📝 there's pieces they can't take of us
August felt like squeezing decades into weeks, which really meant I spent most of the month feeling like a ghost. That feeling leaked into the first week of September, but then my sister went crawling back to Florida, and in her absence I’ve slowly been coming back to life. September has always been one of my favorite months and so it seems fitting that it has felt like coming back home. I’ve finished multiple books, have gone camping, have made really great progress in therapy all of which means I’ve been isolating from my friends less and less.
A few weeks ago, my therapist told me that I've only ever known deficit. On some level, I've always known this, so I wasn’t entirely surprised—cue The Wonder Years: "I know I was an angry kid / but I scraped and scratched for this / Now I'm stuck holding a bomb / With a fuse that's still lit / They'll never let me rest again" and also Fireworks "They thought I was wild and free / but I was angry and lonely"—but after a lot of trauma-informed therapy, I'm beginning to understand it in the larger context of who I am and how it’s shaped me, and that’s where the real magic happens.
After a childhood of deficit, it's easy for me to focus on those parts of my life and forget that life (though still very hard in many different ways) is much kinder to me these days or maybe I’m (finally) learning that life isn’t out to get me. I’m grateful to have a partner who has loved every version of me, has only ever encouraged me to be better, and who has only ever shown a commitment to being better, too. I suppose that maybe I'm also learning that sometimes, life gives you exactly what you deserve and it's not always a bad thing.
When I planned my trip to Homestead, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I almost didn’t plan anything for myself and considered “the only way out is through” approach to the trip. I decided not to go that route and instead decided I was going to do two things: eat a cubano and visit the Everglades.
I grew up in Florida and had never been this far south before. My childhood was spent in the small neighborhood I grew up in and I never had any real dreams beyond that. If I concentrate long enough I can conjure up some half-formed memory of going as far as Lakeland with my dad. My brother had been to Miami on a mission trip with the Assemblies of God, but it wasn't something I could ever really see myself doing. How was I supposed to convince someone of something I wasn't entirely sure of myself?
I’ve had the urge to write but I’ve never done it outside of raging in my Livejournal or academia. I’m also reading more than I ever have (I finished You, Again and I loved it so so much), and I’ve been putting myself out there at work in really scary ways (like hello I’m going to speak on a panel???). When you’ve spent your life being told your voice doesn’t matter, it’s hard to believe when people tell you it does.
My friend Maya has told me to just start writing, so I suppose this is me taking her advice, digging in, biting down, and doing the hard thing: soaking in the surplus after a life of deficit and (hopefully) having the guts to write about it.