Good Fruit

July 17th 2024

I finished a book of poetry and short essays that I planned to launch like a dart into the darkness June of 2020.

At the time I thought it was the perfect follow-up to my memoir.

Stories and details I’d stopped myself from sharing.

It took guts to write about these things and I deserved to express my disgust and pain.

I wrote about multiple sexual assaults I’d only shared with my husband and a couple of close friends.

Stories of women I was supposed to be linking arms with who’d betrayed my trust just the same or worse than the men I watched them marching and screaming against.

Page after page I went on about the infuriating hypocrisy.

The psychological mazes we each have to crawl our way through just to get a glimpse of ourselves outside the lens of our abuse.

I knew this book would be a little… sharper than my memoir.

But I told myself-

Whoever it bulls-eyes, they have it comin’.

I hired a long-time friend and talented photographer to take the photos that would accompany my writing.

Authors photo. Photography by Cheri Parker

Moody and dark.

Authors Photo. Photography by Cheri Parker. Beer by Aldi. Sass by Grandma Jane.

Lots of that resting bitch face I usually kept hidden so as not to resemble my mom who, when sandwiched between my sister and me out to lunch on Mother’s Day one year was prompted by our server to smile for a nice family photo and replied cold as ice-

“Well…I don’t have anything to smile about.”

And that …was the last time that waitress volunteered to take a photo.

Authors Photo. Photography by Cheri Parker.

So- I have no doubt that that book of piss and poetry would have been received fairly well because it contained scenarios so many people identify with, but most of all?

It was angry.

Real angry.

And in 2020?

Are you kidding me?

At the peak of our piss ‘n vinegar?

That year we could write enraged posts about Post-Its and it’d catch fire…

I have had it y’all! Maybe you don’t have humidity out there in bougie California but let me tell you out here in the Carolinas!? We are SUFFERIN’! We have to buy Scotch tape just to tape our sticky notes to the wall so they don’t fall off in three days. It’s a racket I tell ya! We have to pay twice the price just to remember we have a dental appointment Friday the 23rd at 3! And damned if I didn’t run outta tape last month, now I got cavities!

And by dinner time there’d be a fulfilled GoFundMe page to pay for fillings and psychological damages.

Justice served.

Right as I felt my manuscript was all finished and it was time to get that baby out in print, the tiniest whisper seeped out from my bones and grabbed me by the ankle. “Wait,” it said, “wait.”

Wait.

I’m not sure what one thing specifically prompted this pause.

But slowly then rapidly, I looked where I was headed if I continued to lean into the collective outrage and funnel my full spectrum of emotion and experience down a tiny tube of anger.

This quiet realization began boiling over the sides of my pride and scorching all my plans.

I realized how much I’d lost my footing just by staying active on Instagram. Just by staying up to date on current events everyone else’s opinions and plans and pains and victories rather than prioritizing simple pleasures and being present in my own life.

It was fun at first to join in and share and be seen.

But all I could hear anymore was the rasp of my voice trying to scream overtop the crowd.

As if that would fix anything.

As if screaming louder would surely bring us all to a broader perspective of peace and understanding.

What did I come in here for again?

What was the point I was trying to get across?

It felt like setting foot on the dock after a long day of being out on the ocean.

You don’t notice when you’ve acclimated to the unsteady pitch and roll, but your feet touch dry land and you realize you’re struggling to walk a straight line stone-cold sober.

I looked around me assessing from a distance.

Is this really what’s happening?

Is anyone else seeing this or am I just experiencing that latent Mormon megalomania finally kicking in?

Everywhere I looked, performative spirituality was just the new shiny face of wealth and superiority.

Victimhood was the new face of untouchable righteousness.

Science was the new irrefutable religion for the pious doomsdayer.

Branding and marketing were the new replacements for character and connection.

How did I even get here?

I mean… I thought I was still speaking for me… but was I really?

My voice didn’t feel like my voice anymore.

I felt like I sounded…

Tired.

Angry all the time, gargling saltwater fighting the rip current I was trying so hard to swim against.

All I could think was-

I gotta get the hell outta here.

I thought about how I used to hurt myself again every morning so many years ago. When the DJ would play John Mayers latest song, I’d crank the radio in our kitchen as he sang, “Fathers be good to your daughters, daughters will love like you do-”

Every time thinking,

“Maybe he’ll hear it this time. Maybe he’ll see what he’s doing if another man says it.”

And every time my father didn’t hear it again, a part of me fell back into hopelessness.

I started recognizing this same feeling.

That same ache and desperate need to reach unreachable people before I could set myself free to sing rather than scream.

I heard myself beginning to sound more and more like, brace yourself ladies-

…my mother.

“Don’t tell me to smile, you don’t know my pain, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“…It’s just a photo ma’am…”

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was gonna do with that book, or how I’d continue to reach anyone at all for that matter once I jumped off the merry-go-round.

I just knew it was warping my brain far more than it was aiding my happiness.

And one good thing about anger? It’ll help ya recognize what something or someone is costing you and kick you in the butt to say,

“Fuuuuuck this shit.”

The thing is, society teaches us to lean into our ego for stability by gaining attention and applause, not how to build and strengthen our confidence.

Because confidence takes practice and maintenance. It’s an action word. And it’s also something that’s usually happening under the hood not slapped on the bumper.

The way a cat sprays under every window or door marking their perimeter.

This is mine!

I live here!

I own this!

It’s not because they feel safe and confident in their environment.

But because they feel threatened and unsafe in their surroundings.

We have this in common.

It’s no wonder showing up and making sure we’re seen and heard day after day in order to attempt to feel safe has so many of us wanting to go barf in the closet from overwhelm.

It’s neverending.

And any feeling of acceptance or safety we attain from it? Is fleeting.

And so we try harder to make ourselves uncancellable.

Unignorable.

Unostracizable.

We find ourselves matching the voices around us. Regurgitating the opinions that are safe and preselected as welcome.

By acclimating to this hustle and demand, we end up not allowing the fruit of our own lives to fully ripen.

For our wisdom to come full circle.

For our roots to run deep.

There’s no time for that when we’re living in fear.

We begin to feel more and more unsafe in our own environments and so we feel the need to mark our territory over and over which tends to pull ever more anger and defensiveness out of us.

Everything becomes a threat.

Our lives become all about marking our territory in order to feel safe.

We stop growing because we’re too busy defending and arguing for recognition of our existence, rather than building a life.

Rather than gaining insight and wisdom from all of these components in our lives, we rush to share and devour them way too early and give ourselves sour faces and belly aches.

We repeat phrases like,

“If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention.”

We get stuck at the beginning.

Never completing the full cycle of things and finding the liberation and joy that is meant to follow the most painful parts of life.

The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off. — Gloria Steinem

What I love about this quote is that they specifically say, “first.”

It’s easy to get stuck at the start when it seems that’s where everyone else is living.

That to think beyond that anger and outrage, is to be named foolish and unrealistic.

It’s far easier to let anger swallow you whole like a hungry snake.

To let despair and injustice rot in your belly day after day until they decay into an encompassing cloud of self-pity, believing the world is indebted to you and you’re not making an identity out of anger, you’re just aware.

When hundreds and thousands will not only agree with you but call you courageous and inspiring?

Why go further than that?

Why question it?

I see how so many people start with the best of intentions and get pulled out to sea.

I sure as hell did.

Here’s the thing-

We cannot be sure our voice is our own until we give it space to be heard against a backdrop of silence.

What comes out of us then?

Does it still make us proud?

Do we like the sound of it, or is our truth foreign to us?

It can be frightening.

It can make an absolute outright mess of things.

It can beckon us to reevaluate our lives and perspectives entirely.

But it can also help us see why large masses of people rarely contain individuals standing in their integrity.

To truly be in harmony with anyone else?

We first have to be in tune all on our own.

Otherwise, we’re just echoing off one another creating one hell of a racket and wondering why we’re seeing so much disharmony in the world.

I often feel selfish and out of touch by not focusing more of my writing and perspectives on larger world problems.

Honestly what I worry about is other people thinking I’m not aware or that I’m in denial or just self-obsessed.

But my Spirit Family always sits me down and says,

“There is no change, there is no resolve, there is no coming together, until you learn to come home to yourselves. You continue fighting the world, but the world is only going to push back harder until you see you’re asking the wrong people for peace. The world is not trying to cause you further suffering, it’s trying to help you spot the kinks in the garden hose that you can reach right now. Slow down. Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Work from there watering the world around you and it will give you strength and peace to continue outward.”

It’s not always easy advice to follow.

I’m very often in such a hurry to fix things.

To shout advice.

To share stories that I think might help people that I don’t slow down enough to recognize-

It’s not done growing yet.

It's not finished healing yet.

And I’ll hear the same thing so often when I get in that same headspace of hustle and demand and productivity, trying to gain some kind of feeling of acceptance and safety from outside myself.

I can feel my spirit family lean over my shoulder and look at what I’m workin’ on.

“S’good fruit! Not ready for pickin’.”

Authors Photo. The Photographer Cheri and Me

We’d forgotten about this at the time we took these pictures, but Cheri was the first friend I shared my poetry with at 15yrs old, and whose house I ran away to before I knew why I was running in the first place.

Our intuition knows before we do who will understand our story and who has the strength to shoulder it with us.

Trust it.

Be still enough to hear it.

Last weekend after I’d written this rough draft, my husband began playing John Mayer’s Daughters while we were driving to Durham.

(I’ve never …in 15yrs… heard him play John Mayer.)

I asked him what got him listening to that song and he said,

“I used to love this song when it came out! I listened to it all the time!”

And you knooooooow I cried.

Criiiiied cried cried.

I know it’s scary to trust yourself.

I know it’s terrifying to sit with pain and wait in the dark for your light to become visible.

To trust in something bigger than ourselves and know it’s going to be alright no matter how horrifying things appear sometimes.

I’ve written my name in that cement so feel free to put your hand prints next to mine and we can sit together the next time we visit.

To quote Lindsay Gibson-

“If someone wants to understand you it doesn’t matter how you say it, and if someone doesn’t want to understand you, it doesn’t matter how you say it.”

So give your fruit time to ripen.

Let your emotions continue their travels and come full circle so that you can come full circle.

You don’t have to choose a crowd to be accepted and you don’t have to scream to be heard.

You are safe.

You are loved.

Start from there.

I love you. Thank you for reading!