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thoughts after A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

. . . how every parent wants things to be better for their children until finally they have a child who can't help but resent them for that in her own way. She knows enough to hate how much she's wasted but still wants to have the things that she's accustomed to being able to get and hates herself for that. She must learn to be grateful. She is influenced by what is around her and feels guilty for hating her hometown and all of its rich snobbery, where even if you don't have excess money, you make sure you look it anyway. Where things like "white trash" are always someone else, but nobody is exactly sure what it is, and she thinks some of the things they do are surely the trashiest of them all. Where fear was bred into her by habit, and now having become habit, she can't shake its grasp. Where a child was born full of imagination, had it molded and used and then broken and taken away from her by life and school, and by what she learned she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be the same as everyone else and stop trying to be special in any way other than the way everyone else was. Maybe they saw she could be something great, so they broke her and made her afraid in new ways--afraid to speak up, afraid to show her specialness--and taught her new ugly things. They taught her jealousy and loneliness and made her turn to her art until she hated it. She used it as her only support for so long and so hard that after 18 years she felt she'd dried it up and what had once been rushing rivers in her mind came now only in brief dirty-coloured spurts. She forgot how to dream and learned how to cry, and cried her heart out still to her old friend lost somewhere in a notebook.

She tried to believe in God, in art, in life, in friends, and failed each time, and now she's afraid to try to believe in herself. Because she's not sure who she is, or what layer covered over which, or if she could even escape all the things that have influenced her. Because all she wants is to be herself and she doesn't remember how, so she looks to other people to show her. She loves them, and she needs them. But what she wants is for them to need her. Then she'd know who she was. But she'd failed in believing in so much, and she'd learned so much fear that now she was afraid she wouldn't ever find herself or be special like she used to be. People fought for her attentions once. Somewhere in the back of her mind she thinks there are some who would now, but that thought never leaves its dark hiding spot and she doesn't notice them. They probably need her. But she's been taught pain and loneliness and she's come to expect it. Without it, she's not sure what to feel, and without feelings to anchor her, she can't be sure anything is real. She doesn't realize she can make her own happiness. She keeps giving its key to everyone else and getting disappointed when they don't know how to use it. And so she feels alone. And she's scared, because she needs someone to need her and if she was happy by herself then maybe she'd be alone. The times when she is happy she gets trapped in that cycle and she can't figure out what to do with that key. And she hates that, she knows she could be really special but doesn't know how, and she hates how many years she tried to do it their way and she hates how much she's wasted in the process. Because all she wants is to be loved and needed and something special and herself and realize it, and all that seems too much to ask.

And sometimes she hates knowing because it means she has to try and push against what everyone tried to teach her for so long. Sometimes she wishes she was just ignorant so she could be normal and maybe have less to be afraid of. Because she's afraid to be herself--what if people don't like her? and she's afraid to try to be special her way--what if she doesn't make it? What if she's not good enough? There are so many things that could go wrong. And she hates how the fear has been bred into her and she hates how now she understands. How she knows her children will ask her one day why she didn't do those dream-things that are so close to reality for them and all she'll be able to do is smile and say "I don't know" and then "One day, you'll understand." And she hates how one day, they will. And how she asked her parents those things once and made them remember. And how now she understands.

And she hates how she needs to share because it makes someone feel something and she knows she's not alone. How sharing is her specialness and she's been taught to cover it up. And how its been molded halfway into their right way and got stuck, so now she's between worlds. She wishes she could do anything all the way.

She wishes she didn't hate.

And she cries, in black ink and sparse salty tears.