Tag: healing

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Unfinished, Yet Worthy – Day 51

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Prompt – Who You Thought You Were Becoming

Reading through old college papers this past weekend felt like opening a time capsule written by someone who believed becoming was a destination instead of a motion. Every paper held a version of me trying to decide who deserved to exist long enough to grow. The theme was always the same regardless of the assignment. The theme was simply becoming. I wanted the chance to stay somewhere long enough for roots to allow something to grow.

Growing up between bases meant growth was temporary and stunted. I learned to adapt faster and grow shallow rather than deep. Peace at all costs became the unspoken rule, which meant parts of me stayed small so the room could stay quiet. I tried on identities the way other kids tried on jackets. Some fit for a season. Some fit well enough to almost feel true. But none stayed long enough to mature into anything stable.

What I wanted most was not a specific identity. I wanted permission to become something recognizable. I believed everyone else had already arrived somewhere solid while I kept circling the runway waiting for clearance to land. I thought if I chose the right role, did the right thing, performed the right version of myself, then maybe love would return, conversations would reopen, and I would finally be seen as someone worth staying for. The moment never came, at least it was not a moment.

Becoming did not announce itself with applause or resolution. It stretched across years instead. It took me across oceans to Japan where silence felt honest for the first time. It carried me into Rwanda where history sat heavy in the air and made my own questions feel smaller and sharper at the same time. It placed me at tables with presidents where power felt strangely human, almost fragile. It sat me in pubs glowing with warm wood and laughter where friendship felt less like performance and more like breath. It led me into churches that promised healing yet left echoes of harm that took years to untangle.

I still have not crossed a finish line; rather, I am content with standing in the space where old versions of me linger while new ones are still learning how to breathe. Past and present speak at the same time, asking different questions with the same voice. Clarity never arrived the way I expected; instead, I know becoming is not a destination. The person I thought I was becoming dissolved somewhere along the way of me actually becoming him. What remains is not fixed, but rather a life being lived. I am less interested now in arriving and more willing to stand in the in between, where memory, grief, and possibility sit side by side and refuse to resolve into anything simple. And for the first time, my worth is mine. It is no longer measured by who stayed or who left; it is measured by the simple fact that I am still here, still becoming, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Breadcrumbs of Identity – Day 49

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Prompt – Trying on Identities

Identity was never a fixed address. Like moving to a new air base, my identity could shift without warning. If one piece of me did not work at this base, I could always try something new at the next one. New school. New hallway. New version of myself walking in before I even knew who I was supposed to be there. Each new place offered another identity, or at least another mask that helped me survive long enough to figure things out.

Some identities arrived assigned and had little to do with my choice. The smart kid. The quiet kid. The redheaded kid. The husky kid. Labels handed out like Oprah handed out cars. I wore them because they were already waiting for me when I showed up. Other identities were experiments. I tried on invisibility first. It felt safe, like maybe shit would hurt less if I stayed small and unnoticed. That identity lasted longer than most and followed me well into adulthood. But invisibility came with a cost. It protected me from harm, yet it also kept me from being fully seen, even by myself.

College was the first time I realized identity could be rewritten on purpose. I remember writing a paper about it, splitting myself into two voices. Rodney was the rule follower, the kid who survived by staying small and predictable. Lj was the observer, the writer, the one willing to question things even when it pissed people off. I did not know it then, but that paper was less about names and more about giving myself permission to exist in more than one way at the same time.

I tried on other identities too. The class clown. The artist. The writer. The badass. The observer. Each version carried risk. Writing meant stepping out of hiding and leaving proof behind. Observing meant noticing patterns that others preferred to ignore. Being the badass let me channel anger that had nowhere else to go, but there was too much anger for everyone, including me.

Looking back, trying on identities was never about pretending to be someone else. It was a quiet form of survival, a way to test the edges of who I could become without losing the parts of me that refused to disappear through all the moves. Some identities were armor. Some were escape routes. Some were honest attempts at becoming whole. But none of them were wasted. They were breadcrumbs left by a younger version of me who did not yet have the experience to know what the hell I was searching for. I do not see those versions as mistakes. They were thresholds. Thin places where one version of me ended and another began, often without ceremony. Identity was never a single choice. It was a slow accumulation of selves, layered over time, until the noise faded enough for me to recognize the one voice that had been there all along, steady and patient, waiting for me to stop trying to become someone else and finally allow myself to arrive.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Texas Titty Twister- Day 46

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Prompt – A comment someone made about your body that stuck.

Before I was a man, I had man boobs. Not a punchline, just a fact that lived under every t-shirt and never in silence. My pecs were far more than mere specks, and my older brother never let me forget it. He was eight years older than me, which meant he was bigger, stronger, and already living  inside a different version of life. I was still trying to play with friends in the yard while he was chasing girls and becoming the kind of guy everyone watched on the basketball court.

He had a way of turning my body into entertainment for himself. He would sit on top of me, grab my chest, and twist hard while laughing, calling it a Texas Titty Twister. Damn, it hurt! The pain was sharp, but what stayed longer was the laughter that followed, like my body existed for his amusement. I had no chance against him.

Being fat already felt like a burden I carried everywhere. My brother made sure the weight felt double, evenly distributed across both tits. At eight years old, I learned quickly that parts of a body could become public property if someone else decided they were funny enough. I remember wanting to disappear, wanting my body to shrink into something invisible so no one could grab it, name it, or twist it into a joke. Even then, I sensed that shame does not arrive loudly. It seeps in quietly and settles where a child does not yet have language to push it back.

We lived in two different realities. He wanted to fuck his girlfriend. I wanted to be left the fuck alone long enough to feel like a kid. The house did not hold those two worlds very well at the same time. Somehow my piece always felt smaller, dimmer, easier to overlook. I learned how to laugh through the tears because that is what kept the peace. And in my house, keeping the peace was paramount. If stress hit the adults, shit hit the fan for the kids. So, it was easier to call it a joke than to admit that it left a mark, both in the moment physically and emotionally for years to come.

Years have passed, and I have not seen my brother in some time. Still, when I do see him, the first image that arrives is not a flashback of a deep conversation or a shared memory of fishing together. It is his face scrunched with laughter, hands reaching down, ready to twist my man boobs right off my body. That is the strange thing about judgment made about a body. It does not fade the way people assume it will. It settles into muscle memory. It echoes through mirrors, locker rooms, and quiet moments when a shirt feels tighter than it should. Memory does not always return as a story. Sometimes it returns as a sensation. Shame.

But it was just a joke, right? Maybe that was true for him. For me, it was a lesson about power, about how easily someone else’s humor can shape how someone else sees their own body. The words and the hands both left impressions that took years to untangle. I have learned since then that bodies change, grow, harden, soften, and carry stories that no one else fully sees. What stuck was never just the twist or the laughter. What stuck was the feeling of being reduced to an amusement instead of being seen as a person.

And maybe that is where healing begins. Not by pretending it did not happen or by excusing it as harmless, but by naming it honestly and giving the younger version of me the dignity he did not get in that moment. My body was never the joke. It was simply a body learning how to exist in a house where strength and tenderness rarely spoke the same language. Now, when I think about that boy, I do not see weakness or shame. I see someone who survived long enough to tell the truth about what it felt like to be seen and unseen at the same time.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Negative Space? – Day 29

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Prompt – Refusing to Fit In

In an earlier post, I wrote about wanting to belong rather than fit in. That distinction took time to learn. In junior high, fitting in would have been enough. I would have accepted it without hesitation. I would have traded pieces of myself to fit in. At that age, fitting in felt like survival, and survival always felt like success.

By high school, something shifted. After years of practice and a near-perfected “fuck off all the way to the summit of fuck off mountain” routine, isolation no longer felt like punishment. It felt like control. What once registered as exclusion began to register as choice. The same distance that had hurt me earlier now protected me. The difference was not the space itself, but who claimed it.

After the absolute horror of my tenth-grade year in Lawton, Oklahoma, I arrived in Nashua, New Hampshire with no interest in entering the social hierarchy of high school. Lawton had taught me that visibility often came with a price tag I could not pay.

Coming from Oklahoma to New England carried its own gentle violences. More than once, I was asked if I lived in a teepee or wore a feathered headdress. Each question was delivered as entitled humor, which made refusing to answer them even more satisfying. I guess, I was supposed to absorb the insult and provide comic relief in return. Fuck off!

So I withdrew. I did not explain myself. I did not correct anyone. I did not soften the moment for their benefit. I simply refused to participate in the shenanigans at all…until Ms. Peregrine taught me to channel my rage.

Ms. Peregrine’s art class gave me a sanctioned place to not fit in. It was a room that did not require compliance. Rage had somewhere to go. Antisocial behavior was both subject and medium. Silence was not interpreted as failure but as process.

That room held others like me, though we would not have named it that way at the time. Tom, Carol, Zach, and Keith all refused the social hierarchy differently than me. None of us were trying to be alike in our rage. That was the point. Our work shared no aesthetic beyond defiance. The refusal showed up in charcoal, paint, warped proportions, and negative space. What we had in common was not style but stance.

Art allowed me to say things I never had in words. It did not demand neat conclusions or a unified thread that ran through the entire piece. It allowed contradiction. It allowed ugliness. It allowed intensity without apology. For the first time, not fitting in did not feel like absence. It felt like presence, contained and visible. This was the beginning of belonging.

Looking back, I can see the quiet irony. What I thought was withdrawal was actually alignment. Refusal was not the end of connection. It was the beginning of something more honest. Art did not make me belong, but it gave me a place to stand without erasing myself. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes that is everything.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory/Uncategorized

Husky Jean Calculus- Day 28

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Prompt – Trying to fit in.

Growing up, we never had enough money for the things everyone wanted. Back-to-school shopping was always tense because school supplies and clothes were expensive, and the margin was thin on a good month. My older siblings were teenagers, which meant shoes and clothes mattered in the unspoken social calculus of school. My mother, meanwhile, was running a different set of numbers, the kind tied to groceries, bills to be paid, and the quiet reality of coming up short and it all being her fault.

One afternoon in a store, my mother’s shoulders were tight as her attention was divided between price tags and possibility. She was doing the math in her head, calculations that did not resolve cleanly. I noticed, as I always noticed because I was old enough to see but I was far too young to understand what it actually was I was seeing.

So I erased myself. I said I would take whatever was cheapest. If it meant the not-cool clothes, that was fine or the cheaper Rose Art crayons, so be it. I said it lightly, as if it cost nothing, but I knew those words gave my mother a moment to breathe as I gasped for air. It was not that I wanted my siblings to have the best as I became a martyr, rather, I wanted peace in the house. Peace meant freedom from tension, freedom from eggshells. So I chose less and I told my eleven-year-old self that this is what being good looked like.

As I got older, I wanted to fit in everywhere. I wanted to fit in at home, at school, and inside my own skin. I wanted all of it without understanding that wanting everything at once comes with a cost. Somewhere along the way, I became exhausted, as my energy was limited. Survival required efficiency and a lot of energy.

I stopped caring about fitting in at school. Or at least I learned how to perform not caring about fitting in at school. This was not bravery. It was conservation. I redirected what little I had toward staying upright, toward “reading the room”, and toward becoming agreeable and invisible in equal measure. Endurance became my defining trait. I mistook it for identity and called it a personality.

The truth arrived later, quietly, the way truth tends to. I wanted to fit in, but what I really wanted was to belong. Belonging did not ask for performance. It did not require erasure to keep others comfortable. It allowed me to stay. I never had that in my first family.

Fitting in changes a person to earn acceptance. Belonging offers acceptance without negotiation. Fitting in hides real opinions. Belonging makes room for honesty with care. Fitting in depletes. Belonging restores. Fitting in is about how things appear. Belonging is about how things hold throughout the years.

I did not know any of this then. I only knew how to choose peace over cool, quiet over attention, and survival over style. The meaning of those choices took years to surface. Looking back now I see my erasure was not tenderness…it was twisted. But now, I finally belong and there is finally room for me to remain.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Exit Through the Gift Shop – Day 13

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Prompt – What did conflict look like in your home?

In the museum that was my family, exhibits were arranged with great care, but no one ever explained how to walk through the space and appreciate it. There were rules, but they were invisible. There were expectations, but they were never spoken aloud. Reverence was required, though no one ever showed what reverence looked like. Conflict rose and settled, mostly silent, like high blood pressure. It was present and deadly.

I was expected to know how to move, how to speak, how to respond, without ever being taught. Love was supposed to be understood. Respect was supposed to be automatic. No questions. If something felt off, it was never the environment. It was me. If someone felt unseen, it became my responsibility to fix it, even when I did not know what was broken.

There was very little modeling and no learning together. There was quiet judgment when the performance did not match the script that existed inside someone else’s imagination. So I studied faces and read spaces the way visitors study paintings. I read silence the way curators study cracks in marble. I anticipated needs that were never spoken. Over time, I confused vigilance with care. I confused fear with respect. I confused self-erasure with love.

Having my own family, I know that healthy families teach. They model love for each other. They meet you where you are. They invite you into the room instead of scolding you for not knowing the path. They offer maps. They offer language. They practice connection in the open, not behind glass. They make mistakes out loud. They apologize out loud. They are noisy. They are alive.

I am still unlearning the rules of the gallery. I am still learning that I do not have to bow to every display or stop at every exhibit. I am allowed to ask questions. I am allowed to exist in the room without shrinking to fit someone else’s idea of beauty. I am allowed to walk past what harms me. Little by little, I choose different architecture for my own family. There are far fewer exhibits and a hell of a lot more living. I teach my children that conflict is not something to fear. It is something we move through together. I make space for mistakes. I say what I feel and let them say what they feel. We practice beginning again. We learn in the open.

Sometimes the old museum haunts me with its polished floors and quiet shame. Sometimes I still find myself whispering in rooms that no longer require my silence. But I notice it now. I pause and I breathe. I set down the old way.

As an adult, I am beginning to believe something I could not have imagined as a child: love is not earned through performance. Love is not proven through suffering. Love grows in rooms where people are allowed to exist as they are.

The museum will always be part of my story, but I am learning how to walk out of the gallery without carrying the blame as a souvenir.

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