A little to the left

“These are not my people. I should never have come here.”
-Martha Wainwright

Do you ever catch a glimpse of yourself in the reflection of a surprisingly clean building window, or flip through a stack of photographs, happen upon one of yourself and think, ‘man, that’s me?’ And the question you’re asking yourself is not in reference to anything related to physical appearance, but rather to how far you’ve traveled from what you know yourself to be?

I remember an old boyfriend would sometimes look at me wistfully and drawl in breathy tones, ‘Oh Heather, what a woman you will one day be.’ In my naivety at the time I didn’t think to snap back and ask him what the hell happened to be particularly wrong with me at that very moment, but it’s beside the point. And to his credit, which I will now permit him, I don’t think he meant it that way. What I do think he implied was that he could see how my life would likely play out, and the heartache, struggling, pushing and reinventing I would go through in order to get there.

But I guess this is the question. When are we there? Am I there? Are you there? How do we know when we’ve arrived? Is there a cover fee? Is there a coat check? Will there be a big welcoming party where pink-power-shirt-wearing-and-Red-Bull-guzzling young executive men with solid stock portfolios, greasy-hair artists with untouchable creative ideals, social worker women with a line of troubled, doe-eyed children trailing behind them greet me with wide open grins, pat me on the back, and welcome me to the club? And will we all rejoice in our collective sense of belonging to the ‘we’ve made it’ sect?

Sometimes my lines feel a little blurry. A little undefined. Like they’re subject to the charcoal pencils and erasers that are the influences of other people. Maybe this is me buying into the stereotype of women being people pleasers and paying full price for the privilege. But there are moments where I feel invisible I’ve moved so far away from what I know myself to be. And it’s hard not to want to go crawling back to the past. To the times that felt comfortable, to the people who expected nothing more, nothing less than whom they had learned of me to be.

Because sometimes, all this pushing, all this trying to define, trying to grow, challenge, change, alter, shape, learn, acknowledge, it just makes me tired. And at times like these, I find myself half-heartedly looking for the entrance gates to that ‘we’ve made it club.’