Limp-wrist stories

How do I experience it without it becoming my biography?

When do I get to explore without a definition, expectation?
I want to keep my name even if another label comes along with it.

I want to want you where everyone is watching and still have it be us. Still be in this peony ether without letting voyeurs make us more understandable to them.

The labels aren’t always wrong;

They’re just missing something.
They’re missing the context, idiom, timbre, color—

Colors that haven’t paired together even if they’re found in the same flag.
I want all the missing pieces to meet like we did—

Because it felt right, and it couldn’t be forced.

The last post of my twenties

I am ending a decade of existing while trying to survive other cycles. I am turning 30 as a full time student, which I didn’t plan on, but I knew it was coming. I didn’t understand that enrolling in law school at 28 would require feeding the adulthood that I built in the proceeding decade to survive these three years. Many cherished relationships did not survive. There’s no time for my beloved hobbies, and the confidence I cultivated no longer exists. This is the lowest I have been consistently since middle school. I am embarrassed to write that. I am as mortified to admit it as I am to re-read it.

This is a low point, not because I am turning 30 but because I am struggling in law school. I am struggling with how much of my life got consumed by this pursuit, how much of me got lost in it– how much of myself I can’t even locate anymore. I am indecisive, yet convicted. These convictions aren’t logical. All I know is that I must abide by my gut’s command. I keep asking it if we got it right by choosing this. It says yes, and this my only solace. It is the smallest relief from all my grief.

I am so spoiled that I get to grieve a life at all. I am privileged that I get to bemoan attending a professional program. It took a long time to even let myself feel that, to let my pain be as valid as the luck I know I have. Why does it feel most impossible to accept softness when we’re in a hard place?

Because I’ve gotta tell you, I have never had to accept so much grace from other people. It is overwhelming and humbling to be offered anything at all when I feel like nothing. I’ve spent my twenties in awe of the kindness and brutality people — often the same people– are capable of. This includes me. I’ve been disgusted and pleased by myself. I’ve left myself only to return.

There’s relief in aging. Youth is currency to an agist society, but currency rarely affords us reliable protection. Since fourteen, I’ve been on-guard. Since fourteen, I’ve seen this flash in the eyes of people (especially men) with experience or power over me. Youth is a shiny penny, not a shield. It is the thing that some people want to pick up and play with it because it makes them feel lucky, but they lose nothing in losing the penny. We, the pennies, the young people without last names or significant support systems, cannot afford to be dropped. I navigated my younger years in avoidance, with strategy. I did not get the same carefree youth some people discuss. Now, my energy is older. I am older. People who get off on manipulating young women don’t gravitate toward me like they used to, and that is a gift.

Aging is a force of nature. The alternative is death. Historic tragedies often involve man’s vain attempts to beat nature, and in one way or another, nature prevails. I do not want to fight natural processes by lamentation, illusion, or willpower. What willpower remains since I started law school can’t be squandered on lamenting a decade I already lived.

I don’t think that years belong to us. I can’t claim the time, but I want to work with it. Decision making became harder after law school. I feel like I might have screwed up my life by going, and now, every choice or option is doused in that same worry. The worry that I am bad and unworthy and stupid.

I turn 30 in an hour, and I am lonely. I turn 30 in an hour, and I’m not happy with where my life is. I don’t really like who I am in this moment or what I look like. But I don’t want to be anyone else. I don’t want to abandon myself just because that’s the pattern other people set for me. I want to greet this new decade with bare fingers and a bravery I haven’t known in a while. I want the real deal, and I want of be the real deal. And I’ll make it happen.

Parting Words

Goodbyes try sounding cavalier:

“Anyway, don’t be a stranger”

“See you around”

“See you, soon.”

And even when casual,

something wades below the words,

even if it’s just discomfort, a social awkwardness.

We all have to leave at some point and rarely know how to go.

Disappearing Act

I felt like a bad friend,

and I couldn’t handle it.

So I stopped being a friend at all.

Outpatient

I made it three weeks from when I escaped the bowels of the ER,

three weeks until I could not continue my performance as the girl who’s ok,

Three weeks and I was still the person I left in the hospital basement

now surrounded by people my ego urges me to call crazy,

But they sound like me,

Everyone is an echo of the one thing that they can’t fix

because we only know how to breathe when we justify it with someone else’s name.

We can spell our names in achievements and titles and still feel empty on the inside

because there’s a hurt kid taking up all that space,

the only space it had when it was trying to be grown and never became it.

I didn’t know that overachievers are also the most in need of therapy.

I didn’t know what rescuing the whole world left me wounded

until I was surrounded by people just like me.

and it makes sense.

Marksman

My tongue forms bullets from words.

They can be weapons in anyone’s mouth.

I’m just a better marksman than most

with a childhood that gave me more target practice,

taught me how to fire when I was the target.

The muscle memory isn’t unlearned even now.

There’s a body count to

sharp tongued talent.

I wounded people because I was hurting,

I wasn’t the only one bleeding anymore.
Then, there was a distraction from all my bruised because I’d bruised people.
I thought that being the least hurt person was safety,

and punishment is prevention.

Neither is true.

My tongue feels like a threat most days,

A hairpin trigger begging to go off.

I do, sometimes.
But when I do now, my outburst’s aftertaste is rare, bloody,

it tastes too much like gun smoke to keep this habit.

Vital Sign

Need is a vital sign,

It’s an intangible pulse that reminds us that we are alive

by reminding us what we need to keep us alive or feeling alive.

Desire is a sign of life.
Want connects us to other things in life.

Want is the buy-in,

it gives us stakes.

I grew up believing that the less I needed, the safer and more lovable I’d be.

instead, my needs melted into magma,

Repressed emotions who only knew volcanic releases.

And then, I isolated again,

an inactive volcano.

but my warmth works where it’s meant to,

And there’s plenty of people and opportunities and things who wish for someone just like this.
the same is true for you, reader.

My wants,

when I hear them unabashedly, are my compass.

My needs stabilize me.

And the more I claim them,

the less scary they seem.

Dichotomy

My outrage and the performative cruelty I exert from pain are different things,

sometimes together,

but not always.

Honoring my outrage is liberation.

Indulging the performance perpetuates collective bondage where I’m the only certain suffering.

Promises I’m keeping

I don’t want to fear my body

No matter what it looks like.
I don’t want to wish this vessel into anything else.
I don’t want to live outside of my life.

For the rest of my days, I am an insider when it comes to my joy,

and pleasure, and every sensation from the outside or howl from within,

This body isn’t an improvement project.
It’s soft and textured terrain don’t have to meet any market value.

I want to love the way my life feels over any idea on how I or it looks. And I’m done judging myself for it, even if I don’t always get it either.

How do I get back to that?

I hear happy in other peoples’ voices, and I feel homesick.