Vulnerability Isn't A Liability

"Do you think about me?"

The tweet passed my timeline but I just kept coming back to it. I'd always been the person who, while in infatuation, in romantical tangles, in whatever we chose to call those things that make us want to be in love, but aren't love...I'm always the person that seems to want it more. I'm always the person asking that question, because, so often, the answer isn't clear, or worse, isn't what I wanted to hear.

I had a hard day today. I woke up feeling terribly insecure and didn't know where or how to place that feeling. I've been confident in myself and in my world for awhile now so for the feeling to hit me so hard was jolting. What was missing? What was wrong?

And then my someone wonderful comes into the picture. And boy, did I unload all my insecurities on him today. I'm wary of this thing he and I are in because it leaves me feeling like I'm asking too much, or am too jealous, or too nagging or any of the other myriads of things I think that get me down. I'm wary of these feelings, these unprovoked (or mildly, depending on your perception) jealousies and worries; feelings, and people, change constantly, and I, for all intents and purposes, am a rock. I may shift, I may chip, I may be polished, but ultimately I am the same. Today though, I was not a rock. And for that reason, I kinda lost my sh*t.

You see, the way I'm used to it happening is this: I fall, they don't. They lead me on, and I stupidly follow. They drop me, and I bruise. I move on, and they miss me. They ask me do I still think about them, do I miss them? So many of my ex-somethings seem to still have my number. Seem to want to follow me on Twitter. Keep friending me on Facebook. My answer is in the response that they get: none.

I am weary of always being someone's "What if" or someone's "second place." I am weary of putting everything I've got into this love thing and never getting much back. And I'm tired of dudes from friendtationships past hitting me up on some Ne-Yo "Do You?" type sh*t because no, I don't. For a week or two after? Definitely. But someone's got me now who I don't worry about dropping me, as even if he does, I've know doubt he'd help me back up. Someone's got me now who tries to assuage my fears rather than feed them. Someone's got me now who cares about me where all others have failed. And if you didn't bring that to the table to begin with so long ago, I'd be a fool to miss you, much less think about you, now.

As for the me in the present? I won't lie and say I'm a secure girlfriend. At this distance? Insecurity chews me up inside some days. I try to stay cool, calm and collected, not letting it all get to me, and most days, I succeed. But days like today? Everything has me hypercritical, nit-picking, not at him or our situation but at me, and the myriad of things I could be doing better. I could be stronger, and more secure. I could be thinner and wear my hair differently. All these internalized things, because I simply don't know how to ask him "Do you think about me?" without feeling clingy, needy or naggy.

I forget sometimes that my vulnerability isn't a liability but rather the thing that makes me human. Vulnerability makes me nervous. It makes me feel weak and dumb and like I'm making a fool of myself constantly. If I'm vulnerable with you, please, be patient with me. I'll ramble like an idiot. I might cry a little. But if you handle me right, I come back stronger, better and ultimately more comfortable and confident, if not in myself, than in where I stand with you. In such case, you won't have to answer the question, because at that point, I'll no longer be asking it.

Musing: Keys Revisited

I remember a few months ago writing about lost keys. How no matter how hard you seemed to look for that one thing that eluded you, as long as you kept searching so doggedly for it, you rarely find it. I promised myself to stop looking, to stop putting myself through the let down of hearing that familiar jingle only to find it was just pocket change or hair pins. I stopped stressing so much about the keys, and lo and behold, they ended up coming to me.

I could tell you about all the times I thought I was in love, only to find it was just infatuation mixed with a bitter, large dose of desperation. I could tell you about all the times my kind heart was taken advantage of in the name of lust masquerading as love. I could tell you about the guy who broke my heart and kick started this whole inner peace journey that I find myself steadfastly and easily walking. Or I could tell you about now, the time where love snuck up on me.

Those guys in the past put me in que to be who and how I am, and so I don't regret them, or what they've taught me. I don't regret the heartache, I don't regret the headache, as they've lead me to now, where I can show and tell how much I appreciate and admire the guy in my life. 

I'll be honest and say that I don't really know what this kind of love is. I love my parents. I love W and Soul Brotha. I love sitting in the sun with my iPod blasting Dwele G and a sketch pad. But this? I've never felt this before. It's a calmness injected with an underlying giddiness. A closeness that doesn't need to smother to be intimate. A playfulness that I've never really let anyone see in me. It's all these little things about me, not him, that have changed that make me think this is the real deal.

The main change I think is that I feel like a woman no Shania. I forget what exactly he'd said but after he said it the thought that made me smile and raise my eyebrow was "Oh, he's gonna be the man..." Not to say I've never felt like a woman before but I've always felt like a woman among dudes, guys, and boys, never a woman to a man. I've never been evenly yoked with the guys who were interested in me, or vice versa. There never seemed to be this even flowing of energy where, my energy so easily complimented theirs. I was always the one putting in work, always the one being there for them, always on a grown woman stance while they could never really be the man I needed. 

The feeling that I'm in now is shaking me to my core. I've always hoped but never really thought I would find a person who saw me as I am and not who I pretended to be, not who they wanted me to be. He knows about my insecurities and hang-ups, he knows some of the annoying things I tend to do or say, and here he goes, coming to see me and sh*t. I guess the truth is nobody ever proved to me I was worth that much; I was worth weak game, a trip to the dollar theater (that I had to pay for), but never worth getting to know really. And whereas I'm the one who emotes and expresses more with my words what and how I feel, he tends to want to show more than tell, and man is he showing me.

I suppose the reason I'm so shook is a mixture of not knowing really what being in love with a person is like as most of my tentative relationships with guys, dudes and boys tended to be one-sided. I'm shook because he's proving that he wants ME, not me in a couple months, not me in a couple years, but me right now, as I am. I'm shook because falling has never felt so right before. I'm shook because I'm entirely into this person and would really rather not mess everything up with being so high-strung. 

I can't really explain how I know this man is the one who's worth it. I can't really explain how I fell in love so quickly and easily after guarding my heart with such vicious seriousness. And the truth is, I don't have or want to explain it. I don't want to rationalize and suck the fun out of finding out if, indeed, it goes as deep as I think it does. I've found my keys, and no doubt I have a destination in mind, but who's to say it can't be fun getting there? 

StoryTime: I Wasn't Ready...But I'm Still Me

I love my hair. I love it when it's wet and fluffy, retaining water enough to soak two towels. I love it when I'm detangling it in the shower. I love it when it's twisted and kinky, or in a slightly lop-sided afro, and I love it when it's straight; I love it because it makes me proud, because it's mine. What I do not love is the responsibility, the burden, the unwanted and unwarranted advice that comes with being a natural haired girl who will occasionally straighten her hair.

Last weekend I finally went into a salon to get my ends trimmed. I've been natural almost a year now and had done most of my hacking trimming on my own; whenever I got out the shower from shampooing and I saw straight, annoying ends, I cut them and kept it moving. I hadn't done more than pick my hair the three days leading up to it and so I walked in with a cloud of curled, kinky hair six inches tall.

When explaining to the receptionist what I needed her blue eyes widened and went from my face to my hair. The stylist I ended up with knew exactly what I was talking about and lead me right over to the basin. Before washing she delved her hands deep in my mass of waves, an admiring smile on her face. She asked me what I did to it and I told her. Soon a few other stylists came over and touched, petted, fawned, and asked general questions. I felt more proud of my hair than I ever had before; these were professionals and they said I'd done a good job so far with the transition (could they have been lying? Sure, but we all know that look stylists give one another that say "Chile, please." None of that occurred.)

Leaving the salon with bouncing, blowing hair, I felt hot. Like literally, my hair rarely laid flat on my neck when in it's normal texture and now it was surrounding my neck and shoulders; this is Texas, it gets hot. It was longer than I ever remember it being; for a year of growth I'd surpassed my relaxed length by nearly two inches. I was proud. I felt beautiful, just as I had when I walked in. It wasn't a big deal; it was still my hair and I was still me.

It didn't become a big deal until I went into work that next day. I'm not too fond of a lot of attention, but with straight hair, I was suddenly a star, bombarded with "Ooohs" and "Aaahs." Everyone wanted to touch it, sifting it through their fingers like silky gold, eyes wide and admiring. Others wanted me to flip it over my shoulder or shake it out. And suddenly it wasn't just the attention I was weary of.

Comments starting flying in. "Why don't you wear your hair like that all the time?" "Your hair is so beautiful like that!" "I'm glad you finally did something with your hair." One woman even told me that I was much more attractive than when I had my hair in that "Afrocentric mess" I usually kept it in. And I kept silent; everyone has opinions, but damn did these hurt.

You see, I don't get complimented on my natural texture much, if at all. Other natural women will smile when they see me, or ask what I use, and brothas love to tell me "Right on, sista," but otherwise? All's quiet on the western front. But these people who saw me everyday were suddenly lauding and in awe of my beauty as if they'd never seen it before, as if with my hair the way I love it, the way God intended it, I was so much less than beautiful. And it hurt deep in the part of me that craves acceptance and understanding. I was the same girl last week, was I not beautiful then?

I wasn't ready. I love the way my hair is, in any form, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't ready for the backlash. I didn't know it would be such a big deal to so many people what I did with what God gave me. And that's when it clicked; these people don't know me and don't give three damns about me, they're just spouting opinions. If they did know me or care, they'd know how sensitive I am about physical critiques. They'd know I wasn't as hung up on my hair as they were and keep it moving with a simple compliments, not ones that made me feel as if I'd been petted and slapped simultaneously.

I won't be ready next week either, when I wash away the silky straight strands and replace them with coiling, twisting tendrils. I already know the questions are going to come. The looks are going to follow. And no one will be wanting to pet my hair, or run their fingers through it as, indeed, they may lose jewelry in it. Instead they'll shake their heads, "tsk" and go on critiquing someone else.

And you know what? I'll still be me. And that is more beautiful than any head adornment one could ever wear.

Musing: Fear, Love and Chess...?

There was once a time where I was fearless. I would get on a bike, knowing I would be almost magnetically drawn to the one pole/ditch/bench/object in the area, fall and scrap something, and yet I'd do it anyway. There was a time when I was fearless, and wrote a boy in my class a love poem, because he told me he thought it was cool that I read above our grade's reading level by at least 4 grades. I used to be fearless once.

When my Dad left my Mom, I thought I handled it well. My dad was my best friend in the world at the time, and all I knew for sure were the three of us (and my dog Lucky) and suddenly I didn't have that knowledge any more and couldn't be sure of the ground I stood on, much less the people in my life. And now that I think on it, that's when I started to become afraid, not only of doing things away from my two people but of life in general.

So between the ages of twelve and eighteen I was existing in this world; life was happening to me, and I didn't really have any feelings about it. Point of fact, all I was interested in during those years was falling in love, and being somebody's everything and having something, some love, that I felt was lacking. And I looked in all the wrong places for that validation. Once I hit nineteen, for the first time in life I lived exclusively with my Dad. I stayed with him no more than two years all together.

When I was nineteen I fell in love with this guy who could never and would never love me back. I spent the better part of my year or so knowing him trying to force myself to be what he liked, force myself thinner, prettier, funnier, anything so that he would see things the way I did, so that he would see me as a woman who could love him. And then I spent the next two years learning to trust myself again, and forgive my foolish heart for not taking the hints that were given; I spent those years undoing all the damage that he and I caused myself.

Over time I've become fearful. I fear not having things as much as I do having them. I fear making friends, as because of my nomadic past I have a tendency to pull away from people once I feel like I'm no longer needed or that I may be moving. I fear not being near either of my parents, because to me they (and W) are all I've got. I fear falling in love again because the first time was disastrous and took me so long to come back from, and I still feel like I'm missing pieces from it.

But I can't let fear govern my moves anymore. Life is scary. You fall in love and you don't know how or when or why but you do, and for someone not knowing how and not having answers that could be terrifying. You find a new job that you're not sure you're even qualified for, where it seems everyone, including you are expecting you to fail. You make a move that's so out of character for you, you question your own mind and intentions. Life is scary, but not living it would be the real nightmare.

Not taking those leaps when they present themselves is short changing yourself, psyching yourself out into believing that, for whatever reason, you don't deserve or wouldn't know what to do with those things that you crave and that you do, indeed, deserve.

I keep thinking that I confronted my fears on a snowy day in Fayetteville, that the day my heart was broken was the day I came face to face with my worse fears and overcame them. Only now do I realize that fear still hides behind my advice to others, my cautious way of living, my unusually tough walls to get behind. I give the veneer of being shy and reserved, but the fact is I'm amazingly outgoing...once I stop being afraid of you. And I'd never realized it until, once again, I got overwhelmed with feelings of missing home, and remembering that crazy dude who didn't realize that he'd broken me. I got caught up in the 'what if' game of these new things I'm attempting, this new life I'm trying to forge for myself. And I cry when I get overwhelmed which makes me feel really...girly; more than one emotion at a time and I'm pretty much putty that's another blog for another time.

Fear of rejection. Fear of pain. Fear of losing things you hold close to your heart. We've all got them, and we all process them differently. I forget that not dealing with them doesn't make them go away, rather for me they make them all the more tangible. As a woman who's going through this inner change into who I'm meant to be, I neglected working through my fears as I figured you grow out of those, right? You grow out of not being picked first for the teams, and the teasing, and whatever else made you fearful as a kid...right? No, fear is something that'll grow within you if you let it.

So my sage words for today are diminish the fear. Everything you do is going to have risks and consequences, and anything you think you deserve is going to take sweat and tears and work. Not taking those risks to avoid those consequences cheat you out of the rewards. Letting fear rule you makes you a pawn on the chess board of life when you should be the Queen (or King), the piece that makes all the moves, the most valuable piece on the board. That's not to say be hasty and just move your Queen around whilly-nilly, but recognize the good before it's too late. Don't let the fear of losing the Queen piece cost you the entire game.

Different Perspective

I don't think I'm extraordinary. I think every word I have ever and will ever write have already been written, and most likely by more skilled authors, poets and lyricists. I think I'm average and un-intimidating, but a conversation with my mother has shifted that train.

For as long as I remember, Mommy has always gotten me Valentines Day gifts. In my early teen years I always neglected them, wishing they came from some know no good boy, but now that I'm older I really appreciate the effort (and the jammies). This year I got her a teddy bear, some of our favorite candy, and Adele's "21" album (because seriously, Adele has to be one of the coolest artists out) and she got me a really good dinner at Red Lobster, which is a treat for me because I eat fast food and "freezer to microwave" meals more than anything.

We talked about how life was going, and I sort of lamented the fact that I don't feel much noticed in the world and my lack of conviction about being different. And my Mommy looked me dead in the eye and said, verbatim, you are somebody, and somebody really dope. She says my hair, my demeanor, the calmness that lies below my surface can intimidate people, especially guys my age, and make me seem unapproachable. My wit and intelligence are easily observed and that, she said, can be scary; how do you approach someone who knows the game and it's pitfalls?

I'd never considered my outward appearance to be daunting. I'm five fee tall. Natural hair. Kinda large in the chest, spreading in the hips, with a bit of a tummy. I don't necessarily think I stand out because I look at myself every morning, but I'd be blind to not notice the sea of weaves and perms, made-up faces and starved stomachs that surround me. I'm not afraid to wear my glasses. Not afraid to buy bigger sizes and accessorize in an understated way. I don't speak too loudly in public, most times I have earbuds in low enough to hear my surroundings and keep focused (I take them out when people are talking) and pretty much keep to myself and keep it moving.

Flipping the script, if I were someone different, and I saw me, I'd think I was really cool looking. My hair isn't the stereotypical natural of afros and braids, rather it's two strand twisted out, kinks and curls, varying in size and standing at odd angles. I walk and read, headphones on, which amazes people as I've learned, because I manage to avoid bumping into anyone and actually turn pages. I would guess, if I were to see myself outside of myself, I wouldn't look twice, but that first look would leave enough of an impression to make me look over my shoulder.

I don't surprise easily. I notice a lot of folks when they meet me try to gauge if I'm prudish or wild, steady or reactionary; they never really figure me out. I like that about myself. I like to help people, open doors for elders and say thank you when someone does something courteous for me. I'm always carrying something in my hands to occupy myself, i.e coloring books, actual books, tarot cards, diaries. Yeah, I'd say I'm a unique person.

I've been told for the last few years of my life that I am the exception and not the rule. Most girls do this, but Tes doesn't - she's the exception and not the rule. That being the case, as much as people say they are Billy Badasses, the rules are rules for reasons, and none too many question them. So more often than not, I'll be the odd woman out. And I'm learning to be completely okay with that; someday, somebody's going to be looking for a short, natural haired, brainy exception, and I'll be in there like swimwear.

I guess I forget that perception is so much of who we are. Because I live in myself I don't see what others see in me. When, through my eyes, it seems as if people don't bother, in their eyes they may just not know where to start. In my eyes, where I see flaws and things that make me less than, someone else's eyes are admiring those imperfections as the perfect make up of me. Perceptions change over time, and of that I'm glad. Maybe it's time I start perceiving myself a little outside of myself, not enough to get a big head mind you, but enough to maybe edge out my own shyness and muster up the courage/strength/chutzpah to continue to be unique, despite a sea of sameness.

So I guess that's the thing to take away from this one today ya'll: Dare to be different. Be that one red-head in a sea of blondes. Be that one natural girl in the sea of weaves. Be the reader in the room of tweeters. Be whoever you are, and realize that doing that makes you more amazing than you realize.