can already feel my body tense because she’s going to poke at that wound over and over again — and I’m going to let her.
I’ve told myself that going through those things is too soon. But the fact is that it will always be too soon, because she was taken too soon. And at the heart of the pain is another painful thing: keeping her things won’t bring her back. The hardest realization of all.
I’ve entered the age where I’ve stopped relating to the Human I see looking back at me from the photos of my mom and me and it’s the most painful feeling. Not like a soft “ooooff, that one hurts” but a deep sadness and welling in my throat. I’m moving along in time, I can never be that same person standing next to my mom, arms wrapped around each other, smiling together so that you know I am hers. I’ve gained weight. I have more wrinkles and have found a few gray hairs. There’s a heaviness and depth to me as someone who has Lived that lacks in all of those photos, and yet, she’s stayed the same. Her wrinkles, her hair, her smile. It’s a still frame with no forward motion. I can go backwards and see photos of her when I was younger and before I was born, but not forwards. That stopped on October 23, 2012. I wonder what she would look like now.
It’s only recently, several years after her death where I have moments of feeling like I get my mom. Not just love and adore her and occasionally be annoyed by and fight with her, but actually GET her. Her expressions, her control, her cleanliness, her bursts of anger, her feeling like she gave a lot and got little in return, her loneliness. Her maturity. Her grief over missing her dad. Her sadness. I see what getting older does to someone, because I’m starting to feel it. And that makes me respect her even more — because even in the hard, she chose to laugh and play, to believe in people’s goodness, to give a damn about something more than herself, and find joy in so much of it.
At the end of the day, Life in the absence of truth and vulnerability, of touching the edge between openness and oversharing, of allowing people to see me in the way I want to be seen at the risk that they won’t get it or me, of sharing all of my stories — the happy AND the hard — and connecting with people and experiences over a deep knowing that all we have is now, means nothing.
This is 28.
