Somehow I see
Who I could be
Just being with you
That’s the view from here

What do we have to go through to meet the truest version of ourselves?

I was listening to one of my standard podcasts the other day, and the episode was a retelling of Jack London’s short story “The South of the Slot,” about a man leading a double life who has to make a choice. My own existence hasn’t been so ripe for retellings (although I do that, here, every week…) or dramatic, but multiple personalities aren’t, I think, so pathological as they are common. What I’m saying is that we are all more than one person throughout our lives, in different times or to different people or in different places. Luckily for me, I’ve found a version of myself that’s worth settling on–not without flaws or revisitations by past selves, mind you, but worth settling on nonetheless–and I think of how close I came to never meeting her. To never knowing me.

Because at one point, she had a choice to stay or leave: to try her hand in her comfort zone among everyone she knew, or to roll the dice on a cross-country move to a place she’d visited once but had somehow connected with instantly. Out of desire and desperation and a touch of insanity, she chose to leave, to go, to come to the place where–after spending her years becoming a professional–she learned to be a person. Which set in motion so much of everything else, beginning with a proposal on a Manhattan rooftop (or was it a boozy late-night confession a year before that?).

The next time the chance to stay or leave popped up, she was sure it was time to stay. She was wrong. Just like she had been about so many things, including that her son’s diagnosis was incorrect or that some people are more valuable than others or that home is singular. It was by way of being wrong that she was afforded the grace to a better, truer, path–but she had to be curious (and desperate) enough to take it. Luckily, she was.

The other night, we were playing a family game and everyone had to vote on who was the happiest then point to that person. In a strange turn of events, the three males in our house all gestured to me, leaving me wondering what was wrong with them. If they knew me but at all. I am not the happiest person! I kind of pride myself on that! And yet, here they are listening to me sing my way around the house and laugh with them and play soccer in the garage and it’s almost like they completely forgot about the times I’ve lost my temper or raised my voice or been a Petty Bitch (patent pending)…

Or maybe I’ve forgotten–forgotten all the moments that have added up to who I am now, that have brought me here. Here, where I no longer have an orderly and clean car, but one littered with sand and crumbs. Here, where I run my way around multiple beaches before watching Little Brother play soccer on Saturday mornings. Here, where I listen to LB sing “Amazing Grace” not because he learned it in church but because his class sang it at their phasmids’ funeral (all the phasmids were named Kevin, btw). Here, where the best conversations are had in the car because it’s then that I can trick the boys into sharing the most without their realising it. Here, where I work with The Kid through not winning the class leader election because 30 people went for 6 spots and he’s disappointed but still knows who he is apart from all that (and I battle my sudden urge to embrace conspiracy theories when it comes to voting processes). Here, where I find myself more at home on a beach than in a pew on Sundays. Currently. Here, where I often come home sandy-haired and salt-covered. Here, where I’m learning from people I never expected to teach me because it’s so obvious that discrimination is just ignorance mixed with hate and fear, and disability has more to do with how we treat people than what they are capable of, and there’s always time to learn new languages.

Here, where I almost got into a fistfight with two seniors over a stolen parking place yesterday, because here is also where there is more work to be done. Or, I should say, always more grace to be had.