There Was a Real Me

Once upon a time there was a real me. A me that believed that dreams would come true if I worked hard enough, believed hard enough, prayed hard enough. But eventually those beliefs came to nothing because I knew that was the way most people saw me, as nothing. The things that I found most important, meant little to anyone else. As a child, I turned to books when I felt misunderstood, a practice that I learned from my older brother. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery got me through countless lonely days, as did The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. They embodied concepts and worlds that were more welcoming than the reality that engulfed me. It was comforting to know that it was okay to have more than one viewpoint and that acceptance could be found in the most bizarre and wonderful places. They also taught me to search for my own answers and to allow others to do the same.

But I still had to live in the real world. School was awful. I made straight A’s but none of my teachers knew my name. No one noticed when I left my church. I figured that God, being God would be inescapable, so I wasn’t deserting my faith. I was deserting a community of believers who had better things to do than acknowledge that I existed. And for every job I ever had; I was the face in the background, a ghost among the living, on the edge looking in.

I remember a conversation I had with my mother when I first began taking care of her. She was proud of her children, her eldest was creative and artistic, and the next was so responsible, capable of anything she put her mind to. And my brothers she claimed, were intelligent, analytical thinkers. All these things were true. And then she came to me and drew a blank. She stared at me for a full minute and could think of nothing. She finally patted my knee and said, “You’re a nice person.”

Ouch.

Sometimes, I think I started writing to create friends and situations where things of consequence happened and I by proxy belonged. If you can’t be of the world, make your own. And if no one ever reads my stories or my novel that’s in eternal editing hell, that’s okay. I wrote them for me.

I did figure one thing out. I don’t want to be like the people who ignore me. I want to be better.

Whether you believe we come from two fig-leaf clad hominids or from a fish who grew feet and crawled out of the ocean, we are never going to be carbon copies of each other and we shouldn’t want to be.

My only message… no one is less worthy, or less human. The inner thoughts that define us are no less precious than the thoughts of the person next to you.

So, for God’s sake, be kind to one another.