It’s my birthday and I have a message for you:
Your story isn’t linear. Your story is written and rewritten with every breath, every thought. We spend so much time plotting how we’ll get the job, the relationship, the house, the car, the identity, the body, the baby, the family, the freedom. How we’ll become.
We think if only we plan and sweat and surrender our innermost sense of self to the common delusion of a heterocapitalist meritocracy, then surely we‘ll arrive at our plotted destination. But what if that story isn’t your story? And why on earth did we all presume to want the same story in the first place? What a bore: 7 billion humans all aching towards the same bland hegemonic norm.
You deserve better.
Your story is exquisitely unique. Your story, in all its cyclic meandering, its pain, its loss, its apparent missteps, is your freedom. Your story is you learning to trust yourself. It’s you being willing to hear what every cell of body, heart, and mind are speaking to you—and then doing something about it. It’s you being brave enough (US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo told me to be brave back in January, and I’m still working on it) not to turn away when what you hear is inconvenient, when your truth makes you uncomfortable, when it reminds you we won’t make it if we do not remember our inextricable bonds with the earth, with our fellow humans.
It’s about remembering, in fact, that you are earth. You are sky, water, fire, and stone. You are your communities, your neighbors. Your story is about remembering a freedom unshakeable because it is held (and upheld) by everyone, rooted in communion with the land.
Your story is you learning to trust the power passed down to you by over four thousand ancestors (🙏 @lyricalzen for this astonishing math), which you now translate through cells and flesh and bones awakened by this moment in history.
Here you are. Singing a story that is uniquely, wildly yours. In communion with every other story alive today.
Thank you for letting me share my story. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you for remembering breath. Thank you for rewriting every oppressive norm as you live the wild power of your story.
I love you.
