I’m sorry that I can’t give you an “it gets better” story. But what I can give to you, my younger self, is the most essential skill to endure what’s coming. Practice it. Hone it. You’re going to need it.
Someday, you’re going to become an avid karate practitioner, and your Sensei is going to teach you an Okinawan tongue twister: To have patience where one can have patience is not true patience. To have patience where patience is intolerable—that is true patience.
You’re going to take up this adage like your life depends on it, because it does. There is so much intolerable ahead of you.
I know it sounds scary, but don’t despair. You’re going to condition your patience like you condition your fists and forearms, until it is unconquerable. And ultimately, out of so much intolerable, you’re going to emerge with the fiercest sense of your own self-worth and the will to protect it.
You’ve already got it in you. Consider: You didn’t break when that woman at church lit into you because you didn’t want to play with dolls like other girls. You didn’t cower when the kids at school stalked you down the hallways with their stares, inevitably demanding to know: “What are you, a boy or a girl?” You didn’t scream when that pack of boys pinned you against a wall and pelted you with rocks. (It’s no wonder that self-defense karate will appeal to you in your adulthood).
Nevertheless, because of those experiences and so many others like them, you’re going to grow up desperate to prove that you’re not a lesbian like everyone thinks you are.
I don’t blame you. You’re just trying to keep yourself safe.
But that denial of yourself is going to be its own misery. Years of self-loathing. Debilitating anxiety. Empty relationships with empty men. The squeeze of a femininity that’s designed to please those empty men but that leaves you desiccated and empty too.
Eventually, you’re going to snap out of it—but only with the most unspeakable of agonies.
There’s no gentle way to tell you this. I’m sorry.
Your brother—who you love like a soulmate—is going to take his own life. And from that moment forward, your life is going to dip into an inexorable nosedive to shatter along with his.
It’s going to be intolerable. Indescribably so. And you’re going to have to be patient, truly patient; you’re going to have no choice but to be.
The snap is going to happen while you’re sitting, dazed, among all the smithereens. By that point, your fiancé—yes, fiancé, as in a man—will have spent months telling you that, unless you will agree to have his baby, he doesn’t want you anymore. He’s fed up with your grief and believes that a baby will fix you and your relationship with him. You, however, are going to be too busy contemplating a crucial revelation: that life is so short and fragile. Your brother’s life is gone. But you still have your life, and you can’t waste it living as anything other than your whole, authentic self.
You’re too busy, in other words, thinking about women. You’re too busy wondering if you can really abide the possibility of squandering your life in the bleakest heteronormativity without ever knowing what it’s like to love and be loved by a woman.
Again, you’re going to have to be patient. Your choice is going to be the right one, beyond any doubt; but there are so many dreadful steps you’re going to have to take as you demolish what’s left of the life you’ve built, flee from your fiancé, and move back home to Southern Appalachia.
Home is going to be a bewildering mix of familiar old confines and sensitive new exploration. But it is only here that you can, first and foremost, reignite your affair with your truest love: the mountains.
You’ve missed them so much, for so many years. Returning to them, you’re going to rediscover femininity anew—your own and others’, what it has meant and what it could mean. You’re going to find it in the soft tucks and sweeps of the hills. In the wild, wanton curves of laurel thickets. In the glide of your fingers across banjo strings. In the rich solitude of the forest, where you dream of someday having a girlfriend to go hiking with you.
Back at home, in your mountains, you’re going to find yourself again.
You’re also going to find that another of your family members is dying.
Your father’s death is going to be excruciatingly slow and ghastly. Intolerable, but in a different way than your brother’s.
You’re going to feel interminably trapped and terminally lonely. In your desperation to escape and to experience love, you’re going to make impatient decisions that put you in harm’s way.
I write to you in the thick of the latest harm: a year has passed since your father’s death and a week has passed since the breakup with your first girlfriend. Your relationship ended while you memorialized your loss.
There’s so much grieving to do now.
Perhaps, then, this message is not really for my younger self, but for the self of my most pressing past, of my immediate and ever-fleeing present—the self who is writing this document at this very moment.
Look at how, through all you’ve endured, you’ve conditioned the truest patience. Right now, you’re facing yet more agony. But you know what you have to do: find yourself again, protect yourself once more. You’re going to roam mountain towns and delve into Appalachian history. You’re going to play your banjo. You’re going to ride horses through the woods, like you’ve wanted to do since you were a child. You’re going to travel to a karate seminar later this month. You’re writing again, and you’re going to keep at it.
The pain will still be there, but with patience, perhaps it will become more tolerable.
