11/19/21

Today I pondered things all of my fathers said to me.

My stepdad told me that my beauty would get me far in life. My beauty would be the thing that was treasured most about me. My beauty would be the currency with which I paid my way. My beauty was my power. I could never see what he meant. I find beauty in kindness, in intelligence, in dry + silly humour. I see beauty in skill, in art & artistry, in the weave of a finely crafted story/song/poem/passion.
Today, I let this settle in my mind. It’s a knot to untangle. That will be the kindness, the untangling.

My father told me that humans are not meant to be islands. He said that we need other people, we are not meant for aloneness. He worried that I’d become cold, rigid, like him. I said I was happy to be an island, untamed, wild, without inhabitants to scar me, no where to dock. He said he thought I was a liar, that I held myself too still to be wild. He was right, I was exactly those things he said. I’d killed off the wildness in me. What I meant was that I know how to navigate an island alone and that it is easier to listen to silence than to yearn for speech + understanding. Today, I let this settle in my mind. the kindness will be in deciding what this means to me.

My godfather, upon fishing me out of the pool where I almost drowned at age 4, said that drowning lacked courage. Allowing myself to be pushed in meant I lacked vigilance. He gave me a Budweiser and a towel. I remembered that moment years later when I almost drowned in the ocean. I hit the ocean floor and thought (to the ocean) that I had too much courage to drown. I waited for her to let me up through the surface of the water, and didn’t drown. Today, I let this settle in my mind. The kindness is remembering that I’ve never drowned.