Tag Archives: open hearts

The Real Story: The Ones Who Wrote My Heart & Staplegunned It to Their Sleeves

I want to get down on hands and knees and thank God for the year that he’s given me. It’s been magical.

via weheartit.com

On August 15, 2010, I switched to WordPress. And so began Rewriting Life, an experiment in vignettes of my life and a chance to tell the world that slowing a moment down to it’s smallest fractions of a second can sometimes tell you more than a lifetime of mediocre moments ever will.

That’s what I learned this year.

That words change hearts and open minds and play tricks with your mind. That slow songs in a rain-soaked car with the ambulance rushing by on your right side sometimes brings you back to New Year’s Eve four years ago, when you best friend called to tell you she couldn’t get out of her car.

That crouching beneath a basement bar in the dark, huddled next to a metal stool, will always cause your breath to grow ragged.

That driving alone through the forests of North Carolina in the early morning hours will always liberate your soul.

That you are never too old for a makeover from your little sister.

That’s what this year, this blog, taught me.

But the real story is that I found myself through other people, the ones who wrote my heart and staple gunned it to their sleeves. And those are the ones I want to thank.

To Emily, the girl who works full-time and plays full-time and someday will win the world over as the next Rachel McAdams—America’s Future Sweetheart. You are my rock, my best friend since middle school, and my first fan.

To Kate, the girl who let the rest of us reduce her to a blonde stereotype when she’s always been so much more—a marketing expert, your future wedding planner, and lover of all things pink. You are one of my biggest fans and a fiercely loyal friend.

To my mother, who reads every single post, even the ones I want to delete because they’re awful. You are the only one who listens to all my absurd thoughts and idiotic questions in the middle of the day when I call in transit to class or the Breeze office.

To Heather, whose messages about my posts always break my heart but demand that I keep writing for the rest of the girls just like her who are fragile and wandering through life, searching for a guidebook. You are not alone.

To Lauren, who made my day one Wednesday in the middle of February when she DM’d me on Twitter and asked to be my friend. You are stronger than so many women in this world and every time you compliment my writing, I am forever amazed.

To Hannah, whose blog saved me from the worst version of myself in my 21 years and who wins the award for being the easiest to talk to on the phone for an hour without realizing that much time has passed. Your words are like poetry and your heart is always always in the right place. I’m buying your book the day it comes out.

And to J, who might be the coolest 40-something I’ve ever met and whose blog always keeps me thinking about the Big Ideas and Small Moments. You are never without an insightful or inspiring thought for me to consider. Thank you.

I only hope I stumble upon a hundred more people just like them who have my shaking my head in amazement and gratitude. These women are beautiful, loving, and just downright awesome.

Here’s to another year of loving, learning and writing.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.

Guest Post on As Simple As That: "Maybe I should start passing out bags of Skittles to racists on street corners."

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Yesterday I guest posted on Hannah Brencher’s blog – As Simple As That. If you haven’t already read her bog, do me a favor and check it out. Right. Now. She’s a beautiful person with beautiful words.

Here’s the post.

Driving home from New Jersey last week, I had a crazy thought. So crazy I actually started laughing at myself. Out loud. In my car. Windows rolled down and the heat pouring in on all sides.

Maybe I should start passing out bags of Skittles to racists on street corners.
Picture the five-foot-tall white girl with a laundry basket full of the sugar candies like Santa Claus with his Salvation Army donation bucket. That’s what I’m going for.

Don’t you worry. I won’t be so bold as to smack a stereotype onto the passersby in the hopes of nailing the ones who need the message most. No sir.

I’ll wait to hear bits of conversations that fly past me, because nobody notices the Weird Girl With The Skittles. Nobody covers their mouths as they rush by on all sides with shopping bags and strollers, toddles and teenagers. They talk as if I am deaf, a fly on the wall who speaks another language.

I’ve heard it before. Just last weekend, I heard the exchange between two women sitting outside a bar on a Saturday night, discussing the boys they brought home.

I’ll hear it in their words, because you cannot hide something you feel strongly. Racism becomes a part of you. It envelops the way you see the world. The way you speak and the people you speak to. The words you use and the tone in your voice.

It’s not just a noun. A word to label the less-than-open-minded. It’s a mindset. And I hear it all the time.

My grandmother slips and calls all the Hispanics in her town Puerto Ricans. She starts talking about skin color and how it correlates to place of residence like we’re mapping this world into carefully organized sections.

Like we’re not bleeding into each other. Our love for each other ebbs and flows until we wake up in love with someone because of the way they act rather than the boxes they check off on census bureau surveys.

This is what I’ll tell anyone who gets a bag of Skittles:

“Taste the rainbow.”

I know, I know, it sounds sleazy. I don’t mean it like that.

“Have you ever had Skittles?” I’ll ask them.

And if they have, I’ll ask them their favorite color. Everyone has a favorite color Skittle; mine’s green.

But when you think about it, it’s kind of ridiculous. They all taste pretty similar. They’re all filled with sugar, all made in the same dark factories.

And us, humans, we’re made of the same things. We’re all 70 percent water. We all pump the same blood and breathe the same air and use the same organs.

I’ll wait for the weird look that’ll inevitably follow when you try to pair candy with philosophy. Trust me, I know. My friends don’t understand me, either.

“Imagine a bag of Skittles all one color,” I’ll say. “Like that one time when M&M’s had a promotion and if you got the bag with all green M&M’s you won a boatload of cash.”

It’s not like that, though. In real life, nobody wants the bag with all orange Skittles.

We love variety. That’s why there’s variety packs of Lance crackers and Frito Lays chips and Hershey’s Miniatures.

We don’t know what we’re missing, having a bag full of one color. A world full of one race. A town with one standard for beautiful.

Because here’s the kicker: Every heart beats the same. Every. Single. One.
The colors, they’re just for show.

Maybe I’ll even customize the message based on who I’m talking to. Like personalized therapy sessions on the shoulder of the highway, me giving out free candy and them rethinking everything they’ve ever known about Different.
Different skin. Different birthplace. Difference cuisine. Different words for the same thing.

I’ll give Tropical Skittles to the Northerners to reconnect them with the scorching South and Sour Skittles to the Southerners to reconnect them with the less-than-sweet North.

Crazy Core Skittles for the tame ones. Wild Berry for the cautious. Ice Cream and Smoothie Skittles for the lactose intolerant. Chocolate Skittles for the Plain Janes.

Maybe I’ll start taking special orders for people who want to save themselves from prejudice. Until people started lining up for a dose of Open-Mindedness or Bravery.

Until the first thing we do when we shake someone else’s hand isn’t measure the color of their skin against our own but ask them one question:

“What’s your favorite color Skittle?”

I would take love lessons from Weezy any day.

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The words blend together and slur from one to the next like kids pushing and shoving to get to the front of an ice cream truck. Each of them wants the first choice before all the good ones are taken. I turn the volume up on my car stereo and roll up my window, sure I’m not hearing correctly.

via weheartit.com

A song by a rapper that’s not about sex, drugs and violence? What is this world coming to?

The chorus starts up and I hear it again, the way a man I’ve never met pins me down with a few words and forces me to admit where I’m at in this life.

For a second, I think he’s equating seduction with stealing. Crooks stealing hearts. Not jewelry or cold hard cash, but the single-most important organ in the human body.

You know, the one that keeps you alive and all. No big deal.

If breaking hearts is a crime, the world has more criminals than it can possibly hold in its many county jails and state penitentiaries.

I wonder if we’d come to identify certain levels of indiscretions, starting first with the girl in kindergarten who shakes her head and speeds off when the boy asks to hold her hand as they cross a street. Second up: the boy who won’t go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with the girl he likes because he was supposed to be the one to ask—not her. Third: the girl who slept around with the boy who gave everything he had to her. Fourth: the man who married a woman out of fear of being alone and left her because he was afraid he’d never be free again.

Would the crimes build and build until each situation was dissected by a judge, both parties sentenced to individual sentences? Would that stop heartbreak, drying it out at the source so every handhold held meaning far beyond the act of safety?

You deserve the best, he says. You’re beautiful.

Would we listen to a man with teardrops tattooed on his cheeks and believe that he was just as beautiful? Would we consider that maybe he needs to hear those same words and believe them just as much, or is beautiful a word reserved for a woman on her wedding day, when the rest of us know that she spent hundreds of dollars to cover up whatever it is she doesn’t want to remember about herself?

She walks down the aisle in a sheet of white and every head turns. The bridesmaids whisper the same thing. She’s beautiful.

But isn’t she beautiful in thirty years when she’s washing dishes in front of the kitchen sink? Wasn’t she beautiful when she was just a kid with skinned knees and a cherry popsicle stain rimmed around her lips?

Can’t have a man stare at you for five seconds without you feeling insecure, he says.

Believe it or not, there lies within us the ability to balance: spending all day thinking about someone naked versus holing up inside and cutting off our fingers one by one, repenting for sins we haven’t yet given ourselves a chance to commit.

Believe it or not, there are hundreds of emotions and thoughts that pass through someone’s head besides these two things, these two extremes, yet our hearts and minds jump right to the first option.

How to love. It starts with something simple: you’re not ordinary, you’re not trapped, you’re not always someone else’s eye candy.

You can be more. You have to expect more. You have to give more.

No one ever fell in love by scooting into a corner and pulling their knees to their chest. Love is a jump. A leap. A belief that something good is left in this life. That someone good is left.

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