The other night, my husband and I watched Dead Poet’s Society, a movie I remember loving in high school. I loved it just as much this time around. It is a phenomenal movie with phenomenal writing and acting.
But.
It struck me differently this time around. I’m a parent now. I cried—no, I sobbed—great, heaving sobs—when a boy is so beat down by the box his parents put him in—telling him who they expect him to be, what his career choice will be, what he absolutely cannot do, which happens to be his passion—that he has little freedom to enjoy his life and be who he is. He feels stuck in a future of his parents’ making, and it holds nothing he wants or needs.
As a parent, I cannot see this movie without feeling the weight of this responsibility: to let my children be who they are, not who I want them to be.
It’s one of the most important things in the world. It’s the way we show them love. It’s how we teach them to be themselves—and not anybody else’s definition of who they should be.
We all maneuver through a time when the thoughts and opinions of other people mean something to us, whether those “other people” are our parents or our friends or our spouses or our brothers and sisters. Maybe those thoughts and opinions will always mean something to us, because we’re relational people.
But oh!—we should never, ever let them limit us.
When I was in college, I was. 4.0 student, but I got a B in my first creative writing class. In fact, my professor so disliked my poetry (he called it florid and melodramatic) that he scrawled on one of my assignments something along the lines of, “Probably not a future for you here. Meaning, in poetry.” He said pretty much the same about my fiction (he was not a nice person).
On Sept. 18, 2018, The Colors of the Rain, a novel written entirely in poetry, will be published by a reputable New York publishing house.
Maybe I’ll send him a copy.
I let his words stifle me for a while. I put down my fiction pen and picked up my journalism one. I wouldn’t change that choice, knowing what I know today, but I would change the way I let him bully me out of my dream, which was always to be a poet and a novelist. I thought, then, that the things people said about me defined me. They knew more about me than I did, I believed. They could see things I couldn’t. They were right.
They didn’t, they couldn’t, and they weren’t.
“They” can’t say what you get to be or who you are or even why you were put here on this earth. We aren’t made for someone else’s box. We are made for something far greater: our purpose. And only we can know that.
I have been called many things in my life, some of them unthinkable, some of them moderately annoying—for writing what I write, for choosing to have six children, for speaking out against judgment and hate.
I have never let these dishonorable, sometimes vile, always highly inaccurate names define me, impede my vision, or silence me from speaking what I must speak.
Neither should you.
Be your wondrous, brave, spectacular self. This day and every day.
(Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash)
