The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

Hold on to what you love, the songs and books and style and obsessions and causes and questions that make you you. Find people who love these things, too. When you get lost, they’ll help you find your way back to yourself.

Not long after, we’d get the call that it was safe, but just then we drove down the alley, leaving yet another home behind.
I wrapped my body around my son’s, feeling him breathe: Slow. Easy. Calm.
I can still feel it.
A memory not in my head but my bones.

Some of it, I’m now realizing, is an attempt to process loss: my writing isn’t in the hard drive, the Dropbox, the journals. It’s a practice, a process, like my friend Pete taught me years ago with the tubes and the sketches and the mess. You can’t grab it as you run out the door, can’t hold it in your hands any more than you can hold your own heart.
There were twenty steps from him to me, an invisible line between us.
I stayed on that line.
The mind’s got nothing on the gut.

“Often I think it over and then I always have to say that my education has done me great harm in some ways,” and on again, still deeper. This repeats six times, each section coming at the idea from a different place and arriving at different ideas.
I use (read: steal) this structure when I’m trying to understand what feels impossible.

“Look at the woman behind you.” I turned, and there she was, infant car seat at her feet, crying her eyes out. “You’re totally normal,” the receptionist said. “You’re all totally normal.”

I teach writers. It’s on me to show them the weight of words, how they can perpetuate or elevate.
Privilege isn’t blame or shame or fear.
It’s responsibility.

“When do you think about your privilege?” she asks, and I tell her about sitting in the audience at a literary conference, watching yet another panel discussion with all male participants and feeling that frustrating tangle of fury and boredom. Then, the very next day, I sat on a panel with all white participants.

It doesn’t matter if the work is personal or political.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or an essay.
Some people will come after us no matter what we say.
We might as well say things that matter.

“You too have your tools.”
But by the end of the paragraph I realized we had a different translation.
It didn’t say tools.
It said weapons.

I said it. I said please. I asked this asshole, nicely, to give me back my body. Look: I know how small this experience is in comparison, but whenever I hear talk about the “right” way to stand up for yourself, the “right” way to protest, I taste that please: bitter, burning, furious. Ask nicely to make decisions about your own body. Ask nicely for police to stop killing you. Ask nicely for your family to not be deported.