12/10/2021
So it is…
A journalism professor in a long gray sweater taught me the difference between a story worth writing and a public relations stunt. A real story still has meaning even if no one ever hears it; a PR stunt only matters if people are watching.
And that became a new item on the list of promises to myself: That I would never let my life become a public relations stunt. My life would have meaning, even if no one ever knew it. I wanted to write a story I was proud of, even if nobody read it.
I used to dream that I’d grow up and dazzle the world. But time and disappointment chipped away at me until only the real stuff was left, and it wasn’t very dazzling. I just had some sad stories and a sack of regrets, and a new reverence for the pieces of me that survived.
All of these shipwrecks have stranded me in desolate places where I stared at my hands and realized that I couldn’t offer the world what I had hoped to. Dreams shatter and eyelashes fall out, and lungs aren’t big enough to carry the song sometimes.
But I still wake up in the morning and draw my hopes on the sidewalk. And every time so far, they’ve been trampled over, or hosed off, or the rain rolled all of it over the curb.
But I pick more flowers, write more stories, dream more dreams. After all that’s been destroyed, maybe it’s foolish to still be speaking this way, but at least I’m a fool with a soul alive. I swing open the doors on my chest and I offer to the world the only thing that I can: myself. I get it now.
We are not all we wish we were, but we are here, and we are trying, and we are awake. We are not public relations stunts. We are stories worth hearing, even with no crowd in the stands for us. We are the heroes. We are the poem, we are the song, we are the gift.
