a letter to a Black child

I want you to be your best self.  Whatever that means for you, I want you to be your best self.

I want your wit.

I want your curiosity.

I want your cynicism.

I want your quirkiness.

I want your queerness.

I want your street smarts and your book smarts and your gut smarts.

I want you bright, beautiful, and bold as fuck.

Because as long as you are what you are, you can reach any height.

You can be your best and reach mediocrity.  That’s okay.

You can be your best and reach notoriety.  That’s maybe not as okay; but you know what?

You’re still doing you.

If you have a question?  Please ask.

And don’t just ask one person, ask a lot of people.

Then go investigate answers for yourself.  This is how you cultivate judgment.

When you develop a how, it helps to have a why in your back pocket.

Sometimes you don’t even need a good why.  But whys give your hows peace of mind.

Don’t take that as a message that you have to justify everything you do to the world.

You don’t have to do that.

But you are your most important person.  If you don’t know why you’re doing something? Ask yourself.

Learning is your evergreen state of being.

Always learn from your circumstances, your peers, and your environment.

It can be as complex as astrophysics or as simple as “don’t get shot.”

Life is full of rich lessons to make you excel.  Learn them.

There may be moments when it feels like nothing’s happening.

This is a teachable moment.  What were you expecting to happen?  Ask yourself the question.

Then make it happen.

You are what the world is waiting for, and so much more.  Be yourself, and make the world smile.

 

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

(Just finished this book tonight and thought I’d share my review from Goodreads.  It does contain some spoilers.)

I remember

I remember when I was afraid to start statements with “I feel” because someone once told me that was a womanly construction and it betrayed a weakness in the speaker’s ability to articulate their thoughts without preface.

I remember running across the internet and yelling at people.  A lot.

I remember having more articles open on my internet browser than I had attention span to read them.

I remember reading some articles horribly wrong because I couldn’t keep pace with all my reading.  I’d then say something completely wrong.  Later, when retracting, I’d feel a visceral pain in my stomach for being careless — but no urge to slow down.

I remember composing articles by starting from the end or the middle instead of the beginning.  Link farming.  Tying complex ideas together in my head, explaining them, and sounding like a complete lunatic.  Metaphysics and sociology/anthropology/postmodernist literary theory mish-mash.

I remember blaming Derrida, Spivak, Althusser, hooks, and Plato.

I remember near-manic composition about things and later having to go back and read what exactly my positions were on particular issues because I forgot as soon as I composed my posts.

I remember lots of fantastic fictional worlds that never made contact with a page or a pixel.

I remember lots of poetry and wordplay that (sometimes fortunately, sometimes unfortunately) did.

I remember physically shaking when my family members would tell me about writing anything on the internet and how it was risking losing everything.  Just convulsing, developing new nicknames, and writing.  More aliases and emails than I can manage, for writing.

I remember having to shake my head until I felt dizzy because understanding a position is not agreeing with a position.  And yet, everywhere I looked, people took them as one in the same.  Except the ones fighting.  And I would hear all sides as voices in my head.  Screaming voices.  And I can’t abide screaming, and I’d start to shake and ache and even cry sometimes.

I remember how it didn’t occur to me to find other ways to write.  How I bought (and still buy) countless notebooks and journals that I never used.  How I wrote briefs, papers, outlines, and notes in blog dialog boxes.  How other writing formats felt completely out of my control, and somehow, through habit or denial, positive release came with composing in the blog dialog box.

I remember doing guest writings and forcing myself to conform to the venue.  Like putting on second, third, fourth skins that wouldn’t slough off afterwards.

I remember all this now.  Fighting through reluctance and fear of being wrong to write.  And stopping because I lacked a course and a purpose to my composition that I could carry with me into and through my life.  I don’t want anything to take over my voice anymore; my feeling, thinking, and creative voice.

Lisa/Sudy once wrote that accountability is key to action, and it’s important to hold yourself accountable to someone.  I am slowly understanding what she means.  And I think there’s a corollary that one shouldn’t hold herself accountable to just anyone, either.  It’s easy to float on the wind and land where it takes you; it’s harder to fly and determine your own course.

I remember because to forget is to undo everything — the mistakes, the critical hits, the lessons, and the love.