Tag: freewriting

prose

How to be Successful

Ever since I was old enough to listen, I’ve allowed people to define the way I view my own success. I was born into a generation that was told that we could have anything as long as we wanted it bad enough. But I have spent my whole life wanting and asking and working and every time I find myself within inches of the finish line, I fail.

For awhile I blamed myself. I wondered why I was standing in my own way of success. When I got angry enough, I would blame the world. I started writing when I was 12 years old. My first work: a suicide note. After being bed ridden with an illness that rendered me unable to take care of my own basic needs for 6 months, I could think of nothing else that I wanted more than to go back to school. But when I got back to my 5th grade classroom, I found that my classmates had stolen my possessions. They filled my desk with trash and ripped up my artwork.

My classmates thought I was dying. Maybe they wanted something to remember me by, maybe they wanted to destroy my painful memory. But nothing hurt me like the day that kids started telling me that they wished I was dead. I had just beaten an infectious disease that nobody had ever heard of and that was my reward for such a great success.

I didn’t fucking ask for a participation trophy.

There are defining moments in our lives that shape who we become as individuals. My illness did shape the person that I was going to become. My definition of success shaped my character and my future and fuck, it probably shaped my morals and parenting and just about every other aspect of my life. At 12 years old, I thought it would be better to end it all than to continue living with that fucked up vision of myself. But I didn’t.

I remember my first day of college. I got lost in the science building. I felt like an idiot. My science professor was an asshole. He made every person in that lecture hall feel like a piece of garbage. I wanted to raise my hand and ask him why he had to make us feel inferior in order for him to feel like a successful teacher. I never thought that the teachers were supposed to belittle their students. I left campus feeling pretty shitty about myself that day. I found my car, navigated the one-way roads, went north instead of south on the freeway, and cried “wee wee wee” all the way home.

I approached my parents driveway slowly, wondering how I was going to tell them that I wasn’t cut out for college like I thought I was. I’ll never forget how I pulled in the driveway with tears in my eyes, feeling like the tiniest fleck of shit that had ever graced a public restroom. As I parked my car and wiped my eyes, I looked up to see my father standing at the top of the driveway. I could see his eyes glisten with pride as he smiled. His only child had just finished her first day of college. I had surpassed him in graduating high school and setting out to do things that he never could have imagined for himself.

Defining Moments.

I’ve spent my whole life telling people to fuck off and I’m not going to stop now. If you don’t like the way that someone paints your success, you have every right to tell them to fuck off. Not everyone is going to have the perfect paintbrush to highlight your best features. I’ve been struggling through adult life for awhile now and I’ve learned that age defines the things we hate, not the people we are.

As a teenager, I hated children. I hated that I was forced to transition into a different part of life before I was ready. I hated that I was sexualized before I was fucking ready to be. I hated that children didn’t have to care about what they looked like and I did. I hated that I was forced to be picked last for sports. I hated that I was still treated like a child, even though boys were allowed to touch me in ways that I didn’t even want to touch myself.

My twenties made me hate teenagers. I despise how they make mistakes and don’t learn from them. I don’t understand how they sleep all day and stay up all night and don’t pay attention to the world. I hate how they feel the need to be the center of attention. And then I stop. Because I do not want to be a part of the generation that hates the younger generation.

Every age comes with it’s own challenges and defining moments. When I’m 60, I will not be criticizing the only people who can save me. If I die at 70, a plate of success will be my last supper. I will decide what is on that plate. You can dine at my table or you can fuck off.

A.

prose

Waiting

i am the wife of a man, who lives in a tin can. from the moment i said that ‘i do’, this is the life that i choose. i choose to love the breeze that brings his love to me from what ever fucking fleet that he sails through this week.

but my son didn’t choose this life. he was forced to accept this- like we accepted it, 6 months in, with a bulge between my hips, we cried together when we realized he would miss our unborn sons first birthday.

people tell me to be optimistic but follow it up with, ‘i don’t know how you do it’, and seal my casket off with ‘you chose this, so get over it’.

but i have to be careful with optimism. saying things like, ‘i have a surprise for you’ is a slap on the wrist to a boy with one wish so fatefully diminished. you can seal it with a kiss. but how insulting is it to fill a child’s head with hope, knowing that he is going to feel punished?

A.

prose

Photographers

Everyone at the zoo thinks that they are a photographer. I don’t mean the ‘casual selfie next to a giraffe’ type of photography, I mean- ‘You just stepped in front of a single mom pushing her stroller so that you could get the best angle of a monkey shitting into its hand’ type of photography. I have 3 good reasons why this is fucking idiotic and you people need to stop.

 

  1. You look ridiculous. We live in a world where vanity takes precedence over humility. No one is humble anymore. I say hello to people every single day, only to have them avert their eyes and continue walking. They would rather listen to the words of a song through a set of headphones than ever engage in friendly conversation with a stranger. No, you’re not an introvert, you’re an asshole.
  2. You are fucking rude. If you have ever taken a course in photography in your pathetic fucking life, you would know that you cannot just obstruct public areas so that you can get a shot. You can certainly use public areas but you must realize that, just because you decided to pull your camera out, does not require anybody to respect you.
  3. You are not experiencing the moment. That picture is forever documenting a moment that you missed. It’s not a memory of your family enjoying the zoo. It’s not a memory of anything. Nobody cares about personal photographs except for the people who take them or the people in the photograph. You can wallpaper your house in photos of animals but everyone who visits is going to think you’re ridiculous.

 

I watched an 8-year-old child nearly push over an elderly woman today and her family was so distracted by the fact that she was trying to jump out of the photo that they did not even scold her. They didn’t even acknowledge that their child physically assaulted an elderly woman with a cane. I got to silently watch the entire scene as I impatiently waited for the child to listen to her shitty parents. I’m sure in 5 or 6 years that young girl will be a little piece of shit trying to fill public spaces with her vanity too. I think back on that moment and wish I would have done something. Like, apologize for the young girl who obviously didn’t realize that she wasn’t the center of attention. It’s not her fault that her parents are idiots. But one day it will be.

 

I don’t care how you correct their behavior- if you correct it. If you cannot stand to point out your child’s flaws, how are they ever going to know that they have any? You’re raising your kids to pose for pictures. You’re not raising them to apologize, show empathy, or even conduct themselves with respect for others. Take a step back, really think about the individual that your child is becoming. It’s a hard journey, becoming a parent. No one is perfect. But you cannot walk through life pretending that no one else is there. Put your camera down and be present.

A.

prose

Mountains

There is not enough time in the day. Every morning I wake up with the assumption that I alone, will be able to carve apart the mountains that I have built of my challenges. I’ve meticulously planned every day of my life so that I wonder who owns my time. Truly I must, but the mountains that tower over me are so hard to climb. Today I realized that I have planned my own disappointment. In the lists, I have calculated exactly what needs to be done so that I, the creator of my own obstacles, can feel pride. In these lists, I orchestrated my own failure.

But have you ever climbed a mountain? Or even stood at the base of one? Standing at the bottom of a mountain that is over 1000 feet in elevation will realign even the most troubled of priorities. It’s not every day that I can drag myself to the base of a mountain, but on the days that my challenges paralyze me, I find it to be most important. I cannot just flutter through life, half completing my goals every day. Although it is sometimes difficult to imagine, challenges are only pebbles next to mountains.

I’m not a godly woman. I am one of those people who passes through a church parking lot only to collect the pokeballs and any rare pokemon that might be lurking around. I can assume that in 200 years, this type of activity will be written into every holy book as a sin. I wonder if there will be coupons for first-class seats in hell at the end of each holy scripture.

–

While I busied my mind with the idea of burning in hell for eternity, far in the distance I saw a tree- dead on the top of the mountain. For a moment, I pitied the tree. Having to live through the harsh heat of southern California must be far more challenging than any hurdle I’ve jumped. Then I realized, this tree has no concept of difficulty or pain. This tree managed to grow from rock and clay to fulfill its exact destiny on this planet. The tree is dead- but it died at the summit of a mountain.

I have triumphed through every challenge I have ever faced in my life. I might stumble and fall, but can’t turn back until I’ve reached the peak. All mountain climbers must have a similar philosophy: Make it to the top, or die trying.

A.