My Why

“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along.” Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes

My only recollection of wanting to be a writer was when I was 12 years old and was chosen for a special assignment by a teacher at the K-12 school I attended. I was to gather the notes from the other elementary teachers and compile them into a column for our local newspaper.

For a kid like me—a kid who never seemed to fit anywhere—to be asked to represent our small community to the larger community formed an instant core memory.

A kid like me.

A scrawny kid, born in the South but still “not from around here.” The youngest of three kids, the only girl. Bullied daily from my earliest memories, attacked most often for a body I never chose. Parented by two people with generations-deep wounds, living at a time when the only known remedy for pain was to insist that what didn’t kill you would always somehow make you stronger, while no one ever paused to address those things that didn’t kill you.

Why risk looking weak when you could simply insist that you were strong?

I needed to tell you I was scrawny because kids who were small or weak in my time had to learn to run fast or talk fast. There was one other option, should you find yourself unable to do either of the above. Learn to hide well.

Being small and weak, I became proficient at all three.

When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave odd answers since I didn’t know how to say, “Alive and anywhere else.” Since I was the scrawny kid who couldn’t mount a decent defense, the bulk of my energy was devoted to running fast, talking fast or hiding well. I could only imagine a life for “future me” that involved some version of those three options.

I was surprised to find out recently that adolescence is a lot like sharing your computer screen with tech support. You know how you share your screen with someone who knows how it all works, and they direct you to all kinds of secret menus where you adjust the settings so that your unit works like it was designed to? They don’t have control of the cursor. You do. They simply guide you to solutions, tell you what settings are making your life miserable and show you a side of your computer that you had no idea existed. A real peek under the hood.

This is adolescence at its finest.

If you’re disappointed, so was I.

My adolescence, the part where I was supposed to learn how to function as an adult, was less about me developing as I was meant to and more about having my settings changed in an effort to produce a redesign that better matched polite society’s standards.

Instead of following the manufacturer’s operating system and original design, tech support changed the settings to “swallow your voice and distract yourself from your deep longings to be seen, known, and loved for who you are.”

I now grieve for the parts of me that I had to bury in order to prioritize satisfying needs that were never mine to meet.

So why write? And why now?

Because of what Bill Watterson said.

I have finally arrived at adulthood and discovered where I was headed.

For all the years I’ve been in adulthood, I’ve been blaming myself for not showing up better. True to my re-programming, I have scoured my soul, searching for how I could have been less of a disappointment.

Only to turn around, look back at where I’ve come from and realize that this is where I was headed all along.

This has never been about assigning blame thereby staying stuck in those powerless places. Rather, there is a deep relief for me in this work.

This is about how far back I had to go as I searched for who I was meant to be. When I went looking for the last time I felt any scrap of a desire for who to be, I recalled this scrawny little girl who got a chance to have a voice that one time. I saw this shiny core memory, lodged in a place she hoped I’d come back to.

She remembered being asked to be a voice, representing a community.

Going back to go forward is a life hack that is having its day. Going back to the place where you got off your path in order to get back on.

(Something that makes me a fan of treadmills, by the way. Boring? Yes. Backtracking? Avoided. Realistic? Not even a little.)

And so I have returned, again and again, to the places where I felt promise and felt hope and believed I could be something more than so many people’s “greatest disappointment.”

I use my imagination—that always only used to find new ways to run faster, talk faster and hide better—to imagine a life where I don’t have to survive, evade, resist and escape.

Because we were all made to be seen, known, heard, understood and loved.

Because I was never meant to merely survive, evade, resist and escape.

To honor that scrawny kid, I am picking up the trail that she should have been resourced to walk. I am working to emerge from my well-imagined hiding places. I am learning to walk, not run. To talk, more slowly, with more intention. To say what I was meant to say, not simply what will appease others.

She deserved to be seen for who she really was instead of being told who she was allowed to be. She deserved to have people she could trust. People she could safely share her screen with to get better guidance and direction, instead of being hacked and locked out of her own operating system.

I honor her because when she was stripped of certain resources, she used what she had left to find a way forward. She buried the right parts, waiting for me to come back for them.

I honor her now by finding her, remembering the smallest moment where she found joy and, once again, doing what she learned to love in that small bracket of time.

To write.

To be a voice.

Even then, she knew the power of words because some words nearly destroyed her while still others gave her small infusions of life and hope.

As she struggled under the spoken words of so many in-person encounters, she then read the hopeful words of people she would never meet in real life.

This also fueled my desire to write. Someday maybe I could write words that would give total strangers the same lifeline of hope that had floated me forward.

This is my why.

As you read my story, you may never know what it was like to be me. But my hope is that, through my words, you may know better what it is to be you. That through my words, you will know that it is possible to be seen, heard, known and understood as you are, for all you have been and could be.

And that knowing that can bring you hope as well.

The Flunky Chicken, age 12

Excerpt from the school news section of the Rocky Mountain Sunday Telegram, March 13, 1983