The Personal Assistant

by Kimberly Belle

AC. My social media assistant and operations assistant and every other assistant role you can imagine, my work wife and right-hand gal.

When did external validation become a prerequisite for our inner peace? Doubts, stresses, anxieties, expectations, comparisons. Let all that shit go. Live your own life, be your own person. Show the world your authentic, badass self and the rest will come. You are perfect as you are.”

An age where they are all raging hormones and shitty attitudes and mortified by my very existence.

There’s nothing quite as savage as a preteen’s ridicule. It leaves a mark, one that lingers for a very long time.

I can’t think of anything but AC. What she’s doing here, how she found me, how to get rid of her when she’s attached herself to my wife like a barnacle.

“No offense to your investigative skills, Detective, but I can assure you she exists.

Patrick owns a gun, and for more than a quarter of a century. He owned a gun when we met, when I introduced him to my girls, when he dropped to a knee with not one but three rings in his pocket because he knew we were a package deal, when I trusted him enough to tell him about the time I was dragged into the bushes at gunpoint. I went to therapy for years because of that gun, and all that time Patrick looked in my eyes and lied. A lie of omission, but still. My husband owns a gun.

When someone is hurting, hitting them over the head with positivity doesn’t help. In fact, it does the opposite—it invalidates what that person is going through,

“Anger is a secondary emotion,” my therapist keeps telling me. “Dig deeper and find the emotion fueling it.”

And maybe that’s the lesson here, that even in the midst of the messiest, scariest lives, there are moments of beauty, and you have to be relentless in snatching them up. In holding them up to the world as proof that, despite everything, you can still feel joy. Even if you’re not quite there yourself.