“A freedom to do my own mistakes was all I ever wanted.”
Careful is like waiting for permission to live. I would rather mortify myself, fail, waste time, chase happiness that vanishes before it reaches my hands.
I remember the first words that reached me when I came out of my mother’s womb: “Be careful!”. I was thought to be a scanner of what is right and what is wrong. I knew about warnings before I knew my own name, before I knew whether I preferred piggyback rides or being carried like a cat.
I was told about the places where people lose themselves, about the roads that take me to dismay, about and about and about things that can lead me to agony. But every time I listened, I felt a little less alive, like I was l living in someone else’s brain. What I longed for was the raw, unfiltered right to fall. To stumble and bruise and still say this scar is mine, this lesson is mine, this life is mine…
I want to build a kite, but I would never know if the wind might come. Perhaps the kite I build will lie on the grass, limp and useless. Or maybe just maybe it will catch a breeze and fly. Either way I built it with hope.
I have this hunger in me to screw up. While everyone is playing life with a scheme, I want to stand on the edge of a cliff and groove with the wind. Picking the right school, the right job, the right place, the right partner, even the right dress… I don't want to know what “right” is, I want to ruin things and make art with the mess.
Giving myself to the wrong person...the heartbreak, the crying on bathroom floors not making me regret it. It would be worthy to kneel in the wet sand and lose myself in the act of giving, reckless, breathless, half drowning in the waves of my own wanting, shaping something that will disappear. It is like building a sandcastle, the tides can come up at any moment and destroy not only the fragile castle but my fleeting electric desires. This kind of aliveness, the kind you never get to keep but can’t forget either.
Not just that, I want to walk into the library and grab the wrong book, waste my weeks in it and find out it was banned all along, and all the things I related with while reading it were unhuman, far from the basic life experience and it still left fingerprints on me. I want to go clothes shopping but to the men’s side and try the coats that don’t fit me, but I want to learn my shape, the shape without the fitting fabrics on me. I want to break mugs and keep the pieces because they might remind me of the wholeness I once had and now I have it with broken forms.
I was told multiple times that I have a horrifying singing voice. But I still want to sing, I want to sing in the language I don’t know with my ugly accent, my broken grammar and the umms and uhhhs. Perhaps for a moment I might feel bigger than myself, myself being the small, terrified creature.
Careful is like waiting for permission to live. I would rather mortify myself, fail, waste time, chase happiness that vanishes before it reaches my hands. I would rather choose to be messy, bruised, cracked, wrong, ragged, exposed, untamed, restless than being careful. Because at least then, when I look back… all of it was mine. My scars, my disaster, my story.
So no, I don’t want the map, the roads that keep me safe. All I ever want is a freedom to do my own mistakes.
