Actually. Just.

“Are you actually going to read these books or are they just for decor?”  asks the bespectacled young woman at the checkout counter. My arms nearly give way to a heavy load of old books that I present with such glee as though she’d pin my blouse with a first-place ribbon rather than pose this question that has me pleading with my own heart:

“Please, don’t take it personally.”

Her voice? Monotoned. Her expression? Less.

Is this the “Gen Z Stare” I’ve been hearing about?

Down the street from my home lives a thrift store that benefits a local animal rescue. I’m not keen on physically rescuing animals myself, but I am eager to support those who do. I’m more qualified to rescue items donated by the loved ones of the interesting deceased than their furry critters that make me sneeze.

Minutes before this woman’s question flooded my amygdala with all the old tales I used to believe about myself, I was floating up and down the aisles of books with a specific brand of joy. In these moments, I’m mom out in the wild, no kids, feeling productive, feeling reminded that I’m still Marion who loves books and wants more time to find them, to read them, and…feeling proud of this incredible upper body strength that’s been conditioned daily with the weight of my 2.5 year old; this load of books heavier than she, but less squirmy. This is a joy I have befriended again, a joy that slipped through my fingers after childhood.

This posing queen is responsible for the amount of books I can carry from my car in one trip.

Remember being a KID? Remember the tiny joys that would produce instant celebrations? I’m imagining it’s summertime, the Schwan’s delivery truck is in my driveway, and a man climbs out carrying boxes of Dreamsicles, Ice Cream Sandwiches, and Fudge Pops for MY freezer. I’ve been in my bathing suit since 7 am, it’s 93 degrees outside, and my friend from across the street just ran over barefoot to come swim with me. I’m too young to care that ice cream stains my whole lower face, and I ask if my friend and I can have more ice cream. Mom says YES! Good grief. There is no winning lottery ticket or job promotion that tops this.

It’s gratitude; that thing I thought I knew because I did yoga and wrote in journals all my life. Gratitude has felt almost like Latin; this dead language that some learn and use a little in specific contexts; law…religion…an 8am class I took my freshman year of college that made me cry. It served a purpose, built empires, but has it lost its meaning? I hate to say that, for me, it did for a while.

Gratitude is a child’s native tongue. They don’t need to call it by name, or feel guilty when it’s not present, but they’re always open to the possibility of magic, and, in the smallest ways, it so frequently appears! A self-perpetuating cycle of tiny joys, blessings, and celebrations; children are the wisest.

I’ve returned. Or rather, I have arrived. I’m holding hands with the little girl Marion, and she is guiding me.

It took ripping my entire life apart to start recognizing simple joys and wins and choose to celebrate! I needed my body torn and healed and torn and healed again, I needed to experience the radical endurance of motherhood from pregnancy to 2nd grade meet-the-teacher night, I needed to lose myself, crawl out of many depressions, move to a place that isn’t home, to grasp that it’s all up to you to decide to find joy. Where you are. We have more say in our joy than our past would like us to believe. 

We’re such great analyzers. We love to dig deep and figure it out, question it all; our whole generation knows exactly why we are the way we are. It’s brilliant. We’ve copyrighted, trademarked, and branded the entire concept of Trauma©™®, separated it into the ‘BIG T’ and ‘little t’, and even the “casual t” that isn’t “t” at all, but more like a gross inconvenience, uncomfortable encounter, or simply a challenge. But it feels like we’ve stopped here. The understanding of why and the acknowledgement of the bad and ugly is only half of the work; what will we do with it? 

For so long, I kept my pain safe in my back pocket. I could always reach back, pull it out, and slam it on the table- “This is why I’m depressed!” “This is why nothing is working out!” I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t realize this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s so obvious. As long as I held onto my pain, the joy and the beauty would never be revealed to me, or rather, I could never reveal it to myself. I’d write my pain off at the end of every quarter, and while it kept me from paying in a higher bracket, it only lived to keep me down! This year, I cashed it in and invested it. The ROI has been…well, I won’t get into the numbers, but let’s just say it’s been good. 

Here’s how I did it- I started internalizing the stories of Holocaust survivors forgiving their tormentors, civil rights activists in civil disobedience, stories of radical forgiveness, Jesus washing Judas’s feet, the teachings of the Stoic Philosophers, the truth that every one of my neighbors would come running to help if ever I were in need, despite their Facebook posts on topics of which I vehemently disagree- the truth that I’d do anything to help them, too, without an ounce of hesitation. The simple truth that we are each connected and need each other. The inner voice that reminds me that expressing love has been the constant in my life, and is my gift to offer. 

Especially in this moment, in this Mississippi thrift store.

I can feel myself free-falling back into the banal portion of life that I thought I’d dug myself out of; that dull observation of being observed and all of the layers that got us both here in this shared moment. But...my internal conversations have switched from victimy to empathy, and I’ve gained the wisdom to choose whether I stay or go. But I’m only part of the way healed and man…I wonder how long I’d have to spend in an Ashram to rid myself of this irritating self.

My heart balloon has a pinhole in it, and I'm trying to keep it from deflating. Ouch.

Bargaining with my painful parts, I go through as many reframings as I can find in a split second.

“There’s a possibility here that she meant absolutely nothing with this question. Part of your sensitivity to this question, Marion, is that you grew up in the disgusting and unexamined early 2000s where every message uploaded to your precious baby brain was ‘You, young lady, exist solely for the male gaze, the male existence, and they don’t want you smart if they think you’re pretty first. All of the girls in your era were taught this message, and some went in the opposite direction and directed their ire straight to you with their booky mean girl vocabulary and found joy in making you feel like an idiot, and just as unwelcome as the Mean Girls Classic©. This girl is not those girls; she just briefly reminded you of them.”

AND

“You fixed your hair today, and made efforts in your closet to assemble something that made you feel great, and we’ve been taught culturally that women that present like you are more interested in books as decor than books as escapes and adventures and brain wrinklers, and this woman is young, and we’re all so certain when we’re young that we have everyone figured out, so you can’t blame her because this is how human beings develop and one day she, like you, Marion, will grow to be nearly 39 and find out she had NO clue. Just LOVE her. That’s all anyone needs. Just love her.”

AND

“Marion, honey, what would be so awful about buying books purely for shelf decor? What is inherently and morally wrong with this? Would you suggest that the unread books on shelves count as demerits against your intelligence? You don’t believe this about others, so why would you assume someone is believing this about you? Books read or unread are magic, especially these old ones with their muted colors! Your defensiveness over being perceived as the girl who buys books for decor says a lot; you have a lot more work to do, baby.”

But it’s the words “actually” and “just”.

“Are you actually going to read these books or are they just for decor?”                  Bitch!

Actually…just…

Are you actually being a bitch, or are you just insecure?

I’m really in it now, God Marion, stop…

There were feelings behind her words, and they had nothing to do with me.

But I'm still just this precious child! I heard every ounce of subtext, whether it was make-believe or not, and felt all of her stories through her precious body language. We were face-to-face with each other’s insecurities, and very likely making a lot of mistakes about each other in this tiny moment we had to share. Is she reading me, too? Is she wishing she could retract that question? I have chronic foot-in-mouth disease, maybe she does, too!

Isn’t it wild how we have these mini impressions to make on total strangers each day? And we have to get it right the first time, or we’re just the irredeemable assholes they’ll remember forever! No doubt I’ve said the wrong thing, God, I do it all the time. Sometimes I catch it in the moment and explain and apologize, and sometimes I don’t realize it until I’m in bed and it won’t let me sleep.

I said something about how they all looked interesting enough to have a shot, and if they look pretty in the meantime, what a win!

She scans my books that I will take home for $1 each, and I hold my breath a little. Does she understand that she is now an accomplice to this robbery I am committing? $1 for this mintly conditioned copy of Charlotte’s Web, that isn’t exactly a first edition, BUT printed the same year it was published. $1 for a 1960s Faulkner…in Mississippi! $1 for so many treasures, surely she’s not going to let me get away with this. No…these are her shelves, she knows, she actually reads books.

I feel for both of us. Two precious little girls here, just growing up in front of each other. I love her so much. She’s rescuing animals with her time here on earth. And she’s youthfully righteous and certain, and so was I in my 20s. But I’ve surrendered nearly all of my certainty. You want 100% from me on any topic other than love? It ain’t me, babe. Certainty brews pain, sets you up for it. Certainty is a box, a cage, a windowless cubical, a hamster wheel. Certainty is a blackout curtain drawn on your most beautiful view, a shackle on your ankle that binds you to the past.

I surrender all of the feelings that her question stirred up in me in this 2-minute interaction, and pray that everything triggered within me was a total farce that my past fabricated. I thank this young woman, genuinely, with a little heart prayer aimed at her sweet heart, and collect my books.

They will look so pretty on my shelf.