¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

by John Paul Brammer

I don’t attempt something I can’t do. This is wisdom, too, I think. This is helping in another way: If my voice might do more harm than good, then I am not the voice that needs to speak, even if I am in love with the sound of my own voice. There is a time for self-help and a time for self-helplessness. I think you need both to make it through life.

Identifying where I have been helpless in life has done more good for me than maybe anything else. I used to blame myself for the bad things that happened to me, and sure, I contributed. But I can’t change those things now. I can’t go back and make them not happen. I can’t go back and choose correctly, or in the general direction of correctness.

I accept my helplessness there so that I might next ask mysel...

looking, remembering, observing, is an active

thing, it is a creative thing, and I am an agent in it.