stuck in the good

It surprises me.

People do good things. They give you a boost. They act unselfishly. They smile as they pass you on the street. They do you favors and they keep your secrets.

At this point in my life, in the midst of trying to establish my embryonic career and falling back sometimes, feeling overcome by hopelessness, the best it gets is being respected. As a professional; as a professional woman. Not a girl (I'm wearing a suit, dammit!) and not just a student (almost 2/3 of the way through law school) but as an equal. An adult. Because before law school, no one had ever treated me like an adult; and to be fair, I didn't really consider myself one. I never wanted to be. Paying rent sucks; being responsible, planning and cleaning and signing up for electricity made me feel like I was doomed for a life of suburbia, a philandering husband and a boring office job, kids I didn't want, a mortgage ball and chain I'd spend the next 30 years unhappily paying off when I'd rather be funding a travel account. That's not me; that has never been me. If I have anything to do with it, it will never be me.

IT'S NOT ME!

And some of the most difficult, painful, and darkest times have been the fruit of my efforts to try to be a certain somebody, to fit into a role I thought I wanted, to be a source of pride to my parents or to be better than I used to be. To rise above the ghosts of my naysayers, the ones who spent our youth belittling me and sucking the vibrance from my life. I spent almost ten years trying to 'show them' I was someone not to be meddled with. I wasn't who they thought I was. I didn't deserve their ostracization, their collective poison. Eventually I emerged; I don't know exactly why. I couldn't tell a teenager in a similar position how to do it, how to believe against all evidence and depression and after all remnants of hope and desire have abandoned you, how to keep going. You just have to. Luckily, I did. I extricated myself from the various situations (friends, boyfriends) I'd recreated out of the model of my tormented past, and I left it. I left them. I escaped. I was so badly burned, I had worked so hard to release myself of its and their grip on me, those memories, the trauma and the faces and the degrading comments that clung to, tainted, every.fucking.thing.I.did. since I was 15. In the way that a marshmallow, if you alight it and let it burn until the outside is pure charcoal, will uncloak so easily, leaving just the ooey, gooey, yummy middle that spreads and sticks and melts the s'more chocolate to perfection.


The self that I knew when I was 15 years old, the person that I was, my inclinations and habits and lenses, were charred so completely, all I had to do was, slowly and carefully, shed the skin, erase the scars of then, to reveal this butterfly-like being.

Yes, I'm fragile sometimes. For some things, I hope I always will be (I'm sensitive). Being vulnerable allows you to be closer to other humans; it strips away some barriers and boundaries and gets rid of motes and Great Walls and booby traps. Once in a while, it'll be a mistake. By definition, when we are more open to the good, we are more open to be wounded, too.

I lost where I was going. I made a misstep. I didn't think I would talk about it here.

In any case, I'm trying to be good. Good at what I do; good to my friends and family; good to strangers and waitresses and maintenance people. Good to the mailman. Good to the checkers at the grocery store. And it's okay to make declarations like those when it's unseasonably warm and millions of pink petals are blowing in the city's corridors and you've gotten a pat on the back for your work. It worked out today. Sometimes life goes our way for a bit. Sometimes things go better than expected, sometimes people treat us better than we deserve, sometimes we get on a good karma roll that seems to have come from nowhere.

I had this person once, he was mine for a long time, and he would always tell me, somewhat annoyed at my usurpation, not to use other people's quotes to convey something to him. Like from songs or poems, I would use others' words to say what I wanted to say to him. I never understood, I still don't really, why he hated this practice with such ferocity. My counter-argument was always, if they say it as good or better than I ever could, why wouldn't I use their language? Some of my most utilized appropriations come from E.E. Cummings, others from song lyrics or books, a good number from the Simpsons. Because there is not, within this universe or cosmos or lifetime, any way that I could say these sentiments better. Any attempt would lack the layers and layers of meaning, enigmatic significance, and pure emotion that belies their configurations of words, but which is conspicuously absent from mine. Even Bloc Party used Cummings' "i carry your heart with me" as the chorus of 'Ion Square', and they make their living being creative! My sweet words are cliched, they're trite and they're thin and wrinkly and have the consistency of a dried leaf that crumbles with touch. Even some of the most famous and influential musicians cover others' music - Johnny Cash covering NIN's 'Hurt'; Elliott Smith's various Beatles covers; Ben Harper's cover of Marvin Gaye; Eddie Vedder playing Neil Young - so I see it as nothing more than reverence for those who do it better. I don't agree that it takes away from the overall message if I use someone else's words. If I'm saying them as if they came from me, in the exact same way I would had I authored them, aren't they just as meaningful?

As far as I'm concerned, in many different contexts, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, especially when you're first starting out. Learn what you can from those who did it before you, ingest their collective knowledge and the fruits of their research and mistakes, and build off of that. There's no shame in not starting from the bottom if you don't have to; it doesn't detract from the legitimacy of where you are or what you've done (as long as there is no cheating, plagiarizing, taking credit for others' work, or other ethically questionable actions involved).

That seems to be all for the day.