growing up and growing out

"give me back my girlhooooood it was mine firrrrst"

When I was a child I would stand in my bedroom, close my eyes and imagine the wind outside carrying a message to my friend. I would whisper it nice and clear and I would trust in the winds to take them where they needed to go. The next day in the playground my friends and I would sit and discuss how we got each other’s messages, and how the winds were so gentle when they arrived at our door. We would believe this because we could because it was real to us.

When I was a child my parents bought a summer home in Turkey, the ads showed kids jumping into a pool and houses paved with blue and white tiles. When we arrived it was a half-complete building site in the middle of corn fields next to the beach. All 4 of us huddled in one room, slept on blow-up mattresses that would always deflate by the morning, cooked meals on a portable camping stove, and listened to an old wind-up radio because electricity hadn’t been wired up yet - my parents got up and danced with us every night - singing extra loud when the music cut off. We loved it there, it was our happy place, it was ours. My sister and I would cycle to the beach every day and leap into the freezing cold sea. At night my sister and I and all the neighbor’s kids would walk back to the beach with our mothers and talk about shapes we could make out in the corn fields of beasts with pointy teeth and long black fur. Our mothers would light cigarettes, one after the other, and talk about family woe’s as we would laugh and kick up sand, they would cry about their problems as we would count to ten and hide.

The incomplete houses in the summer holiday village became fairy tale castles, cafes, and dungeons. We’d climb up the half-constructed staircases and throw down rocks from the rooftop - throwing rocks at the dragons approaching us. Someone’s grandparents would come and scream their heads off at us to “get down right now!”, we would promise never to go up again, and then proceed to throw rocks out of the back balcony next time.

The imaginary pools that only ever homed families of frogs have been covered up now, the construction houses keep new friends and most of our old friends have moved out. The blue and white tiles are paved in, and the corn fields are taken over by fancy homes. But we still cycle by them super fast - just in case the sharp-toothed creatures come out and chase us. We keep them alive.

When I was a kid I would tell the truth. I’d tell the truth about the wind carrying all my messages. I’d tell the truth about throwing rocks at dragons. I’d tell the truth about being an international super spy in training, a billionaire princess, or an alien creature (my favorite past time was to convince my sister I was an alien who had kidnapped ‘the real me’ and make her do a bunch of stuff to make ‘me’ come back), and more. When I was a child I could see all the colors in the world, everything was so bright and I mean this very literally, I haven’t seen a yellow as vivid as the way I’d see yellow when I was a child, perhaps colour was worth absorbing my time focusing on, and now I live and colour exists around me and I don’t stand still enough to ever realize.

When I was a child my aunt was the funniest person in the world, my uncle was the coolest and my cousin was a nuisance. Their harsher interactions with my parents were always background rumble, not even worthy of an afterthought to my endless days and outings full of fun with them. Sitting on the sofa as they’d yell down the phone to each other in the room next door and all I could do was wish summer would come by quickly so I could be sat on their sofa watching the popcorn machine overfill and POP! My parents would hand me the phone at the end of the most painful conversations and I’d tell them I love them before being sent to bed. And I did love them, I saw them as I made them be, and they weren’t at all flawed, they weren’t at all human.

And then I began to grow. ‘I began to rot as soon as I ripened’ as I wrote in a diary entry on puberty, here it is in all its damaged glory -

I began to rot as soon as I ripened. The chill of blood wandered down my unmarked thighs. A cold that seemed to seep through my skin and wild veins. A cold that is never really settled, never really welcomed. They didn’t see it at first or hear it as I would moan into the dark. Pain sounds so much like pleasure to filth-stained ears. Pain sounded like exploration to my blood-stained hands. The pain would blossom growth they said, but hatred bloomed every night in the dark. And then they saw the way I started to contort my body, shifting from open lands to mountains, peaks in places I didn’t know were there, scars from unforgiving riptides. Hair mazes wrapped around my knees and arms, it didn’t hurt but my body no longer felt at home.

I was being taken over, I was being taken down by the very body that once held me comforting my restless nights. I could taste the rotting cells building up in my saliva. I began to spit in the mirror at the stranger looking back at me in the mirror with eyes pleading “help” with eyes pleading “who?” With eyes no longer windows to the soul but windows to the black mold that grew over my feelings, my imagination, my laughter, and joy. And replaced them, slowly, with rules and shackles - how to sit and smile, as now my body was more than just a suit to carry within it all that kept me alive.

My beating heart now pounding as danger loomed in figures six feet tall. The floorboards creek warning me of incoming traffic and sweat pools at my feet. I wanted to dive, I wanted to drown. The stench of food that my brain has convinced me will sit wrong, will settle wrong, rot wrong on my frail bones.

Some call it blossoming, they say I will soon bloom. But I know that’s not true. Because I felt the rot as soon as I started to ripen, and since then I have felt nothing but tired. My blood has been nothing but bruised until blue.

Puberty was weird for me, I felt like I skipped it completely because I was busy dealing with health problems. I woke up and my body no longer felt ‘safe; it would bleed, and inflict pain, and I’d be sore and sweat and people would just… watch. Touches lingered a second too long, and smiles didn’t feel as welcoming. Growing up wasn’t exciting or a fun adventure the way my childhood had been, it was a risky mission with no real reward. And most of all growing up was shameful. It was and still is, one of the most shameful experiences I had to endure.

The whole thing felt rotten and made no real sense. I got the how and why’s taught in school but I still felt like I skipped the most important parts. It felt as if everyone else was in on this huge fucking secret I couldn’t ever figure out (this is a thought I have often about many things), but now I think that perhaps everyone's puberty feels rotten and somewhat incomplete. The transition between girl and woman, and the guilt of blossoming, I think these experiences are universal in their bitterness. I mean nobody’s said they ever enjoyed their puberty, right?

I know that as much as the confusion, shame, and guilt of puberty survive in me but so does the child who could speak to her friends via wind-mail. She lived on, even after she felt like she was rotting. The child lived on and moved into a real princess castle, with a prince and pony to match. At some point - maybe growing out of teenhood and into adulthood, that child held my hand and told me it was okay to still climb half-broken staircases and throw rocks down at the dragons. She told me it was okay to feel rage, sadness, and joy, to the fullest degree because it never made me weak like I was so certain it had. Allowing myself to feel everything when I needed to feel everything (the way she did), only bought me to me. It bought me to love, it bought me to the foot of hope and to dreams in the most vivid colors.

Adulthood hasn’t been easy at all so far, but I have her fiercely holding my hand, and I know because of that it’ll be alright. She was holding my hand as a teen when things were getting so confusing and dark, she filled me up with a child’s strength, fearlessness, recklessness, and straight-up much-needed delusion. And because of that I survived and thrived even after what no other teenager should have gone through.

As a woman I now know I must be aware that I am carrying my girlhood with me. And remember that I must honor her and cherish her, I must ride the bike extra fast when going by the corn fields, I must allow the strength of my teenhood to sit on the back of the bike swinging a bat scaring anything that runs behind us away.

Things got dark and difficult along the road of growth, but the sun hardly ever sets on the beach, the popcorn never stops in the machine and cigarettes are always being lit in the dark on the way home.

I still kick up the sand.

I still see it in the most vivid yellow.

What I’ve been consuming -

Audio

Anything Father John Misty, I see him in concert this month and so I’m trying to speed memorize all of his songs, also I love his lyrics

Visual

The Florida Project

I wrote this newsletter after watching this film and I have a feeling it’s all that will be on my mind for this whole month. I sobbed so much at the end of this. Girlhood…childhood…living and growing so oblivious to the cruelty around you, just the blind hope of living as a child and then how fleeting it is, letting it all go - in what feels like one dramatic moment, whereas you had been letting go all along (or it had been letting you go). I loved the Florida Project, I loved all the things it made me feel and all the things it made me hold.

Bones and All

Inheriting all the trauma from your parents and not knowing why you are the way you are until you grow up and look at them and look at yourself and you feel so disgusted and so in love, but it is because you have love on your side that you have hope, and so you have endless pain…disguised in a cannibal movie.

Also, Timothee Chalamet plays a cannibal and I am very aroused.

Reading

These are long reads this time but make great reads. Maybe consume over the course of a while in small portions.

How to Be an Anticapitalist Today by Erik Olin Wright - Anticapitalism isn’t simply a moral stance against injustice — it’s about building an alternative.

There is an internet that is mine & I would like you to live in it with me - Chia’s Blog -Chai’s internet is so very beautiful and I’d love to live in it.