So much of what I continue to learn- so much of what I have been able to feel this past year, is that shame is not going to make me better at anything.
I come back to myself. I continue to heal.
I take a beat and revel in the fact that I am able to slow down enough to look at the sum of my whole life and not just the shame or the diagnoses or the loss or the trauma or the the the. I think, what a privilege- this ability to slow long enough to look back. To stay in one place.
I do better when I know better.
When I love, when I am being loved well, shame isn’t in the room.
I aspire to be a Coffee Shop Queer. I would like to be a regular somewhere besides the grocery store- to have my seat and my order remembered. To sit and be able to absorb the energy around me in a helpful way- one that is generative and that my body thrums along with in an effort to keep up- keep moving. keep going. keep writing.
But I’m not and I don’t- too many voices and noises.
Too many Shiny Things.
I stopped into a local coffee shop last week on my way to pick up one of the kids. We had conferences at one school and an event at Little’s school thirty minutes later. I was in real clothes and my hair wasn’t in a top knot or left to its own wavy, grey unruliness. I was looking like a people; the sun was out and I had thirty minutes that belonged only to me. I was a Coffee Shop Queer. I ordered an earl grey latte with oat milk, just like that, and without looking up the barista responded with, “I mean, I can make a London fog…”
k.
The difference between the two is that a traditional London fog has vanilla syrup and I didn’t want vanilla syrup, which is why I ordered it the way I did. I didn’t have the desire to communicate this so I left it.
My drink was delivered sans the vanilla syrup which left me simultaneously grateful and perplexed. Why all of that to just give me what I asked for?
For a split second I felt ashamed for not just ordering an earl grey with steamed oat milk.
I sat on the patio with my face towards the sun before coming-to and realizing I was sitting next to out-of-state tech bros examining the block and making big plans with their deep pockets for this “underdeveloped neighborhood.” I wanted to spit my shame into a napkin and leave it on their table as I walked by, cutting my Coffee Shop Queer montage short and walking back to my car deflated and ashamed but not knowing who it belonged to.
Once when I was five or six I abandoned my place in front of the television along with my bowl of cereal to stand in the bathroom of our apartment in my tiny kid underwear, examining my belly- a pot over the elastic band. I took my mother’s tortoise shell-looking razor out of the shower and ran it repeatedly over my nipples and belly until they were a bloody mess. I remember going to my mother’s bedroom where she was asleep next to her boyfriend and standing over her. When I picture her this way, wild-haired and open-mouthed, I see my babies. I stood there and watched her and bled. Not crying or moving but watching until her eyes fluttered open and without skipping a beat she barely whispered “what did you do?”
The better question, the one I don’t have an answer for, is why?
I don’t remember a lot but I do remember wanting to disappear. To be a better kid. To be less of a burden. To release her 22 year old self from the permanence of teenage motherhood. Was I attempting to remove parts of myself to make myself smaller? Did I wish to be invisible? I don’t know, but I remember the shame I felt as she cleaned my chest and put me in new underwear while she quietly cried.
I don’t know where her shame ended and mine began.
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