Ain't No Script, Bih
Keeping y'all on your toes with a Tuesday drop
We livin’ in capitalism. A day late, and that’s my business. Life been lifin’. Thank you for your grace, dear reader.
I’ve been grappling deeply with my relationship with my mother, whom I’ve concluded I will never be good enough for. While overall, I’m in a place of acceptance around our dynamic (or lack thereof), the hurt, anger, betrayal, and resentment bubbles forward to the surface to let me know that healing isn’t linear and acceptance is not a finite point. My therapist offered this consolation: “Your mom lives by a script. She believes that things are supposed to go a certain way because that’s what the evidence of her life suggests. She doesn’t know any other way. But you’ve deviated from her script. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to go off script.”
In order to unpack this, we need to have a lil history lesson. But first, some context: my mother is Black woman born in the 60s into abject poverty in 9th ward New Orleans. Determined to make a better life for herself, she went to college, became a nurse. Along the way, she bought a house, got married, and had children.
I’ll put this video here, if you want a more detailed explanation, but the long and short of the history lesson is that, my mother hit adulthood in the 80s when the neoliberal myth of the American Dream became the script that people were sold as the key to a better life. As a country, in the post-war boom after World War II, America established itself as a world power and the exemplar of capitalist consumption and production. And by most estimation, the shit was working.
Until it didn’t.
ENTER: The 2009 Housing Crash and Recession (the singularity created as result of all that capitalist (over)production).
Okay, so yeah, I was 14 in 2009. And even though I wasn’t out in the world like that just yet, I remember everybody and they mama (including mine) complaining about gas prices and groceries. I saw how instead of graduating high school and heading out into the workforce, a lot of the older kids in our community stuck around, not because they were lazy or unmotivated, but because for the first time since the last major economic crash in the 30s, there was a shortage of jobs. And college didn’t cost 5-cents-and-a-paper-clip like it did for their parents’ generation or even just a decade before.
The script effectively began to disintegrate in our young faces.
And not to toot my own horn, but I peeped that shit.
But for Mom, who’d already buttered her bread on the hopes of a now, outdated, promise, the script worked for her. And she subscribed to the same neoliberal bullshit that suggested that people couldn’t find jobs because they were deficient, rather than the system itself.
…
Now, I’m not gone lie, they had me in the first half.
When I say I was that kid, I was that kid. Nerdy, to myself, bookish, A-Honor roll, in Beta Club, on the debate team. I graduated class Salutatorian. I graduated college in 3.5 years instead of four. I checked all the boxes. I did the things. I got the degrees. I wanted so desperately for my mother to be proud of me. I did everything I could to elicit her affection and approval… until I realized that getting that from her meant betraying who I was.
YODO - You Only Die Once
Yeah, I know what Drake said, but hear me out. A writing buddy put me on to this reframe.
I decided to change my major to English against my mother’s wishes because the STEM track that I was on — the one everyone promised would bring me so much success and stability — was driving me to suicidal ideation. That was the beginning of our rift. She took my departure from the script as insubordination, ungratefulness, and disrespect.
Now, my father is a lot of things, but one thing ‘bout him: he was ten toes down for me and my dreams. Counter to my mother, he admonished my brother and I from a young age to always think for ourselves.
“Ya mama think she know everything, but she don’t. Yo’ life ain’t nobody’s but yours, not even your mama’s.”
Call it precoscioiusness. Call it hard-headedness. Call it being a self-possessed bad bitch.
On any given day, you can live a new life. You can make a new choice.
And sometimes that’s scary. Sometimes, it means uprooting your life and trying something different. Sometimes, it means disappointing people you love.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my mother thinks I’m a disappointment. But I know that the day I decided to say fuck this script was the day I departed from the version of me that she’d created in her head, and she just didn’t know what to do with that. Rather than celebrate me in my becoming, all she knew how to do was criticize and judge what she didn’t understand.
That ain’t my problem though. Respectfully, of course.
YODO nigga. You can live all the lives and be all the things. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, anyway. Have a little fun, why don’tcha?
What I’ve Been Reading/Listening To/Consuming
Reading: The B-I-B-L-E (and commentary)
I start my first week of Seminary classes this week! This week’s readings come from Genesis. I always like to have a bible commentary on hand because we not about to be making meaning of the Word out of context, ya heard?
Outside of class reading, James I was on my heart this week as I was thinking about what to write this week. James 1:2-8. “My [siblings], whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy…”.
Now, this is a scripture that gets erroneously used for the purposes of spiritual bypassing. We don’t do that over here. But what I did take from sitting with these words was the message that whether it’s the dissolution of a relationship or some other life upset or tragedy, the “negative” experiences of life shape us as much as the positive. In that, I found the invitation to move from resentment and anger towards gratitude and forgiveness.
How can we turn towards our torment and still find the words, Thank you?