the summer after sophomore year in college that I conned my parents into letting me rent a room in a house they'd never seen, with people they'd never met...
people who were all male...
and older than me...
whose housekeeping skills sat somewhere at the crossroads of Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm...
Mr. Milkweed had a secret.
This was not a "big" secret, culturally defined. He was not a spy, or secretly wealthy, or father to a passel of unclaimed children. It was something both smaller and larger than all of that.
Its discovery was small and accidental. I'd returned to the house after my shift at Farmer Jack, a small and now defunct chain of grocery stores with a brief-lived stint in the Shenandoah Valley.
Howdy.
I worked in the deli department, slicing meat and spooning up a variety of potato salads for third shift employees of the local chicken factory. The summer was drawing to a close and Mr. M and I were hard at work disentangling the knot of our combined stuff, since all of mine had migrated from the closet sized space for which I was paying rent into his enormous bedroom. The floor was a stew of clothing, books, pizza boxes and-- since we both had long hair-- about 500 million elastic ponytail holders. It was slow going.
The joke about that day (which is entirely true) was that I'd left him reading next to some empty boxes he intended to fill with books while I was at work, and returned a full four hours later to find him next to some empty boxes he'd intended to fill with books while I was at work. He had been sitting there reading something.
It looked like...comic books?
OK, so there had been no packing-- whatever. I could flow. But I'd seen all of his stuff, and I was pretty sure there weren't any comic books around. When I asked about them, he broke out in a sweat and his eyelid started twitching, and he was all "MAYBE I HAVE ONE OR TWO MOVE ALONG MA'AM NOTHING TO SEE HERE LOOK! A HORSE," and I'm easily distracted. We hopped on the horse, kept dating, got engaged, and then got hitched.
NEIGH.
It wasn't until we officially moved in together FIVE YEARS LATER that I began to understand that he didn't just own comic books, he OWNED COMIC BOOKS. I turned around and suddenly there were these weird, white, oblong boxes sitting next to the U-Haul. One second, nothing. The next second, BAM. Piles and piles of them.
Like cardboard mushrooms.
And that was when I learned about this totally silly, endearing, ridiculous thing that he'd been hiding, because he was terrified if he told his girlfriend that he liked comic books she wouldn't be his girlfriend anymore, even though she was now his wife.
I've been thinking a lot about that these past few months-- about the ways we hide from one another. Sometimes it's just a matter of figuring things out, but how many of us withhold these juicy, elemental, beautiful details that flesh out our personal catalogs and push us beyond Sears and Roebuck and into the weird, the specific, and the amazing? How many of us are meant to be copies of Southeastern Left-Handed Duck Hunters Who Yodel when we masquerade as Field and Stream?
I've been trying to live into my own specificity lately. It has been a little shocking for some of the people that know me. It's been a little unexpected. There's been some SHAZAAM! and KER-POW! But the thing is, both owning and owning up to the complete and fascinating hold God has upon my life has been the most liberating move I've ever made, and I mean that in a game, set, match kind of a way. I'm fully aware that I'm supposed to be more into Pinterest than Protestantism. I get that it's odd to salivate over a leather-bound combo of the BCP and Hymnal rather than Fifty Shades of Grey, though seriously, people, that's low even for a common denominator. None of this means I can't or don't enjoy talking about decorating and recipes and trashy book club novellas, but those things don't get my heart racing and MY HEART DESERVES TO RACE.
YOUR HEART DESERVES TO RACE.
What are the things you wish you could say? What are the secret interests, the deep truths, the elemental basics that fear has kept you from embracing?
Just think about it for a little while. Maybe there's nothing there, but maybe there is, and I'm actually not advocating that you embrace it right this very second. But you need to think about it. I see my kids getting older across the room and I acknowledge having bought under-eye night cream on a recent occasion and I remember that's it been a while since I've been carded for purchasing alcohol. The leaves change at the turn of the seasons because that's just what they do but also because time? It moves along. You don't see a tree sitting around wishing it were green when it's time for it to be yellow. Is it time for you to be a yellow tree?
I don't say any of this as some kind of uber-confident, motivational sorceress. Coming more closely to the person I'm meant to be has meant that some things are more confusing. Some things are more difficult. Living in to honesty can make you feel pretty exposed, and that's pretty damn uncomfortable.
The thing is, I think it's worth it. I think the people who truly love us are going to take a deep breath, sit on the curb by those long white boxes, and stay with us as we take out every issue and explain. They're going to let us add to our story lines in a graphic, exciting, repeating manner and might even read a few copies themselves. Most people are expansive enough to do that, and if they truly love you then there's no question.
So where does that leave us? Is it possible that this entire post on embracing one's secret self has been an elaborate set-up for the confession that I am not only excited about seeing Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, but bought a ticket on pre-sale and might go in costume?
BECAUSE THAT IS TOTALLY TRUE.
Hey, I said our hearts deserve to race, right?
1 comment:
Love it and you, M-L.
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