dailyprompt-2107 – Stories That Are All True

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

People, in my experience, are scared of themselves. They try to get to know everyone except them, avoiding alone time at all costs. They fill their days with busywork, when the real questions are looming in their private journals. It seems like you are doing yourself a favor, all this keeping busy. But then when disaster strikes, you are not as resilient to change. Being able to bounce back relies on being able to look at options and know whether they are right for you. You will not be swept up in a stream. You will be able to advocate for yourself.

It doesn’t take being a blogger like me to get familiar with yourself. It just takes a few lines a day, a reflection over all that has happened. Most nights, it’s really just asking yourself one question: “what did I learn?” Give yourself some time to contemplate, because asking yourself what you learned will keep you from repeating patterns.

Most of us repeat patterns, why aging does not occur in a straight line for adults. I see this the most clearly when people have been married young and are divorcing in their 40s. Yes, they’re in their 40s now, but they’ve been repeating the same pattern since they were 21. Not all of them is in their 40s.

I know within myself that I’m 18 and 48. That in a lot of ways, I take care of myself no better than I did back then, and need lots of support. In other ways, I’m a wise sage who can do “a damn fine piece of writing.” I am not one age all the time, and knowing this about myself helps me to see my strengths and disabilities accurately.

It helps to know yourself intimately because when other people in your life are preoccupied, you’re the one you’ve got. You need to feel comfortable with you, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time together. Try not to fill your silence so quickly. Leave room for the divine, which for me is a stunning sunrise.

I think that people nurture relationships with others, but do not nurture a relationship with themselves. What does that even look like?

For me, it’s thinking of my own wants and needs like I would do for a partner. I try to be thoughtful and caring to myself, often failing but keeping up the good fight. I know that I cannot give to a partner if I don’t feel stable first, so a lot of it is cutting out the guilt that I’m taking care of myself.

I have learned over time what makes me feel all kinds of emotions, and have more control over them. I have turned inward because I have some house cleaning to do. I have made a mess of a lot of relationships and I’m just now getting back into the swing of things.

It starts with listening to my body and asking what it needs.

There is nothing more important to know than that.

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

Really the only thing I believe all people should know is that race is a construct and we’ve lied to ourselves about that since the first enslaved people arrived on US shores in the 1600s. It’s not an American problem by any means, but the police do not convince me that we have gained much ground. Yes, there are great big sweeping changes in that people aren’t enslaved anymore…. but in America, you can’ shoot Jim Crow all you want and he will not die. Ruby Bridges, the first black girl at William Frantz Elementary during the school segregation crisis, is the *three years younger* than my mother.

Homophobia is just as manufactured. The Bible gave people a book chunky enough to beat people and that’s just what the church does unless you take time and energy you don’t have to search for a congregation. The barrier to entry with Christianity is high, because you have to swallow a lot of bullshit church teachings that you don’t like if you go to the wrong one first, and most people don’t come back. I promise there is a difference between the Church of Christ and the United Church of Christ (“Splitter.”), but if you are in one and belong in the other, my guess is that you don’t know it because I would bet that a lot of people could tell you the difference between Catholic and Protestant….. but probably not one protestant denomination from another. To the unchurched it’s all the same. Jesus would most certainly be baffled by *all of this.*

Transphobia is where the rubber meets the road in the queer community. First of all, white gay men rarely compromise with anyone because they make more money than everyone else. Watching gay people on TV, you’d think we were all one big happy family, but depending on where you live, there’s a deep divide between men and women. Not hatred. Just have their own spaces and don’t reach out. When I was coming up in the 90s, some bars you couldn’t even get into unless you were male or accompanied by one who’d vouch for you. These are the bars where straight white women think they want to hang out and get completely wide-eyed at dick o’clock. Moreover, there are lesbians that make Rowling’s Twitter/X feed look like child’s play. It took years for HRC to support trans issues (their point and I do see it, though wrong, was that gender and sexual orientation were two different issues…. that trans people weren’t queer people). I have never had the entitlement of a rich white gay man, but my own feelings toward trans people have changed through education as well. Younger people are losing touch with their history and it’s because no one wants to hear me (or anyone else) tell it. “Don’t Say Gay” is just the latest iteration in “lock up your kids because homosexuality and pedophilia are the same.” Republicans are making it harder and harder for queer children to feel normal in today’s world because they don’t realize what everyday life was like for us in the 90s, much less remembering that we were targeted in the Holocaust. Our pink triangles are slowly being forgotten because our infrastructure to be able to pass down information is being bottlenecked in so many directions.

And now we’ve arrived at the most important thing I believe everyone should know. If we do not stop picking people to hate, erasing these three things will do no good. We’ll just take the way we’ve treated minorities and apply it to something else.