What You Need to Know About Me

I want to tell the truth, but I am not always sure what that is. I have a good heart but there are things I am angry about. I used to be a people pleaser and now I please myself full time. I am not yet an expert at this but I am a fast study. I sometimes struggle with both shame and knowitalism. I mean well. I am from working class blue collar Appalachia – Eastern Kentucky, specifically. But I never really fit in there. I come from a fairly large extended family, but haven’t ever fit in there, either. Being loved, being tolerated is not the same as belonging. I have made a life for myself in so many different ways in so many different places. I have known deep and profound love. I have never been married. I will never have my own children. I lived and thrived in NYC and it was the greatest teacher I ever had. I can be a force to be reckoned with. I have been a badass executive and I have been a scrappy but irreplaceable hourly worker. I excel at both and in-between. I hated high school but I loved college. I have been an academic and a teacher, a professor, if you will, and loved that, too. I love my life. I am so grateful. I will say the things other people won’t say. My face says everything my mouth doesn’t. I keep breaking my own heart over and over again and I only recently learned that was a good thing. It was a revelation. I am a fierce protector of people and ideas that I love. I have only recently learned that I am one of the people and ideas that I love and I am becoming fiercer and fiercer every day. I have spent a lot of time auditioning for roles that were never available in shows that only I knew were being played out. I am invitation only these days. I am the first to admit that I am wrong. I’m so good at it I have a tendency to accept blame that doesn’t belong to me. I’m glad I finally noticed that. I love my body but lots of people and images and products and industries and media and well-meaning folks that insist there is something terribly wrong with who I am and it has been potentially the greatest challenge of my life to not believe them. To say out loud that they (I, we) are incorrect in our conclusions. About me and everyone else. And we all need to shut the fuck up about it and get glad to be alive. Maybe the last thing you need to know is that I will, often seemingly against my own notion of comfort, gnaw my leg off before I will stay somewhere that I am trapped. Sometimes the gnawing takes years and my jaw gets tired. Sometimes the trap is the actual greatest place I have ever been, a place that feels like the best home I have ever known, but somewhere very deep down my in my deepest knowing, I know it’s a trap. I have never, ever been wrong about that. But I have been sad about it. And left bleeding and half scabbed over and prone to infection. So the goal now is to have my teeth so sharp that the moment I know I have to get out of the trap, I bite clean through my wrist. And that the knowing comes faster. The lesson is not to avoid the traps. The traps themselves are beautiful. And it turns out I can regenerate those discarded limbs.  The goal is to be swift and surgical when necessary. When I have to leave, I have to leave. But I don’t have to suffer anymore. And neither do you.