I have a new home now

sarahteresacook.com

I hope you’ll come visit.

Making Plans

How other people’s plans interfere with your own. How other people’s plants interfere with your own. How mothers and people and plants go inside your own body. How other creative plans go inside the air around you. How new pants and shirts and clothes interfere with your hair. How new habits become old habits. How old habits die hard. How old habits cry regard. How old rabbits belie hearts. How other people’s hands interfere with winning the pot. How other people’s plants interfere with planting your own plants in the same pot. How space is taken up more quickly by more people. How space and mothers and land are all contested metaphors, but I’ll give it a shot. My house is where I grow my plans, they change along with the weather. How moods and grants and transportation shape your human life inside the planet. Despite the planet. In lieu of the planet. In situ: this plant. Right where I placed it a second ago, my hand. I am leasing my mother, one moth at a time. There’s a bug in my house. How other people’s lamps are swarmed with bodies telling me to be smaller. How mothers are people with or without mothers, too. How lovers go far with their own other blues. In situ: this planet. Right where I paid the planet to be. I’m through with manners. Right where I lay them at sea. There’s a shrug in my blouse. How land interferes with each plant planted right above the interfering blight. How man intertwines through blunt slants and fight clubs and inward dazzling fright. I’m through with people pleasing. Plant squeezing. Men trapeze-ing. How other people’s plants go inside the inside of me. But not the trapeze men, not anymore. How other people’s problems go outside the outside of me. How other people’s problems try to trapeze the woman right out of me. How mold describes my heart. How I put what I’m done with straight into the ground. Into the sound. Into the hound. How the outside of me goes straight into the inside of the planet. How the best things get cancelled at the last minute. How the best plans are planets made of plants within them.

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Sorry List

October 31^st: said “sorry” (there were no clean forks/spoons)

Said sorry for asking if the noise from hitting a man’s belt back and forth could please stop thank you sorry

Said sorry, sorry-sorry for bumping into a book as I was sitting back down. One beat “sorry” followed by the quick step of two more

Said sorry in response to someone being tired and done working and I’d been still trying to help them finish up

Said sorry for helping during a feedback session that spent the other person’s last remaining energies

Said I’m sorry (for being sad, basically)

Said sorry, on behalf of another person’s interfering presence

Said sorry for revving the engine a tiny bit accidentally too much to make it through the turn

Said sorry for accidentally running my own foot into the wheel of a shopping cart

Heard a woman say “sorry” for mispronouncing “dissertation”

I said I’m sorry I bumped into you when you leaned over into my space

I am sorry it got dark out

Sorry I hit your elbow with my stomach

Sorry to the following people in this order: men, men, men, men, men, men, men, men

Sorry for leaving so many clear tracks in the dirt

Sorry for the wind and how my legs start to shake,

I fall over and am blown away just thinking about it

Writing the Body

I wrote my body, not my shadow, by writing to a friend with affection and openness. I wrote my body by eating toast naked in front of a mirror and watching myself chew and chew and knowing that I was nourishing my body and giving my body energy.

I wrote my body by facing it head on because our bodies are a kind of writing and living is a kind of writing and facing my body means acknowledging the agency in not being quiet about it. There are things I feel I can’t do with my body and then I do them anyway. That’s called, writing.

I wrote my body after putting only my shirt back on and sitting cross-legged on an afghan with the mirror to my left now, quick glances at my body to acknowledge my body. Writing is more than words on a page.

How is my body like writing? I asked myself earlier this week. What do I do in writing that I also wish I could do with my body? I wanted to know this, too.

Then I decided that accepting my body is a radical act, a feminist act, and that writing my thoughts down is also a feminist act, a radical act, and so to be more radical and more situated in my feminist stance I could keep writing about accepting my body, keep looking at my body more responsibly in the mirror.

It’s hard not to like and dislike one’s body within the systems already designed for us, the equations of value and appearances that we’re born into and in some ways can’t ever escape, not entirely, even as we rebuild our relationships to ourselves. You can’t unknow them or forget them. You can set them aside and learn other things and build other things and form other habits and remember old ones cautiously, informed by them in some way, the way that dismissal or refusal or running away is always informed by the dismissed, the refused, the away.

My body is a body that will eventually go away.

Good spaces are so fragile and fleeting. How can looking in the mirror, writing the body, writing about my body make me feel less fragile, more centered in a good space, self-commanded, asserted?

Is the goal to command one’s body?

I think it is okay to order goodness.

All the times in which I’ve let my hands hit the keyboard and my body synchronized a tiny bit further.

Sometimes I shower and sometimes I don’t—don’t wash my hair, don’t cut my nails, don’t wonder what I look like from every conceivable angle.

In most sentences you can replace “angle” with “anger” and the meaning holds.

Hold the anger, hold the quiet, hold the music, hold the words on the page until they stand on their own, in the meantime cradling their tender little necks.

Worry

That stupid dinosaur-crocodile hat is hanging right in front of me. “Hat” is a generous word. The hat is neon, and foamy, and cheap—much cheaper than the dollar I spent to be allowed to take it from the store. I pulled out my money and pictured the hat on my head, at work. I pictured any day suddenly like Halloween. I pictured calling it a crocodile when I need crocodile energy and calling it a dinosaur the rest of the time. I pictured the rest of me in dark colors. Instead, it hangs near my front door, with the summer scarves and the extra totes, and it has not been Halloween once since I purchased it. Since purchasing it I have written on the days when I “feel” like writing instead of the real good thing that is writing on a daily basis, through the feelings, through their lack. Writing despite x, y, & z. Writing because you don’t need to be composed in order to write. Like today, stuck indoors because of the fires and the heavy smoke and writing about the crocodile hat that fills me with rage because I know I would not grab it on my way out the door were I told to evacuate my home. I would grab other things, a few very clearly, fretting over many more. Rocks and seashells, some plastic trinkets I’ve had for 15 years, my sticker collection. I might accidentally forget my laptop, or one of the many bundles of instant photos we have lying about or tucked away. I’m stuck indoors because the state I live in is on fire and I’m trying to “write” without thinking “too much” of what I’m trying to write, trying to just “experience” the process and the act of writing without getting ahead of myself, and the crocodile hat upsets me because who knows what a dollar could do for a less selfish person, someone stuck outdoors and worried about getting ill or already ill and worried about growing sicker or maybe just done with being worried at all but really wishing they could buy a coke. A big fat cup of ice with sugar water to the rim. How cold and clear it might be in this difficult moment. There is so much pain in the world. In the store, I had pictured myself walking through long beige and blue hallways with my hat on, pretending to be none other than myself. As if it mattered. As if authenticity pursued head on could dismantle anything. I’m too busy thinking about myself to be myself, which was where my mind was when I purchased the hat.

~

I heard that the Almeda fire that burned northward from Ashland to Central Point, Oregon was started by a homeless gentleman. I heard that when the police arrested him, he said he was hot, and he was tired of being hot, and he thought if he started a fire maybe someone would take him somewhere with air-conditioning. 

I slept much better last night, my mom said, though she’s still sleeping on the couch, which allows for a better view out her largest front window. I only woke up a few times looking for smoke.

Some people live whole sections of their lives awake at night, wishing there was a window between them and their worry.

Nobody’s sorrow is better or worse. Nobody’s fear. Nobody’s trauma. 

Those statements above are true, but only if you look at them in the right direction. A sanctioned direction.

Look at my face through the window I sit behind and you’ll see it plain and true: worry. A girl’s affliction, no matter her privileges.

~

The chickens across the street don’t look worried. Not the squirrels or the cats, either. I worry about them all. I sit on a large purple chair, more expensive than any piece of furniture we’ve ever purchased and only inside our home because it is second-hand, and look outside as if hunting for concern on their little animal faces. I don’t find it. Which little animal faces am I most concerned about? I don’t find worry on the faces of the crows and I don’t find it either on the face of the woman with blue in her hair and earbuds in her ears, walking down the sidewalk, smoke billowing, everything dangerous, walking just like how I picture she walks on a normal day. The day is not normal and yet there she is. Nor do I see worry on the face of the man in the navy blue t-shirt smoking a cigarette and walking like his muscles told him not to stop no matter what. He looks upset. They always do, really. People like him and the woman don’t have their priorities straight, I think to myself in one of those pre-language thoughts, just learned instinct curdling in the areas of my chest not specifically occupied by a heart. Neither of them are wearing a mask. The man and then woman enter and then exit my view, and soon enough I am looking at the black and white cat across the street, a giant cookie made of fur, grooming himself on the front porch just like I’d picture him grooming himself on a normal day. Are you gonna be alright, cat? The feeling is like a light beaming out of my chest.

The window I look through gives my day the much needed semblance of a container and a routine. It makes me feel like I belong somewhere, and that somewhere is not out there. 

All people have voices, and some people have the space in which to use them, the default public setting of being heard. Some people are empathizable. Easy to feel across the distance. 

Which comes first: the chicken, or my worry about the chicken? The feeling of crossing a distance in order to empathize with you, or the sense that you’re already close enough for my empathy to make it over there?

The chicken is on the fence now, one of them. The other one has taken to sleeping precariously in a tree. More reasons to worry—I basically manufacture them in my spare time. I care about the chickens with no effort at all, a bursting feeling.

Some people sleep in their cars every night. Some of those people are the “lucky” ones.

If you are well, and you encounter a traumatic moment, the city might rally. Especially if you’re graced with social privilege. You might be greeted with opportunity and given access to resources. The community will likely “feel” your pain.

If you are not well, your life a string of traumatic moments, then it sounds like this is actually just your baseline and you will be difficult to empathize with. What did you do to end up here, anyway?

I get used to the repetitions—that’s what repetition does: primes me. Deludes me and the outer world right along with it. As if pattern diffuses a malicious thing. As if form trumps content. Normalized expectations sing, and I’m sad to confess I get used to the background music. I would like to expect a less patterned, more imaginary world, and trace it until it is a real shape. I want to be shocked by the shocking things that continue to greet the daily sun. I want to “do” “something” “good.”

The cat across the street is a very big cat. But the problems are bigger than the big cat. 

The chickens are the only two chickens I know, so they constitute the place where my worry pools: on the fence, in the tree. “Ignorance is bliss,” except this is only true for the beholder. What about the chickens I don’t know? There must be more than just these two. How will I know which others to worry about?

The gray chicken has leapt into the tree now. Before tucking himself into the safety of an inner branch, he floats on the outer leaves and flowering parts. He looks like an apple. He looks like something to pluck. He is a guitar, and a whole barnyard, and the entire ocean in a single drop of chicken. He is gray, with the requisite yellow and red parts. The white one, always anxious being left behind, only gets as high as the mailbox and then stares at his ascended partner. There used to be three chickens, actually. These bird-dinosaurs are the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more plucking and leaping and breathing and walking and sleeping and wishing out there. I notice what I notice. And what I don’t notice? I don’t notice it. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t there, hovering, maybe camouflaged, scared or hot or looking for a window, maybe even something near a breeze.

On Boundaries

Having good boundaries means you are going to feel people pushing bumping running bouncing pressing off of them, in other words: making contact. People are going to make contact with you. That’s the reason to have boundaries in the first place. It will not feel like outer space neutrality; it will not be as if no air has entered or exited the room. It will not turn “hard” into “easy.” It will not make difficulties disappear, caught in some chainlink fence while you stand yards away in the background, barely registering their presence from afar. You are the boundary. You are the fence. You are the thing, both caught and catching. You are the boundaries you hold. You will shift, because you will have found your footing, and then the world will continue to change around you, often approaching and sometimes at unbearable speeds. There is north, south, east, and west: how often are you facing one of them, after all? It is likely that no matter how restful you are even in this moment, there is a world somewhere approaching. 

The world continues to change around you whether you have good boundaries or not, but the point is that good boundaries do not stop the world from changing, do not translate into an experience of not ever seeing or feeling or otherwise sensing the difficult approach of another. They do not stop others’ existing, they simply protect the fact of your own.

Others may not understand your boundaries, or may not take the time to notice them, or might not even be equipped in the first place to recognize a boundary not of their own making. Boundaries won’t prevent contact with those who would attempt to break them: instead, they prevent the wrong kind of non-contact: the kind that smushes you: so that it’s like you’re gone: the kind where you perpetually fall backwards because it feels like the only way to keep the other person from climbing aboard you and doing all the terrible things that people do while standing on top or inside of your bubble (they pressure, they force, they think poorly, etc.). 

Some people will think poorly of you no matter how good you are, and their poor thinking does not mean a thing about your good goodness. This is called, “boundary.” How many times has a boundary gone extinct in response to the fear of poor thinking? It will feel a little uncomfortable because you are alive and good, which naturally makes one dream of perpetual openness. It is always a little uncomfortable when one living thing encounters another, even if they are both good and yet still different. Uncomfortable but riveting, like air coming and going. Like the moon in a different position every single night, shocking no matter how hard you try to understand the science behind its patterned movement. You don’t need to understand the moon or the difference between you and it and you don’t need to justify your boundaries and you don’t need to circle every single good feeling with a pen that outlines it entirely just to make it real. You don’t need to know about a good feeling to feel it. You mustn’t describe a good feeling just to fill up entirely with its contributions. You can brace yourself, choose to exist firmly, choose where your doors and windows are, let the feelings come and go and be a person occasionally associated with poor thoughts by those outside you. Who cares. Disappoint them! Boundaries won’t rid the interactions of all discomfort. They will turn the discomfort into fruit. They will make it so that even on your lowest feeling days, when the world seems constructed without your input, you might still find something sweet and earth-born waiting for your mouth. 

Five Unexplored Ideas

 

I am learning to tell the difference between writing and wishing.

 

*

 

A biggest fear: someone other than me not feeling understood.

My default setting: persistently nod along.

 

*

 

It is one of the most tragic banalities of human existence that everything you are not can be a significant factor in everything that you are.

 

*

 

These little unrelated pebbles, dropped randomly on the ground or in the water, it doesn’t matter where: I jump to avoid them and am changed.

 

*

 

I understand anything in this world by pushing it away. I mean by writing it down.

Sir,

an elderly woman called out to me, what she thought was me, and indeed it was except I was no sir. Could you help me with something heavy? I said yes and brought my boyfriend out instead, as if supplying her with the more accurate version of her request, the sir she wanted. Are greetings just floating signifiers, or made of actual content? I suppose it depends on the context of interpretation: artist or viewer. If the woman’s intention was to produce invitation through contact, then it worked: I understood her request immediately, didn’t look over my shoulder for the others, would not have benefitted from clarification. Who, me? A few sentences ago, I almost wrote something about, “polite contact.” Is it ever polite to misunderstand someone? To brand them with your personal expectations of how the world works? The question assumes a superficiality antithetical to community, forcing “inclusion” to revolve around sight, the status quo of all human senses. Understanding demands space for difference and curiosity, which flower with appearances, sure, but only by firmly hidden roots, all the grounded stuff you can’t expect to see. To understand someone is to know that there will be truths both contradictory and unwitnessable. The only way out into the broad arena of true recognition is therefore through questioning and apprehending, and the elderly woman did both. She suggested a world in which my gender presentation and my biological sex may not reinforce each other, and she was polite to me regardless of the potential affront that stalks such incongruities. But by now, I am mistaking the viewer’s reception with the artist’s intent, imbuing her words with stance and premeditation. She simply thought I was a boy.

I brought my boyfriend out instead, without asking for his availability, having translated question into obligation. This woman needs your help. In the face of misunderstanding—was I embarrassed? feeling defensive?—I brought a man to solve what was then reinforced as a man’s problem. Why didn’t I just help her? Because I am no sir, and my drive in that moment to establish the few attributes I lack overpowered the possibility of the many I could contain—strength, fluidity, playfulness, understanding (the woman was, after all, quite old), or just being a good neighbor. I picked up all the implications of her greeting and found a way to carry both much more and much less than the situation asked of me.

Men have always turned “weight” into opportunity: muscles tasked with function, they rectify absences, fill holes, provide height when gravity bullies and receive praise through their lifted objects without having to become them. Weight, a woman’s problem that demands modification and restraint, becomes, in the context of dudes, a thing to absorb or pick up. I am engulfed by manly distinctions, a flame too close to my back. If words sometimes stick to the wrong body, which is modified by which? Why did I say wrong body instead of wrong words? Perhaps I could only prove I was not a sir through comparison and contrast, by taking the woman’s question seriously enough to insist I could only supply, but not become, the answer. When born of insecurity, need sometimes does nothing but highlight its own relativity: if I must find a man in order to establish my own lack of manhood, what does it mean to be a woman? I am not a sir, but perhaps not inherently a she, either.

Even landscapes can be made of habit and instruction. Land goes here, sky there, keep the horizontal median plush and predictable. But gender is pure context. Things weird or new look out of place against the backdrop of all that’s already been established as what is. Trace a line far back enough and you eventually find an initial point of contact between pencil and paper, context of the origin. Is it ever polite to misunderstand someone’s gender? If things are made up, and the social world is constructed, and humans are capable of change and growth, then the question is nonsense. Only when misunderstanding morphs into insistence does confusion become dangerous. But in the context of an elderly woman wearing thick glasses, crossing the street near our lilac bush and discovering my young, accessible body: it is simple reflex gone mildly rogue.

When people ask me questions, I sometimes wish to know their long-term expectation before answering. As if truth requires context or carries a faltering sense of responsibility. By truth I mean gender. Full of holes, defining itself against others and itself and the new day.

Sea Sick

To be willing to grow, you must be willing to be, at this stage, at least a tiny bit wrong.

I said wrong, not different.

When something or someone different has to be vouched for as being “okay,” “alright,” “I mean it’s fine if that’s what you choose…,” you are indicating a system which demands that perceived otherness or badness be accompanied by language. “She’s fine.” “I guess that’s okay.” Despite, despite, despite. Lifestyle, relationship, tone, design. Shape, size, etc.

My point is that it is a privilege to move through space unaccompanied by language.

To not alarm anyone by your need for explanations.

To be a disseminator of the language of approval is basically to disguise judgment as tolerance.

Some things don’t need to be said. Or shouldn’t have to be. A more tolerant world would, in fact, be mostly quiet.

I suppose oxygen is okay. I mean breathing is fine. It’s alright if a “deep breath” is what you prefer. But I wouldn’t take one myself.

Who says a single person needs to understand everything?

[           People who feel the need to vouch for otherness.

People who refuse to couch their fatherliness.

People who peruse and who mouth and who cover up the rest of us.

Here, let me explain this to you. I know how badly you want to understand.           ]

There are good things in the world that you’ll never understand:

How the sun works.

What gives water its blue-green precision.

Your birth,

or where and when excitement is distinctly born.

You want to understand because you can’t distinguish love from facts.

You can’t love me without thinking about me. Thinking through me. Right through the middle.

And what’s the point, you say, in thinking, unless you’re gonna do it all the way? Think until you understand comprehensively.

So that when you’re done thinking, you tell yourself you’ve arrived at comprehension. F-a-c-t.

You can’t see the rooms the doors of which you haven’t even opened.

You can’t see the frog in your throat.

There is a frog, and you love him. You want your love mirrored by the cold shape of unmoving, published statement. You want to understand love from the inside, as if it were capable of being emptied out. To dissect the frog, it must be dead. Then you’ll know so much about him. Your thoughts about the frog will be buoyed by

your own objective knife, called apprehension.

I am working on healthy boundaries:

Distinguishing no from yes.

Leaving a room when I must.

Not laughing out of habit.

Not picking up weight that belongs to another.

I watch “love” and “understanding” meander down the street, side by side.

Not interchangeable, but in many ways, yes, parallel.

And when the two diverge, I sometimes maintain my grasp on the former, let my thinking brain go on ahead a few more blocks, however far it wants to go, while we stay behind, me and my heart, no longer wishing to replace presence with scrutiny.

The thinking, at times, interrupts the being. Segments it. Blood-letting, a slicing motion.

It says:

I think it’s okay. I mean, what you’re doing. I suppose I think it’s fine. If I can just see it from the inside first, take a closer look at the stuff naturally kept away from me, I think I’ll feel better releasing it back into the pond.

How To Raise Kids Without Having Any

Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject…All objects, rightly perceived, are already full.”

~Susan Sontag

 

How are you supposed to be a person before you’ve become yourself?

When you’re 9, 10, 11 years old, handcuffed by the impending sea change of hormones and the inevitability of messing up, it’s hard to overemphasize the value in looking at everything that exists outside your boundaries and then making some hard choices about where to cross over. Do you hear what I’m saying? One becomes oneself by first loitering and failing, by drinking the strange potion of doing bad things and making what will eventually be seen as, in one context or many, mistakes. Bad because not allowed, mistakes because never again. You prank people, you send a neighbor’s trash can barreling down the street, you reveal words to friends told to you by other friends and find yourself, by the end of the week, lonely and speechless and bored. You judge people and turn away from opportunities. You hang out with peers you’re “not supposed to” and drink things you’re “not supposed to.” You do little at school, and then even less; you do bad in life on purpose. If the greatest thing about being 70, as May Sarton once told a stunned crowd, is that you are more of yourself than you’ve ever been before, then the shared truth of that fact is that you are hardly so when you’re young.

So what is the job of a parent? And how do we ensure that the duties are fulfilled when the nuclear unit, already so treacherous a shape, has exploded, leaving kids parentless, and single parents stretched beyond the thin membrane of their already tapering selves, and children vulnerable to the strange spectrum of homeless <—-> home after home after home, the displacement caused by hyper-placement, the unraveling of home from a house to a street, a street to a city, or one couch to another, night after night? Kids bounce, or they run, or they are placed elsewhere; or else they share space with numerous others and find themselves shuttled back and forth between visitations and conflicting schedules, their lives unfolding not in bedrooms and classrooms—the privilege of clearly defined, designated spaces—but filling up whatever empty cracks and corners they can sneak into. Bouncing and rebounding, running and shuttling: all those gerunds are the side-effect of unintentional splitting, whether it be sudden death or the earth opening up around a couple’s previous commitment, how we adults can sometimes change our minds, or leave our minds perfectly still for too long, only to find younger generations swallowed whole by the consequences. Abuse, neglect, or things simply catching up with us, which happens a lot, in my experience of being an adult: one day I’m doing the chasing, the next day I’m being chased. And while I never moved through foster care myself and, with a few minor exceptions, generally knew where I’d be sleeping each night, I was nevertheless a child of divorce, unwellness, and adults who refused agreement and compromise; of the shattering of normality, how we all pretended, according to our ages, that we could function through to the other side of whatever it was that consumed our household for all those years.

It wasn’t until I reached my 30s that I found Nora Ephron: “…infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was.” The brain damage was, is, mine, and the infidelity my father’s, who brought a whole slew of damaged and damaging women—in image, in real life flesh—into our household, exposing me, at the earliest age I can remember, to the abusive notion that my gender could achieve value only through becoming sexually desirable to a certain type of man. Achieving, becoming—in other words, gender troubles. The thing about gerunds is that they take all the action out of the verb, they function by relinquishing their motion for the stillness of a noun; they hold still when you might’ve expected them to go forward a little, and I can’t think of a better way to describe being young and feeling out of control than that.

So what is the job of a parent, a support person, a trusted adult? You can’t help a person become themselves any faster than nature and empowerment allow. But you can help a child understand that they have options, that they can make things exist that did not exist before their making them. That they can be curious, fail broadly, try again. There’s a lot of time for trying again when you’re young. But the best way to encourage the person a child will become is to model the doing, the making, the being; in other words, the personhood. Kids see how we act and what we see, they learn through the act of witnessing. The job of the guardian is to foster spaces wherein youth may witness life’s bigness, fortified by patience and humility and, above all else, a creativity that growls over perfection’s whisper.

 

The other day, killing time in a doctor’s waiting room, my partner recounted some of his teenaged hijinks to me, spoke of how he and his friends once rearranged all the lawn décor on a series of houses a few streets from their own. The doctor hadn’t called me back yet, so I reciprocated by mentioning the time I once shot a bb gun into a school window; or how I’d stayed the night in a den with a bunch of seniors when my mom thought I was already home, how I had a man call the school and claim to be my father, excusing me from the day. Some of it worked out—by the skin of my teeth, I avoided certain natural consequences—and some of it didn’t (my mom had already called the school 30 minutes before us, looking for me, worried sick). None of this stuff has any bearing on the person I am today, beyond the simple and extraordinary fact that she was once me, and that she survived.

Posturing, denial, repression. Our adult methods for making sense of a chaotic world grow sophisticated as we fall more into ourselves, as we army crawl into the lives we’ve chosen. As you get older, you learn how to do more than just casually tiptoe across the boundaries you encounter and begin to harness the full force of your unique volition, sometimes setting new, expanded boundaries. Survival depends, at least in part, on a relationship with your younger self: that you learn to let the word “forgiveness” sit lightly on your tongue, that you understand how utterance conjures the good ideas which, in turn, become actions. But survival also depends on the experience of being young, being her, and having at least one adult who will listen to your new feelings and less good ideas and transitional states of mind and, rather than dismiss them, will take them no less seriously than what’s found in the heart of every single adult who, alive and mortal, sometimes changes their mind, too. Nobody stops growing, and that’s the shared intimacy of life and death across all generations, two sides of the same fabric—the same seam, the same pattern.

To alienate a young person in their journey toward becoming themselves is a form of abuse. To pretend their struggles are not normal, to react with shock more than curiosity and understanding, to try and replace steadiness with speed or vice versa. It is to close them up into little clamshells, to pretend they aren’t the same creatures who will one day make pearls of themselves, their feelings real in the same real world of your own.

We punish kids for not being better, yet we’re full of shock when, over time, they change. “You never used to like [fill in object here],” goes the classic parental saying, or, “you used to be so __________,” always said with a touch of ridicule. As if we want to take our little loves and freeze them in place at our own shifting will. Dear reader, how many pieces of your own comprehensive heart do you show the world, and when are they static? How often is your thought process conflicted, or full of thin holes, or not anything like what you’d once expected of it?

 

We can support youth, in professional as much as personal capacities, by showing them what it looks like to be a model of misfit survival. It is nothing short of magic to watch the walls go down when a young person reveals a dark sliver of themselves and you, adult person with power, don’t flinch. You understand, you remember, you empathize. It’s hard to make hard choices in frail circumstances, you think to yourself. Sometimes, survival is the only eligibility requirement when seeking a coping mechanism from a dark place, and you recall this by reflecting on your own once-bad choices and the ways they kept you reaching into tomorrow. Validation is a big, fraught word, but at its base, all it requires is understanding, any version of it, between two people.

What youth need from us: witnessing, contemplation. And I do mean the Sontag kind, where you recognize the worthiness of a young person to the point of momentarily forgetting about yourself; this is the reward of working with youth: an “already full” heart, how the stewardship of children and teens requires paying such complete attention that you can’t help but fill up with a tenderness bigger than yourself. And when the obstacles are larger? More and more consideration. And when young people find themselves inhabitants on the spectrum of homelessness <—-> home after home after home? Place and environment are things every young human has the right to count on, but care and open communication are places, too. Nonjudgmental language is an environment. Who is that person you could turn to all those years ago, when you were young and scared and needed someone to trust, someone whose lineage wasn’t bound up with yours? Think of that someone who kept you afloat. Now imagine under whose lifejacket you might be the ocean beneath.