The Kind of Person I Want To Be
Living in my childhood home prompts much reflection about what has changed in the past forty years of my life; it provides for a type of introspection about what I hoped I might do with my life and what I might become from my childhood imaginings. Sometimes, my life stands in stark relief to these dreams and aspirations.
Over the past two months, I have felt a sense of great disappointment in myself, particularly in my ability to fight and win. I ask myself, Why is Tibe banned from our home county? The answer centers around my passivity, my inability to fight for him, my choices to leave and walk away and not challenge and confront. I think to myself, he may have his life, and I am thankful for that, but his liberty was lost because I did not fight hard enough or long enough. I fear that I let him and me down. Of course, I note that I take full responsibility for our current circumstance. I blame myself and not the bullies. This dynamic is another way homophobia–and all manner of oppressions–works. The object of the bullying, the hatred, the meanness, the pettiness, the expulsion thinks that it is her responsibility. If only I had done better, fought harder, been nicer, fit in better, apologized more, etc., then this terrible thing would not have happened. Homophobia tells us the circumstance could have been avoided with different behavior. In fact, the circumstance was created not by our behavior but by the hatred and vitriol of others.
Still, I wish I had done more. I wish I had hired different lawyers, fought back more, rallied others, told more people, named the bullying behaviors, challenged the process. I wish, I wish.
Since we are always reimagining and reinventing ourselves, I want a future where I am stronger and bolder and protective and victorious. That is the kind of person I want to be.
This process has taught me a lot about the kind of person I do not want to be. I do not want to be a person who organizes against animals and people who care for them. I do not want to be a person who studies other people’s social media profiles to “diagnose” their fitness as a caretaker of animals. I do not want to be a person who is silent while others bully. I do not want to be a person who is unforgiving, who does not create space after mistakes, who is unrelenting in a view of rightness. I do not want to be uncaring, mean. I do not want to act out of bigotry and hatred.
In the mornings at the park where I walk Tibe, sometimes we see a man feeding birds and squirrels from his small, old Chevette. He stops his car at the side of the park road near a small grove of trees. He makes sounds, speaking to the birds and squirrels so they gather around. We have never spoken to him. There is a silence and serenity around him that I do not want to disturb. Believe me, a 135-pound dog disturbs any sort of serenity at all times. Still I watch him from afar. He sits in his car, tossing bits of bread as the animals gather. Every day, he puts out his hand and a bird comes and lands on it to take some small seeds. I think a lot about this man. I try to imagine his life, what he does in the other twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes of his day when he is not at the park calling and feeding birds. All I can conjure is the kindness that must surround him. The tranquility he must exude for those small birds to land on his hand. How gentle his being. He is the kind of person I want to be.
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