What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness.

Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.

Memory is a fickle beast. So often we choose what we want to remember; but sometimes memories choose us.

all those years of paternal indoctrination—uniformed authorities are out to get us—escalated my panic into an instinctive rush of self-preservation.

For the first time since I’d found my birth certificate, I realized that I’d been robbed of not just a mother but a whole different life.

The line between hope and delusion can be awfully narrow sometimes.

This was a happiness I’d never experienced before. Joy is always sweetest when loss lurks just below it.

Even then, I must have known that the new world I had found wouldn’t last forever, but in that moment, I deluded myself into believing that it could.

The world is mad, you tell yourself. It’s the world that’s mad, not you.

Along the way, I lost Lionel as a lover. Don’t be disappointed by this, though—I’m not. Because I never lost him as a friend, and maybe that was more important, anyway.

We still chose each other to be members of the families that we needed, as opposed to the families we were born with.

I’ve carefully built my own community over the years, because if there’s one clear lesson that I learned from my hermitic childhood, it’s that you need lots of people around you if you’re ever going to find your true self.

neither version of her was the mother that I had been searching for.

given the unusual ability to choose whether or not I wanted a mother like that, I chose to live without one at all.

Can you ever escape legacy? Does it define you, whether you like it or not? Even if you consciously flee it, doesn’t it still circumscribe the shape of who you are, or are not?

I’ve spent my life trying to walk the middle ground, to be neither my mother nor my father but someone who is wholly myself.

I’m writing these pages, still seeking some kind of clarity—it’s evident that I haven’t really escaped either of them. Their ...

life isn’t always a series of binary choices. Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.

I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life.