A Girl's Diary

Candyland

What's an audience anyway? What is it about eyes video taping your actions, your words, your thoughts, your feelings... that makes me cut those off one by one until there's nothing to look at anymore? 

Looking can be one of many things. It can be staring, absorbing, taking in and processing... or it can be spectating. Thats the line. Theres watching with or theres watching at. 

I'd rather be watched with, but in the moment there is no way to tell, and the strongest walls involve assuming that everyone is watching at. 

My whole life, since I knew what the word hurt meant, I looked at life as a game where the top competitors were the hardest to reach. Tough people have been idols for me for forever. I always thought of myself as a tough girl, because I couldn't stand to think of myself as an unprotected one. You see, maybe it was the words of my mom who taught me to associate vulnerability with silliness, more bluntly, stupidity or naivety. Maybe it was something else. 

I've never seen vulnerability as a strength until I realized it wasn't in my tool belt when I was losing. 

Right now? I'm losing. I'm losing the game of life. 

The game of life I guess is like board game. I think everyone is handed a different version. Even more obvious, everyone is handed a different list of rules and instructions, objects of victory, and some aren't handed anything on paper at all. Some people can't read the paper, some people don't want to. Some people resent the idea of the paper. They hate it. They light it aflame. They watch it burn and cease to exist at the object of their hate. But one day, they might regret burning it or not even think to regret it at all. 

The game of life has a proposed purpose but no rules on how it must be played at all. 

I think coming of age is realizing just that. And while we're making up our own rules, lets just get rid of the phrase 'coming of age', it sounds like I'm ready to consummate a marriage. 

It's important to acknowledge that I can't speak for anyone else, that it would be impossible to even try, and foolish to pretend, when I say that I should carefully consider and weigh every rule that I put in my rule book. 

I guess I've come to realize that I had a pencil in my other hand this whole time. An eraser too. 

I was born with a long list of rules. I imagine this is common but I can't ever really know. A long time ago, these rules were my friends. We liked each other, mutually. They made me feel good about me, and I liked them for that. 

But time changed that relationship. Like a long sleeved shirt, I loved them so I grew bigger, and first my shoulders lost mobility, my chest showed through and then my collar became claustrophobic. Out of respect for my good old friends, I kept wearing the shirt, afraid to give it away like so many other outgrown things in my closet. 

I wore it so much that I ceased to grow. I began to shrink and deform and my mind followed suit. 

You see, the rules in that book stopped being my friends the minute they didn't compliment me anymore. The minute they made me feel large and unnecessary, like I wasn't what I was planned to be. 

One problem with the rule book is that its handed to us in the first place. Sure, in the beginning we know nothing of the game or the other players in it, and the rule book by a different author may indeed help us to find a path, roll the dice, and advance in a direction. 

The minute you arrive at your first space though, a new list begins to be written. Sometimes they add to those in the book, but they're not located in the book at all. They're not in the book and they don't share the author of the book, because the author is you and these rules are personalized for once. 

All along I've had these rules in my head, one's proven to be true in my lifetime, but I have left the light off in that room, never to revisit and read them. 

I've been playing the game of life, and I've been losing. I've been playing by the rules which someone else wrote. I've been following the path laid out to me by other people, paths painted by other people and reviewed by other people. 

Thats why I've been losing. You're destined to lose the game if its not yours, and its not yours if you didn't make it up. 

I used to love the game Candyland. When I was little, anyone I played with let me cheat to win, acting as if they didn't notice my skipping the space that would've landed me behind. When I got older, because they loved me, they didn't let me cheat anymore. But losing isn't a good feeling. 

Five years worth. 

I hope I haven't gotten too good at playing this foreign game though. I see some around me who never realize the possibility of exiting the game. I must leave it and make up a new board. I must be the only player, which I know will be a challenge. You see, practice makes perfect, and I've practiced a lifetime worth of following arrows and abiding by the rules, a list which is twenty years old and brown by the amount of times I've referenced it. It's even prickly to the touch because my hands have forgotten the familiarity by growth. 

Do I still have a pencil? Can I find the paint? Do I even have the cardboard to make it up? Can I figure out how to fold it so that I can store it easily, and have it close at all times?

I must say the most difficult is telling myself I need to create it and believing myself when I say it. 

I fear. 

I fear that others will not appreciate my color scheme. They'll call my game boring, one they would never want to play even if trapped indoors without power. I'm afraid I can't block their noise from reaching my ears. I can block some, if I chose to play my game on a surface far away from theirs, but some will always reach me. 

And the truth is, I can't escape those voices and I don't want to. 

The truth is, my body physically can't escape those voices. Those are the voices that tie me to this earth. 

My greatest fear in life, my absolute greatest fear, is missing a single syllable of those voices. 

And so, while I can't possibly continue to play the game of my childhood any longer without accepting a lifetime of defeat, I can't get rid of all of the rules of that awful game either. 

The voices I value, the voices who comfort me are some of the voices who handed me that rule book the minute I was birthed. It is because those voices handed me that book out of the purest love that exists, and because despite the fact that those rules may or may not be tailored to me, they are proof that love exists for me, and that it just might again.