I had been working diligently on myself and becoming truly and authentically happy, but I had yet to conquer my past. I knew upon receiving the assignment that it was my chance, but I fought hard. I'm not the kind of person to seek pity or sympathy, and I certainly didn't want to dump my baggage on a class full of strangers.
As if I had no control over my words, when I sat down to write my speech, my past came pouring out. I had written about things I hadn't told anyone and stuff I hadn't even processed fully myself. Quickly my speech turned into a celebration of all I'd overcome, and come Monday morning, I opened up for the first time. With tears in my eyes and my knees shaking, here's what I said:
Everyday is a clean, new, fresh slate – except mine looks more like an overly used whiteboard where, yes the marker is technically erased, but you can clearly see everything that’s ever been written, drawn, scribbled, and sketched on it.
It’s kind of yellowing and altogether generally off.
The beautiful images created and designed by my father left my slate, my whiteboard, my canvas, stunning and radiant. But those images were washed away, staining my slate with the desperate tears and heartbroken cries of a five year old who watched as her dad, her hero, withered away, turning into a jaundice yellow mass of skin and bones; as cancer took over her dad’s body as he lost his person and morphed into an unfamiliar sick creature captive to an unruly, unfair, merciless disease.
The acid forced to come up after every meal for six years and counting burnt holes in my canvas;
Six years and counting; six years of counting
Counting calories over and over again to ensure that I wouldn’t go over 250 a day,
Counting how many pounds went away since I last stepped on the scale,
Counting how many cavities over the years because, in case you didn’t know, stomach acid erodes teeth, no matter how many times you brush and floss
Counting how many ribs stuck out in the morning versus the evening,
Counting to three as I took deep breathes in and out because I was lightheaded when I stood up
Each acid-eroded hole in my canvas was a sign of success.
Empty holes for an empty girl.
Dripping red marks stained my slate from attempts to scratch the dirt from my board, my body, my wrists and my ankles
My body is a temple
A temple colored red
I chisled away at my temple with the sharpest object I could find
The opacity of blunt red covered my grief, anxiety, hunger until the next time, when the old had dried and the new flooded – a sort of distorted cleansing.
Tainted with drinks of forgettable nights and the blues and greens and whites and yellows of miscellaneous prescriptions – I’d thought I’d finally clean my dirtied slate with alcohol and drugs
”Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
“Do you want a drink?” Transformed into “Do you want to forget what it feels like to suffer?” then quickly into “Do you want to die?”
It was “lame” to not drink, you’d be considered “boring.”
Boring. What’s boring is sitting on a couch in an office telling a trained listener all of the things that really make me “boring,” such as:
That time I thought that dumping buckets of sand into my car was a good idea. Clearly I was right.
Those times I slept in places other than a bed: front yards, my minivan, the shower, a dog bed
The time I came home after a party, went to talk to my mom, and ran smack into her door
Or when I slapped my own sister so hard she had a handprint on her face for days, a reminder of my actions when I couldn’t remember them at all.
That time I was so wasted I thought downing bottles of who-knows-what pills was a good idea, accepting the fact that I’d be dead within the hour… bottoms up, right?
Believe me, I was not boring.
But what really cleaned the slate, what wiped it all away, was the hot salty tears and aching cries of a girl sitting on the cold tiles of her bathroom floor asking for forgiveness, grace, redemption, and freedom, realizing the biggest mistake of her life; what nearly took her life away
So I made different use of my slates – what had portrayed all my faults, baggage, and damage now was used to create a world entirely of my own. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” – Anais Nin
A world of creation and life,
Joy and peace,
Adventure and curiosity,
Fearlessness and honesty.
A life centered around forgiveness and grace, redemption and freedom; a world where I can be unapologetically and dangerously human and it’s okay not to be okay; a world that is boundless and infinite. As John Steinbeck *put it, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
I’d like to end with a quote from one of my favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “For what it’s worth: it’s never too late, or … too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you
make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. – I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
I had to write "breathe" periodically throughout my speech as a reminder, but it didn't work. I didn't breathe more than twice, I barely looked up from the paper, and I felt numb for the rest of the day.
Part of me wanted it to be a nightmare, or nobody have listened, but it was real and people heard it.
Like drawing a picture of the monsters under your bed and tearing it up and throwing it away as a kid, sharing such personal aspects of my life put the power in my hands. I felt vulnerable and raw; refreshed and alive. What power did my past have over me now? I had defeated the reign my past had over me, and I had witnesses ready to testify.
