The invisible girl

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place. 

~Author Unknown 

“You’re an incredibly intimidating person!”

I looked at him, dumbfounded. I’m intimidating? I walk out of the yellow-walled classroom with a friend—protesting that I try to be pleasant—and my friend bobs his head emphatically, insisting, oh yes, I am a terribly nice person. But maybe rather intimidating.

And I heard it again from a professor walking out on the sidewalk in the April sun, and again from a former roommate when reminiscing about our first meeting: I have it under control. I get things done. I’m on top of everything. Good for me.

What those people do not know is my inability to let myself even timidly approach anything close to weakness is itself one of my greatest weaknesses. The struggle for authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability fights bitterly against the deadly safe walls of a “perfect” exterior—and a false self. It is easier to be perfect than to be vulnerable, to give others the chance of hurting you, laughing at you. It is easier to be perfect than to let others down and cause them pain and risk them leaving you for your clumsy life.

Not allowing myself to be weak—to not be perfect—has affected me as a woman. I know I was not the only little girl to dream of being the great beauty rescued by the prince—I always secretly wanted to be dramatically kidnapped and  even more dramatically rescued (complete with epic battles and castles, swords, and dragons, preferably).

But as soon as I started dreaming up those adventures, I’d bite my lip and anxiously push back those stories, because, I knew, if I were silly enough or pathetic enough or dumb enough to get kidnapped and in trouble in the first place,  the prince would surely be annoyed he had to come rescue me—he’d think less of me—“Hell,” he’d gripe, “what an idiot, she got herself into a hell of a mess”—and I’d have only shame where I wanted love.

If only I’d been smarter, braver, or better, I could’ve earned the his love, I could’ve avoided getting in trouble in the first place or at least could have gotten myself out of it on my own and proven my worth. Ultimately, I would be rescued only because I had failed.

You are not enough, the world tells me, If you show your weakness, others will leave you. We are afraid of being the girl, who, when she finally summons up the courage to show her weakness, finds herself abandoned by her prince and by others at the very moment she needed their strength. It is in that moment she learns she was just not quite worth fighting for.

Why people rode west

When wondering
Why people rode West,
I ask horses.
For once I knew bright wanderlust,
Tears when sun wove down to flax—
But now I stay, as statues stay:
Sleepwalk.
Yet mustang herds in picture books
Choose godly mud, swim
Through oceaned fog as rivers
Under Utah stars—
So I mount my mare to rise
To fields of blistered sky,
Scale a cliff of glass or grass—
Let September sun trade places
With life in stirrups' muddy tread,
Nails pushed full of dirt and sand,
Living unasked.

Moonlight

We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small. 

~Tara Brach 

As a college freshman, desperate to loosen the choke of city’s fingers around my throat, I would walk carefully beside the sidewalk. With eyes focused on the ground, I’d see only grass, pretend I was home on our 30-acre prairie farm. Three years later, a senior at Northwestern College, I have learned to see the beauty of a Minneapolis skyline trading places with the stars. I still leave the paths, though no longer for fear.

My high heels clip the sidewalk and stick in cracks as I walk to my Corolla, classes over at three in the afternoon. The tulips are like the breathless aurora this April, and driving onto campus this morning, I most respected the white-tipped scarlet ones—“beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things.”

A hill rises to my left, Riley Hall seated on top, radiating spring heat thick from its roof like a dry riverbed. The sun drenches, dripping golden-hour light down redbrick walls into a watercolor of tulip rivers. Warm wind brushes aside my bangs and breathes gently on my forehead. I find myself with shoes deep in grassy surf, peasant skirt twisting around my knees, climbing up the hill to the flowered stream, searching for tulips already broken onto the lawn; I will not pick any. Three torn crimson petals and a damaged blossom offer themselves, and I cup them in my fingers to bring back with me—somewhere. I balance on hill’s crest.

Uplifted. Below me on concrete path, a football player who appears to have his summer home in the weight room. He watches, tight-lipped; I feel petal silk on my fingertips and know he sees only a torn-up tulip, though it isn’t his fault my world is lit by a different sun—Oscar Wilde said, “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.” For a moment, I feel childish and wonder if someday I’ll know someone who treasures shattered flowers. The boy looks away; perhaps he thinks staring is rude. I stare at the rubies in my hands.

In the car, I place wilted tulip and three petals on my dashboard, and when I reach the freeway and 73 miles per hour, I roll fully open every window so my hair tangles and lips dry out and I can listen to silence. The fiery petals flicker and twirl under the wind; after minutes of straining, one slips out the window, a blink, or a breath.

I watch it leave and wonder if a little girl will find it on her doorstep and stare. She will see the dawn, Wilde says, before the rest of the world.