It’s summer in San Jose. The May weather is balmy, even in the orange and violet twilight. I’m waiting in line with friends dressed as Gaara and Sasuke for the masquerade near the convention center.
I’m sweaty. My feet are sore. My drugstore eyeliner, so carefully applied in the hotel mirror, is smudged—half gone. I’m so content to be among friends. The soreness in my ankles is a badge of honor I display proudly on my lapel. Proof that I am a dedicated con-goer.
It’s my first time away from home without my parents. I feel grown. I feel free. I am among people who understand me and who love the very same things that I love. Thousands of people just like me.
Gaara says something to Sasuke—makes a joke. My laughter bubbles up from somewhere inside of me. It is full and trilling. It is a child’s laugh because I’m a child.
Gaara looks at me, his gaze is skeptical and sharp.
“It wasn’t that funny,” he says.
And so I trim that part of me away. It no longer fits in the container I keep myself in, so it’s time for it to go. I have to remember that jokes can only be so funny and laughter can only be so loud.
It is my junior year of high school and I am in love with a boy. He plays guitar and looks good in the color blue. He shows me how to read tablatures and I realize I can learn to play guitar, too.
He has a girlfriend across the country. I don’t plan on trying to ruin that. I am a good girl. But I can’t help and adore him even if the feeling is unrequited.
Sometimes we text late at night. It always makes me feel like I am stealing something. There is a sort of precarious danger to the exchange, but a thrill all the same. He tells me he finds me attractive and my cheeks hurt with how brightly I smile at my screen.
Our language becomes formal and surface level after that. I’m a good girl and he has a girlfriend. I’m not disappointed. I feel so happy to finally be beautiful.
I want to experience love, though. I want to hold hands with somebody and kiss them chastely in public. I want people to see how happy we are. It will never happen with the boy and I can be okay with that. We’re friends and I love that too.
I ask him one night why I am still single.
He asks if I want him to be honest.
My stomach lurches. I don’t want him to be honest. I want him to tell me he doesn’t know why— to tell me I’m a beautiful, interesting girl. But now that I know he is not going to say this I tell him yes. I tell him I want him to be honest.
“You are dark and odd,” he says.
I don’t know what he means, but I am too hurt to ask. I scour every conversation I have had with the boy I loved and trim away anything that looks dark or odd. I weep for the parts of me I have had to amputate and cauterize the open wounds on my heart. It is a painful necessity if I ever want to be loved.
I am twenty years old and I am feeling better about myself than I ever have. I’m recovered from a break up that crushed me and I’m playing the field. There’s a man I’m pursuing. He’s eight years older than me.
We’re best friends. We know so much about each other. We have seen each other cry. He is handsome and he seems to like me. I tell him I want to be with him. He says he’s on the fence.
One day in the summer, he rests his hand on the sun-warmed skin of my thigh as I drive with him through town. The windows are down. The wind whips through my bright red hair. I dyed it myself. I brush my fingertips through the undercut I had my hairstylist shave on the side of my head.
He sighs in comfort but takes his hand back. I’m like his sister, he says. I am not convinced. I steal a kiss from his lips in the silence between secrets. He tells me I’m a trouble maker, but he’s smiling. I’m smiling, too. He feels so close to something I can grasp.
Another day comes and it feels the same. But the marine layer refracts the sun in a way that hurts my eyes. I tell him we can work. I tell him we have all the trappings of a relationship.
He rejects me. I am like his sister, he tells me again. He doesn’t want to throw the friendship away. I bring up his hand on my thigh. I bring up the kiss.
“Look at you. You’re wearing braces. The side of your head is shaved. Have you seen the women I usually date? I date models and athletes!” He says.
I close my lips over my teeth and my brackets feel obstructive and foreign. When he goes home, I tell myself I will give myself a day to grieve the daydreams I had been spinning in rose-colored thread. He promises to be my wingman. I tell him about a boy in my life drawing class who has lips I want to bite.
I marry the boy in class instead.
It’s been ten years and I’m married. My best friend is recovering from an abusive relationship. We talk about the expectations her ex had for her, we talk about how she was incapable of following his rubric. She sounds sad and small. I hate it, because her joy is something bright and beautiful.
Her heart is like mine; full of sea-deep love. It is hard to reach the bottom of it. It keeps going.
Sometimes, her sadness turns to anger. It’s a welcome change after so long of being caught in someone else’s tide.
We’re talking one day and I pull out some tarot cards for myself. When I read the message in the cards, though, they seem to be for her. The card that represents her ex stares me down. He disapproves of the message I pass on to her. Good. That means she needs to hear it.
We parse through the cards and she shares a deep sadness that he could not love her for all that she was and all that she wasn’t. I can hear in her voice the frustration in retrospect of being unable to fit into the ideal he’d crafted for her.
That’s when I tell her that she’s not a failure for not contorting her body to squeeze into a box he’d made for her.
Sure, the box may be shaped like her, it may even be her favorite color, or be filled with all sorts of creature comforts that she likes, but a box is still a box. It still limits her. It still is forcing her to be artificially small for someone else’s comfort.
It’s one of the rare moments of clarity I have from time to time; when all of my own aches and traumas crystallize into an understanding I didn’t know I’d internalized. It feels good to say it to her, and it feels good to hear it come out of my own mouth. It feels good because I am also used to trying to make myself small for the comfort of other people.
Speak less, laugh quieter, dress this way, have these interests, get rid of those ones. Every day is a constant series of checks and balances to see if the me I am portraying is the one that is acceptable to the people around me. I see the evidence of everyone else doing the same thing.
Women who claim they're too old for pink and purple hair. Teenagers apologizing for their love of a certain type of music, or their fixation on a hobby of theirs. My clients asking if a look they want to try for their hair is a good one for them.
It strikes me as silly.
In a world where so many of us are trying so hard to make it through every day, why should we apologize for our joy? If our happiness doesn’t come at the expense of someone else’s, why should we be ashamed of it? If our understanding of the world around us has protected us and brought us to where we are today, why should we try to make our own unique flavor more palatable to someone who would never like it anyway?
Is it not better to simply find the people who love us for what we are and aren’t?
It’s not easy. It’s scary and vulnerable. It opens us up to pain that is sometimes worse than it was before. It’s easy to cope with rejection when it’s not the real us they are rejecting.
But when we find the people who love us, and I do mean truly love us, it is the warmest comfort there is.
I totally agree 👍🏻
So real. 35 years old, and I am now working on destroying my own box. It's a journey. And now my hair is blue. <3