Becoming Human

I want to start out my story by saying that I’ve written this so many times in so many different ways but I want this to just be totally honest. As such this is a true story told from my own perspective and it contains some adult themes and language and I’m sorry if that bothers you but this is my story. 

I don’t know when it started. I’d say that from a young age I had a love for people and a fear of death. I didn’t and still don’t know what happens when that day comes where there’s nothing I can do any more and they put my body in the ground to decompose and turn to nothing. Maybe I go with it and the same nothing will be reflected into me and sometimes I just feel my face and think about how one day the flesh will erode and my eyes will dry up and I will be nothing but a disgusting fraction of what I am today. That thought still scares me no matter what I say. But my love of people, that’s changed a bit. I used to be very self-sacrificial and so I believed that my purpose was to help others even to the point of dying for them. That love of life was the only thing that triumphed my fear of the casket. But once I reached school age, my life changed. I don’t know why I deserved it but I must have because everyone else seemed to think so. I wanted only to love the world but it beat me. I was hit, spit on, cut, hated, had rumors spread about me, called the worst names until I started to believe them and play along, an adult at my school even put a cigarette out on my scalp once. I didn’t feel valuable. I was in trouble all of the time and despite being in the office every day, they still refused to learn my name, the name that no one else shares and it just helped to solidify that I wasn’t worth it. If I had even the tiniest bit of self worth I would have been pissed and I fucking deserved to be. I was young and learning about the world and this is what they taught me the world was and I believed them. I ate it up like a starved child and I let it shape me. Like a sculpture put on display that was meant for the trash, I stood proud for all to see but clearly broken. 

Even then as I swam through the halls flooded by hatred and cruelty I found a few who could stand just tall enough to keep their heads above the waves. They became my guides, my first steps onto the lifeboat. These friends helped me to believe that was worth something altho how much, I wasn’t sure. But even as the years went by and they tried to pull me higher, the water rose too and I began to drown. Kicking and screaming as water filled my lungs and we moved away from there. My family brought me to a whole new state. To flush the liquid out and breath again. But this house is empty. I mean that in a real, actually empty sort of way. It’s not their fault but my room feels like a thousand degrees and there’s nothing in it but an air mattress and a laptop sitting on the floor. And even though I was drowning before, this new emptiness was so much worse. It’s true, the flood was gone but in its place came the void. At least before I had a rescue crew to keep me afloat but the void had no buoyancy. It was inescapable. It was loud and bright and despite my best efforts to ignore it, it seeped in. It poured into my body through any crevice it could find and I fought it until I couldn’t anymore. And in that summer heat I let it win. There’s no good poetic way to say that I tried to kill myself but I did. And even though I wasn’t strong enough to do it then, it would sit in my mind for years. And while my physical body still takes air, the kid I was is long dead. That’s all I was, a fucking kid. I hadn’t even hit 15 yet when I died. I don’t want you to feel bad for me but I had to write this so many times because I didn’t want to say that because I’m still embarrassed but it happened. 

Instead I lived on. I took the void and I forced it into a box when it wasn’t looking and I keep that box in my backpack so it goes with me wherever I go. Here is where I would love to tell you that I took this as a second chance and became a better person but I’m afraid it really only gets worse. The flood replaced the void but this time I didn’t fight it. I drank the water and I hated everyone. I was mad at my own very existence. I’m even less proud of that and it took a few heart breaks, the development of an eating disorder, the attempted suicide and later loss of my brother, and a failed attempt to enlist in the military before I got better. But those are longer stories and I don’t have the time for that now. 

I hate talking about my past. I chose to believe that the me that existed a few years ago is gone entirely. They say you should never forget where you came from but I obsess with the future because I want to be as far away from my roots as possible. Now I’m choosing to be something different entirely. I won’t let the flood waters touch me. Even as I’ve lost my love for all people. I walk around and see empty eyes as my own once were and I have to remind myself that only I can carry my mirror and I won’t forget that I was once worse than most. Though I hold myself to a very high moral standing now, not everyone does and I must forgive them. I know that I’m a good person now but I want nothing more than to be better. And only through years of reflection and change have I been able to reach a point that I can be proud of the person I am now. So while it’s easy to view others as ethnocentric assholes, I have to remember that I was there once too. And while it isn’t an excuse, we all come from things that we aren’t proud of. Some people have it worse than others and you never know what someone’s gone through. So just be nice to people. 

Reflection

I know this is really long and I’m still not happy with it but I’ve rewritten it so many times that I don’t know if I’ll ever be and that might be a good thing. It’s uncomfortable material and very personal and I’m sharing it with people that I still don’t really know. I’d like to make it a lot longer, I think that if I could, and didn’t care about the person reading this, I would make this a few dozen pages easily but I still don’t know if that would tell the story I want it to. Originally this was going to be an expansion on the poem I wrote for class in response to “undocumented black boy”. I took a line from that poem entirely out of context and made a poem of my own about mental progression. It was a sort of abstract way of talking about how I feel about other people but from a very pessimistic stand point, which I think is very easy to fall into these days. But instead of continuing the poem, I decided to give it a backstory and context which ended up being extremely long in comparison. Writing this has really helped me in some way. I had to revisit a lot of thoughts, feelings, and memories that I don’t like but in doing so, I was able to think about them as more real. I think the first thing you have to do in order to move past your past is to accept that it’s real. These things really happened and while they don’t make me who I am, they are a part of me. Still, even after all of that I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed, scared, angry at myself, or really how I should feel at all but I know it’s real. As far as connecting this to the class and academics, I don’t feel like I can connect to one single story in The Dew Breaker but rather that this comes as a product of the theme itself. Living afraid and witnessing bad things, having to work through personal struggles and even leaving the place where you grew up. Those things, while not the same, have all been a part of my life and the story that I felt some need to share. I don’t want to say that my story is anywhere near as intense and maybe I wrote it in such a way on purpose, I don’t want to give up too much. But I do think that these stories really resonated with me and the poetry along with it, made me want to share my own. I also did a bit of research before I set out on this task, I live on campus and I wanted to make use of the professors here so I interviewed Dr.Fishler who was my ethics professor at one point. We talked about why people do awful things and the stages of ethical development and while I didn’t use any quotes from him, I used his thoughts to drive me and allow me to connect to the story more deeply. And I’m very grateful for his help.