Bravery

The title of this blog comes from a comic from existentialcomics, but I have been unable to find the actual comic. In the comic, an adult asks a child, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and the child answers, "An honest, brave, and compassionate human being," to which the adult answers, "No, I mean... how do you want to sell your labor?" And while I love this for its commentary on social capitalist expectations of children, what I really love about it (and the reason I keep buying shirts with this comic on them, available here) is that wanting to be honest, brave and compassionate seems like the most urgent thing to me, and when I ask my heart what I want to be, what I want to do with my life, that is the answer.

So that's what I'm doing here. Right now, I'm practicing bravery. I'm practicing the bravery of being my whole self to the nasty and lovely world of the internet. I think of myself as a private person, and I am, but it occurred to me recently that the reason I cultivate privacy has a lot to do with not wanting to deal with other people's shit about what I think and what I am. This, I think, is ultimately reasonable, but I wonder if there's more space here than I'm allowing myself to see: that is, I don't have to cloister myself away, hide myself from the world, limit my being, in order not to deal with people's shit. It will get on me anyway, because that is what people are. Shitters (of emotion, of stories, of cruelty/love/tenderness/vulnerability, of actual shit)

And this cloistering, hiding myself, limiting my being, also has the effect of hiding me from myself, and I want to see myself in all the glorious and repugnant ways I have of being. And I think, perhaps, that the cloistering I've been doing is really more about not wanting to see all of these aspects of myself than it is them not being seen. People see me. I am seen.

I have a memory. I am extremely young -- my mom says I must be about 18 months old when this happened -- and I am hiding from my grandfather, who has come to pick me up to take me to the doctor. I am giggling from my hiding space as he plays the game of not being able to find me. Perhaps my chubby, sticky hands are covering my eyes and I watch his feet stroll around the room, searching. I am pleased with my hiding spot. I feel hidden. It is under an open ironing board. I think I am hidden, but I am not. People see me and I am lucky to be seen, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it means something unpleasant is approaching, even when I don't want to be. So now I choose to turn and look at this, to invite it, to investigate it.