A Letter to My Younger Self

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, about people who are different. I've found that there's a lot out there about being on the receiving end of different kinds of prejudice, and I am very grateful for those who do that kind of writing. It has inspired me to answer somehow. Today I reached some important revelations about what I was doing when I was younger and I was so fascinated by the stories of the people who were the targets of such behavior. In response, here I write an open letter to the little girl I was around first or second grade.

To the little girl who wants so badly to be different,

It isn't just your imagination. The prejudice you're sensing is real, and it has real causes in things that are just under the surface of who you are. Your mind really does work differently, and there's a proper name for it. It's called Asperger's Syndrome. In third grade, you will meet a boy who has it and doesn't like you, so you won't have much to do with him, but your class will be taught about what it is in ways that you'll hear but not understand until you look back and remember about him four years later. In fifth grade, there will be a boy who identifies you before anyone else does, and you'll feel a little sorry for him because he claims it as his own identity even though it's obviously a medical diagnosis.

And then, in sixth grade, you'll get the diagnosis for yourself and realize that you know exactly why he did.

You've been bullied all your life, little girl, and it will get better, but it will never go away completely. Your mommy will try to teach you how to deal with it and ignore it, but that isn't what you're looking for. This is:

Your concerns are real. Your worries are real and have good reasons for being there. You aren't just undergoing some twisted rite of passage--you're being attacked because your classmates can tell that you are different and want you to change. And your job, which will be hard but very much worth it, is to hold on to yourself.

You are going to be persecuted, just like you'll find out in fourth grade that Jesus promised--and the other half of that promise will be fulfilled too: the rewards will be great.  Hold on to that promise. It'll help you survive a lot of trauma in fourth grade, and seventh grade, and tenth grade, and twelfth grade, and also in the spaces between the hardest fights. Pray, even when it's hard to find the words. Ask for help, but don't believe anyone who tells you that your senses are lying. The funny high-pitched noise that comes out of the TV is real too, and anyone who can't hear it just doesn't have hearing as sensitive as yours. You are different because you can see things, hear things, and do things that other people can't. You are different because you can't help these things. 

There are other people out there who are different for other things they can't help, like where their families are from or what they look like or how they understand themselves. You're already fascinated by them--good. You're looking to their histories because you want to identify with them--to see your own life mirrored in what they have to face--and because you want to do something to make up for how other people have treated them. Keep listening to their stories and learning from their struggles, because you can learn a lot from them. You'll learn how to treat them with the respect everyone deserves, and you'll learn how to demand the same from the people who are hurting you when your turn comes to tell your own story. The most important thing you'll learn is that people who are supposed to be big and responsible and powerful can be wrong, and that they need to be challenged when they are.

I know you're looking at these stories because you're so desperate to see some kind of truth that will explain what you're seeing in the world. Keep looking. The truth is in there, even though some of these stories aren't about "your" people. Oppression is a real thing, and because you see it you have the responsibility to fight it. Because you are of a few of those groups, you have a story in there yourself. You don't know what you are yet, but when in due time you will find out what identities are in your blood and heart and mind. Value your own identity, and the ones that you can only watch and fight for. Don't forget that for every one you aren't a part of, you will one day know and love someone who is. Don't forget that, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." All kinds of bullying are wrong, and if you can you should stand up to the bullies.

There is no forbidden knowledge. Don't worry about what the teachers say--it's okay to sit down and study everything you want to learn about. Learn about science, and when two books disagree ask questions about why. Immerse yourself in history, and you will have lived over a hundred years' worth of questions and culture and growth by the time you are old enough to look out at the present day. No matter what anyone tells you, this is worth learning about. You have the ability to be more than you are expected to be, and that is how you get there.

People will hate you for who you are. People will threaten and insult you for daring to exist. Worse, people who mean you well will try to make you hide yourself and harm yourself because your safety is uncomfortable to people who will hate you no matter what. If you realize taking that advice is hurting you, draw the line. Your safety is important, and your body belongs to you. By the time you reach seventh grade--as you'll calculate in second grade because of books you're reading and liking, that's the first year of junior high school and the year your body will start changing to look more like an adult--you will need to know that how you look to other people is less important than simply being able to navigate life without being hurt. If performing the woman-act interferes with your ability to do everyday things like going to school, the first priority should be to be able to do your everyday things. Mommy will talk a lot about priorities. You will set your own, and it's okay if they don't always agree with hers. Existing is the first priority.

Don't let anyone tell you that being different is bad, or that you aren't different. You are not capable of everything that everyone else can do, because you are capable of things that other people can't even imagine. You will know what you can and can't do before you are old enough for people to believe you. Keep telling the truth as you understand it, no matter what. They will come around. And--as you will understand instinctively--it will pay off.

When your feelings tell you something that doesn't make sense in the world you're told you live in, stop and think about it. You are living in a world that isn't fully real, that has been made for you to have a childhood in. The books you find will give you doors to other worlds--some are real, some are not, and all are worth exploring. You'll learn a lot of things about people from them. But the world you are living in is missing some important information that will come back to hurt you later in life. There is a part of your heart that the people creating that world want to erase from existence. They want you to follow a straight line through life that won't necessarily work out for you, without ever looking at the fact that you are designed to be able to do something else. They've already taught you to be confused by it, even though you're already seeing it. You can--and you do--fall in love with girls, the same way that you have been told it is only possible for girls to love boys. You already have had one girl you loved that way, and although you will never see her again after the first week of second grade, there will be others. They will make you wonder--she has made you wonder--if you are a boy on the inside, but don't worry: it doesn't matter whom you love; you can be a girl anyway. There will be boys, too, but that side of yourself is already accepted and you will never have any shortage of help in growing that way. Some grown-ups, even Mommy and Daddy, have tried to force you to ignore the other side of yourself. They think it is healthy for you to believe that that kind of love does not even exist, because they have been lied to and told that it is wrong to love another girl that way. It is NOT wrong. It is part of who you have been all your life, and it is not any different from how Mommy and Daddy love each other. As you grow up and the false world slowly falls away, you will see that you are not the only person ever to ask these questions; far from it, there are many. We are a minority, and one that is often fought against, but we exist and always have. We make people uncomfortable, by existing as girls who can and do fall in love with other girls--just like we make people uncomfortable by existing as people with Asperger's who look at the world and see things that most people don't notice instead of things that most people do. It's the same thing, really: seeing things and people differently.

 You are different, and you see the world differently. Never be ashamed of that. The greatest commandment in the Bible is to love God, love others, and love yourself; never let anyone take that away from you. Never lose your will to learn, either; you will become a better person if you pay attention to everything. When something doesn't feel right, stop and think about what's going on. Ask questions. If someone tries to shame you and shut you down for asking a question, ask more questions. Learn how to forgive and whom to forgive, and watch people until you understand why they do things. Ask more questions about that. And always tell the truth, even when you're shivering with fear--as I am writing this now. Honesty is worth any cost, any shame, any harm.

As Mommy will tell you many, many times,

Honor. Courage. Commitment.

Our core values, in the Navy. Learn what they really mean, and live them.

With love and great good wishes,
 Iuliana Amata
 Your future self

Eximus

So it's the last night my family's going to be spending in Hawai'i. I'm not really sure how to feel; on one hand, I really love it here and I've missed living here, but on the other I really miss having a bed to myself that isn't on the floor, and on a foot we're going to have a(nother) funeral for my grandpa before we get home for which I'm going to sing.

Grief is a strange thing for me. It's always kind of dull and distant, because I've grown up in a military family and had to lose touch with everyone I knew every year for a long time. Between that, the fact that I'm largely lacking in most kinds of time sense, and my faith, I actually don't see the difference between temporary separations or permanent ones. Or maybe I just don't believe in permanent separations at all anymore. There's little sense in the back of my head that firmly believes, and cannot be convinced otherwise, that sooner or later I will come back to Hawai'i, and that someday I will see Grandma Jan and Grandpa Bob again and ask them the questions that I never knew to ask until after they died, and that someday I will get to meet my natural grandmother on my dad's side and see if I really do look that much like she did.

And, yet, I cry over war memorials, now that I begin to understand how much pain and horror they represent. I visited the USS Arizona today. She must have been beautiful, just like her sister ship the Missouri still is, and unlike the last time I visited both--when I was much younger--I understand now what kind of destruction took place at Pearl Harbor in World War II. The Arizona is still commissioned, I found out yesterday, even though she has been sunken and a tomb for her crew for seventy years. The flag over the memorial is attached to the remains of her mast. It flies at half-staff to honor the dead, the same as at Arlington and Punchbowl cemeteries.

After seeing so much this week, I feel like I should do something about it. Something to honor the sailors who died at Pearl Harbor, and the survivors like my great-granddaddy. Something to show respect for the Hawaiian culture that I know too little about and have so much interest in. For the former, I know what I can do. I can tell my family's stories, and sing in honor of those people.

For the latter, all I can do for the time being is shut up and listen. But maybe, if I listen hard enough, perhaps I could learn to speak Hawaiian properly.

Maybe if I listen hard enough, I could begin to deserve to learn.

Please Direct Me To The Mahalo

This is a post about trash cans. Specifically, the kinds of trash cans you see at fast-food places, which always seem to have "THANK YOU" printed on them.

Right now, I'm in Hawai'i for a family vacation--my first time coming here for any span of time less than a year. When I was younger, on three different occasions, my family lived here more or less permanently. I freely admit to having loved everything about it except for fourth grade (long story involving an abusive teacher and two sets of bullying classmates).

One of the things I've always especially loved about Hawai'i is the language. You have to learn at least a little bit just to get around every day, at least enough to be able to pronounce the names of the streets and figure out whether you belong in the "kane" or "wahine" bathroom. Just basic survival matters like that. And it's a beautiful, deceptively simple language (at least until you're confronted by the fact that the state fish is known as the humuhumunukunukuapua'a, meaning "a fish with a nose like a pig").

Of course, in the Hawaiian language, the word for "thank you" is "mahalo." Which brings me back to the title of this post: has it occurred to no one else that someone from another country who speaks another language might come to America and assume based on the tradition of the polite fast-food trash cans that "thank you" means "trash can"? I would never have thought of it were it not for the fact that my dad has made a habit, every time we come to Hawai'i, of joking that "mahalo" must mean "trash can." After all, it's carved into the lid right there.

We attended our old church yesterday, and interestingly the pastor gave us a survey about military families that he wants to use to plan his next sermon series. Oddly, he had a number of possible relationships to the military with checkboxes at the bottom, to indicate one's perspective--but "child of a servicemember" wasn't an option. Perhaps I ought to make a blog post in answer to his survey.

As I finish this post, we are headed to Punchbowl Cemetery. I promised my aunt BabyBlue (of BabyBlueOnline) that I would lay flowers on her mother's grave, and while we're there we are also going to visit Auntie BJ and Uncle Earl's graves (no relation, that's just how Hawaiians talk about close friends of older generations).

"Bring Him Home" and Related Music

It's a little odd for me to listen closely to all the music that's out there about "praying for your soldier to survive," because there's something that's missing. I love these songs--"Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables, "Letters from War" by Mark Schultz, and the first verse of "Pray for You" by Blessid Union of Souls are all beautiful and tender and moving and make me cry every time--but there's still something missing.

I know I'm in the story those songs are trying to tell, that it encompasses me and my brother and John and Carolyn and Amy and Ashley and Kelsey and Alexis and Jacob and Emma and Caroline and Andrew and Peter and thousands more like us, but we're never mentioned in the lyrics. Not even once. I don't know what it is, but, while we're eventually present at the end of the music video for "Letters from War," in the lyrics we're not acknowledged. 

All the praying-for-your-soldier songs I've ever heard focus on the soldier's parents, never children like us who watch our own parents go off on long deployments that in some cases take them into war zones, or like my granddaddy, who at the age of ten on December 7, 1941 literally watched his own father walk into a war zone just outside their house. And I think they're missing something because of it. Not that the parents don't have a worthwhile story to tell, since they absolutely do, but that our story is not any less worthwhile. We have a different perspective, and one that really needs to be told. We are forced to grow up quickly, to get used to living in families that can go from being two-parent to single-parent in a day and back to two parents six months or a year later, and there are families out there where both parents have been deployed at once and the children had to just live with that. We have to get used to grieving very quietly for an entire life we had, everywhere that is familiar and nearly everyone we knew and often a few treasured possessions too, all at once, every year sometimes when we move, and it has to be quiet because even though we don't know if we'll ever see those people and places again, we can't get in the way of moving. And it's all hard on our parents and us at the same time.

On Memorial Day a few years ago, I began a poem about how my father missed my sixteenth birthday because the military wanted him somewhere else on that day. I never could finish that poem, but now I think there's something I have to write along similar but broader lines. And it boils down to this:

The children of those soldiers and sailors and pilots want to bring them all home safely, too.