all past, what present, no future

my personal statement

I grew up learning to keep secrets. To talk enough half-truths around actuality to make things work out. Enough smokescreen and diversion and just a smidge of hyperbole massaged through the whole thing, dough conditioner to make it taut and elastic and easy to consume.

Your reader does not care about who you were when you are a child.

When I was a child I washed and cut vegetables. The water would run cold and my fingers would become numb. Blue fingernails and knicked knuckles that wouldn’t bleed. I washed the sand out, slowly. Sand and dirt from the garden, contaminated with heavy metals. We put these vegetables into our bodies with gusto. We cradled them in a big wooden salad bowl that’s been forgotten somewhere.

They are more interested in who you are now than who you used to be.

The past feels too far off to be real. But then it breaches the surface, sharp and sudden, of the present. When I was a child, my skin was new and bright, and I didn’t feel tired. When I look in the mirror, I see myself wearing into my skin, into my body. My eyes are the only thing that betray my 30’s. They are tired, dark, creased.

What led you to becoming who you are today?

I want to do what is good. I want to do what is easy. I want to do what is right. I want to float away. I want to let go and just drift but I have cut a course that demands a swift freestyle swim. One arm over the other, on the side, kicking, breathing, feeling time slip across my skin.

Did you have moments of pivotal personal growth?

In the stories you read on the internet, someone got their grind and their hustle on. They learned from a mentor. Got on a schedule. Sigma Sixed their grindset. Someone grabbed them by the collar and yanked them into greatness. Now they have a house, a car, a wife, kids, a mistress. Or a husband who ladles fresh salad into big bright wooden bowls, who cooks salmon and quinoa, kids who read lexical loops around their peers, a mortgage at a low rate. A fridge full of beauty supply products. A tight body. Over a thousand twitter followers.

I have made many mistakes.

I think I need to feel safe to create. But let’s be real here, since this is a diary. I don’t feel safe at all. I’ve made some bad decisions over the past 5 years; never in love, only in business. I trusted my hands and my work to prolific shitters, people who polish turds and roll in cow pies for fun. First I said, I am here and I am bright and strong: and they pressed me thin until there was no brightness, no spark, no streak of excitement. They distilled me until I was what I did not want, and then said, don’t be like her.

I need to see how this is informing your character arc.

Then everything was taken and I became brittle. I said, I will shatter. It was not profitable to make me stronger. I had to come apart into an epiphany of nothing and then it was profitable to hold me close and tight and suffocated, within and outside, unsleeping, unwaking. You have to earn the right to look at the sick rhododendrons and mildewed petunias now. Do you realize now that you have no rights? No right to sin, no right to sun, no right to breathe fresh air? Your very being? Mere contigency.

How did this make you stronger?

I said, I have been shattered. You know of people who have been shattered. You have said you yanked them up by their collar and thrust them into greatness. I do not expect you to do the same for me. But I have been shattered. Treat what remains kindly. I am bright along the lines of my faults, the flaws within what I have been reconstituted into are still glittering. They still throw off light.

I need to see how you became the person you are today.

They said, this isn’t the sunlight that I ordered from Amazon. I need you to send me a replacement and a refund. I was supposed to get identity politics and I got computers instead. I don’t even like computers. I never liked computers. I like nature. I like looking at pictures of waterfalls and feeling like I’m there. I like running my hand along the withers of a tired horse, feeling the muscles. I like sunshine and dry grass. I like native plants with deep roots. I do not like silicon. I do not like my phone. I do not like Twitter. Please stop whatever you are doing.

What did you learn from this experience?

I’ve learned nothing.

The key to success here is authenticity.

The reality is that we are all ugly. This has made us ugly. We pretend we are the sun dancing on the water when we are broken glass held aloft in the atrophied claw of an overharvested local crab. We are quagga mussels. We are barnacles. We are leveing apart old cars under the expressway in Oakland while a fat police officer in a bulletproof vest delights in his bloat. Our labor rights are being violated. The cop does not care when bright red blood leaks through the weak cotton of a dollar-store work glove. If a little radioactive-green antifreeze leaks out, pearls up on the dust, you’re getting a ticket. You do not shop at the dollar store because it is bad for the planet. You say, Black Lives Matter and ACAB. You do not realize that you are the cop.

Be vulnerable. Write honestly.

Honesty: I’ve become/am becoming a weak person. I am so tired. There is so very little of me left now. What used to be no longer is. I am aware of the consequences of my actions. I am disciplined. I am distinguished. I do what I should, as I must. I am not kept; I keep myself.

Make sure that your ending emphasizes your journey of personal growth.

I know you want a happy ending. I know you want to believe there’s a future. One in which you’ve managed to strive so hard, put one foot in front of the other, turn a million tiny little freewrites into a beautiful epistolary novel, get accolades, get money, have a house in the hills with enough land to just see grass, glowing and golden, waving in the wind. You have a residency, a professorship, you are well-known and respected, people come and fall at your feet and ask you for just the tiniest dose of your wisdom, which you can give without blood, without hurt. What leaves you becomes more in the hearts of others.

How will this help you contribute to your community?

It probably won’t. I probably can’t. Leave me on the outskirts, under the expressway, breathing in fumes. Leave me cut. Leave me pebbled broken glass. Leave me nothing. Hold me down and scrape off my VIN. Replace those windows with these. The engine still kind of runs. It’ll take you from point A to point B. I’ll take you from point A to point B. But there’s nothing good in between. Just waste, just thistles and phragmites and crabgrass. Just a landscape of brokeness, just clouds of fine dust that are half hydrocarbon waste, a freeway from now into forever.