After some contemplation, my first draft will have some heavy revisions. Really, the story came out looking and feeling like a free-write--retelling the story that happened to me. It was important to do, but now that it's out and on the page, I've decided it's time for me to look deeper into why that story was so important for me to tell. And it was important. I was able to write it almost as soon as it happened, despite how raw and muddled it was, and how my emotions were.
I've looked deeply, in the past week, into looking at the words and not at what they say, but how I felt as I was writing them. There was a level of cartharsis in simply lashing out to the paper--but also a steely frustration, and a low burning ire that wasn't directly rooted to this situation. I'm not mad at that boy. I decided then even in the telling that he did nothing wrong. Perhaps he was socially backwards about the way he approached me--a stranger on an empty sidewalk--compared to the level of trust and acceptance he expected me to put in his request and his credentials.
But he didn't do anything wrong. I did. I refused to stand up for myself, to speak up and say "No, I would rather not." And there is the story. Not in the shoes, but in my own inner power dynamic.
In my conference I mentioned feeling like water daily. I let people talk over me without issue. I let people walk through me. I step aside, and I lower my voice, I stay calm and I change with the moment. I never get in the way. I take pride in never being in the way, also fluid, flexible, accommodating. I like that part of myself! It makes me happy that I can make people's lives easier by not demanding stage-space, by being the stage that they can stand on and shine in some situations. What does it matter if I'm not the one who says the idea that changes things? Doesn't it matter more that the idea is said?
Taking undergraduate courses in Chinese civilization and Eastern religions, I came to fall in love with Buddhism, and Taoism--spiritualities and mindsets that actively supported pacifism, and simply "going with the flow"--not just the non-violence deal, but in human exchange--in conversation and society. Like being water. Taking nothing as absolute but one's own belief, and being willing to change with the moment as needed. I think of how in childhood I'd wade in the creeks in the woods just about naked, sliding around in the warm brown shallows like a mud puppy, completely content, completely healed by the way it made room for me. I think of the ocean and its reverence--as a teen I thought I was invincible and ran into the tide of a tropical storm, and found wondrous horror in how the water took me in like I was nothing at all, and would have found no regret in killing me in a tye-dye t-shirt and a pair of my dad's jeans with my grandmother watching.
Isn't it powerful to be water?
But in myself, I've created an anomaly. I've taken the spirit of water, that compassion for action through inaction, to strengthen not myself, but my fears and my doubts. I let people talk over me because they talk louder than I do, and I often think they're smarter than I am. I get out of the way when people walk by because I don't believe they are going to step aside for me. I kneel down and let other people rise and spread the idea that changes things because I'm afraid that if I do the same, I'll just do it wrong. I let the boy on the street take pictures of my socked feet and put my legs on his because I'm afraid if I say no, he won't care and I'll become a statistic. I'm afraid that if I speak up for myself, I'll perpetuate the conflict that I hate, that I've hated for years; the residual echoes of the battles between my parents, the sides of my family, and the sides of my own heart.
I've taken the beautiful power of water in me and I've poured it into a plastic bottle to grow stale on a shelf while everyone else drinks from the well, and that's an insult to everything I know.
So for Draft 1, my revision will be one of content. There will be a great deal more content, more vignettes and examples referring to my water tales, to address the points I've alluded to above.
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