one day you're going to wake up and not want to end it all. you’re going to have that peace you asked for. you’ll have that healing you prayed for. i know you’ve been let down, disappointed, and broken in ways you thought you wouldn't recover from. but you are here. you have survived most things people haven't. you are never alone, i’m right here with you. the pain you endured, the suffering you went through, it's real and it's valid. you’re still worthy of as many chances at life as you need. but don't ever give up on you. you don't have to be strong right now. just know you are loved. you are needed.
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Q: How do you reconcile disturbing revelations about an author you admire? Does it change how you view their work?
Discussing this on my latest mlbooks IG post. Please chime in.
So I watched the Stranger Things 5 doc and while all my criticisms and snarky thoughts are there, honestly, more than anything I just feel sad.
I'm sad for the version of me that was so deeply moved and enamoured by this show I watched on a whim 10 years ago. This earnest take on friendship and healing that spoke to something lost and grieving within me. I'm sad that creators who probably started out sincere caved to the pressure to make it bigger and more flashy. I'm sad that even while the show strayed so far from what made it special, there were always glimpses of that magic. I'm sad that even in a final season I didn't enjoy, and a finale I had so many criticisms of, there were echoes of the show that helped me understand my own quiet pain over growing up, growing older.
I'm sad the ending wasn't what it could have been, that so much feels tarnished. The ending was always going to break my heart, and it feels ridiculous and childish to say, but I wish it wasn't the kind of heartbreak that takes away the magic of what brought me to this show. But then I guess that's the whole point they wanted to make, right? I'm just sad it's over.
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I was also eighteen, and had used a quote from Janet Jackson's fourth studio album, which I am thinking is my favorite from her catalog, the messages were so positive and upbeat, hopeful. We weren't all the same, and it wasn't only knowledge and wisdom that were separating us, there was so much more that I was only beginning to see. I was starting my real education, my eyes never deceived me, my heart did, with my continually thinking people were going to be better than their nature, I was proven wrong repeatedly.
I think that is the worst part of growing up, learning that the world really isn't fair. I mean by this time I had survived an attempted murder by my dad's hand, beat unconscious with a shoe by his girlfriend, and the mother of his second child, found my own mom dead on the couch a few days before my eleventh birthday, and was sexually abused by a child, who was probably getting the same by the hand of a male in my god grandmother's home.
I may have been headed for college, but I was also headed towards huge disappointments about what I wanted out of my life, and what those around me thought I should get.
I come from a line of folks who do not have natural smiles, to get the illusion in the photo my school-mate Eva Matuka was working with the photographer to make sure everyone looked their best. I think she made a joke or something and got me to laugh and that is what was captured in this photo, that single moment that makes me look more hopeful than I really was. A pleasant deception that made for much better wallet-sizes that my grandparents handed out like cigars at a birth.
Something else that is long past, that I see in this photo is the earring in my left ear. My junior high school friend, and co-worker at Petland Discount, Nelson Lorenzo literally bought me physically to this shop on Allerton Avenue to get my ear pierced, he said it completed my look, whatever that was. I think it was sometime after my three semesters in college that I let the hole close up, I had figured out on my own I wasn't really an earring person, and that single lapse of peer pressure was soon only marred by a bit of tougher cartilage near the tip of my ear.
Generally I think I have made it through alright, I don't have the people I once had in my life, I also don't have pieces of me that were bartered, stolen, raped, beat, and mis-trusted away. The people who did things to me took those parts of me with them as thoughtlessly as they would a piece of lint that had attached to their shirt.
They walked off with parts of me that I had needed, but could obviously no longer use once the damage had been done. I have spent my adult life attempting to cultivate the growth of new parts to fill the space where the old ones used to be. Some times I am successful, other times I am left with a hodgepodge of hopes and wishes that are standing in like replacement organs, trying to help me get back to the me I used to be, garnished with the knowledge and wisdom of the life I have led up to now.
[Photo courtesy of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts '91 Yearbook with the blessing of the Brown estate]
