‘what do you want to do?’

note: this needs editing but i really needed to get this off of my chest – Ci.

Just got off the phone with my Auntie. She’s who I want to be when I grow up. Although she tells me otherwise, I feel like I disappoint her a lot. Not with my decisions but with my inability to fight through whatever ails me. She’s solution-oriented. There’s always an answer to the question, always a way out from the way in. I know I need people in my life who can call on for advice, who’ve lived a little and seen a few things. It’s why I joined a church with older saints: ain’t nothing can phase them because they’ve seen the Lord work more times than they can count. Faith the size of a mustard seed. They don’t need the signs and wonders. They know. 

But I didn’t grow up around anyone that could tell me that everything is going to be okay. I didn’t have a parent to run to when I hurt myself or a friend to talk to when some boy hurt me. No one consoled me. I was left to talk myself off of the ledge. My Dad wasn’t available emotionally because of patriarchy and stereotypes surrounding Black manhood. My Mom wasn’t available emotionally because the neurons in her brain sometimes wouldn’t allow her to be. On a few occasions, she found a way to cut through the madness of her mind. Every time she would rub my back and hug me, I’d break down into a puddle. But I can count on only one hand how many times that happened in my life. Not until my twenties did it occur, actually. 

So solutions shut me down. When I’m not okay, I don’t want to hear how to not be. I just want to know that everything will be. 

My spirit has been heavy. I feel the dread of getting older and not being able to take care of myself. Will I be able to clothe, feed and shelter myself? I don’t have a savings account. I’m not good at all with money. The little I have goes out as soon as I receive it. Clock that to survival. Clock that keeping my head above water. Clock that to working in an industry that pays you enough to breathe, bathe and bunker down somewhere but not enough to bolster your future. I fear being broke forever. I fear having to move in with my family because I can’t afford to be on my own. I fear turning into my Mom. She’s taking care of herself but she’s by herself. 

I had to scrounge for change to get to work the other day. That was my breaking point. Or starting point into this place of heaviness and dread. There was no reason for me to do that. If I was more responsible, I wouldn’t need to choose a bus pass over food. Beating myself for buying a book I wanted to read or clothes to wear somewhere undetermined. Even if it’s less than an Andrew Jackson. But I have to take pay advances from work in order to get to work, to eat, to live. Because I put myself in such a hole by being irresponsible that as I climb out, more dirt must be shoveled onto my face. I’m tired of this. I’m about to be 37, by God’s grace. At some point, I have to get it. I have to get it together. 

I don’t know how I survived this long walking knee deep into my own madness and destruction. I mean, I do know. It’s a supernatural power beyond me. It’s God. It’s the same power that pushed me to this city that I detest because it’s a representation of hitting the bottom but also not living up to expectation. I was always the smart kid, the one that would make something of herself. People seem surprised when I tell them that I dropped out of college twice, that I almost lost everything not once, not twice but three times removed. I told my coworker that I – since I now have health insurance for the first time in years – need to find a primary care physician and don’t know how. You could see the surprise in her face from my revelation and I wanted to cry right there. Me again, shattering everyone’s expectations of me being responsible and normal and functional. 

I think I play normal well but in reality, I’m far from it. Everything about me is not okay. 

My Auntie asked me what I wanted to do with my life. What makes me happy. I’m not sure of what brings me joy. I know that writing brings me a sense of peace. I’ve felt that way since I was ten years-old. I always wanted to be a writer. A sports writer. My dream since I was eleven-years-old. After my Dad died, I went through the files on my Dad’s old work laptop and found fake sports articles about the 2000 NCAA tournament. Fake pull quotes and all. I was in middle school then. My Dad would lay out the Washington Post sports section for me every day and I read it from page ‘D1’ to the last. That’s how I learned how to read box scores and betting lines. I picked up writing leds and the inverted pyramid-style of summarization. What a byline was and how much I wanted one. “Beat writer”. I wanted to be on a “beat”, whatever that was. Imagined myself on sports radio. That was my dream. 

In high school, I tried to realize it by joining the high school newspaper but I didn’t give myself the chance to write anything. I settled with being a layout editor because it was the best I could do. I remember walking into my 11th grade history class to ask my teacher, who coached the high school football team, for an interview and he granted it to me. Figured because I was a good student I would. The only piece I remember writing was about our early season struggles and how we were planning to rebound for the rest of the year. I didn’t write much else. I think that’s where I learned that I wasn’t good enough or built for whatever it was. I didn’t have the drive or determination to chase the big story or ask the hard questions. Like, I was only 16. But that’s when prodigies are made and when stars become aligned. When the “I knew she’d be somebody” is stamped onto your memory. My classmate who was the editor-in-chief and head writer is doing really cool things right now so it must ring true. 

I still wanted it though, the dream. When I went to college, I majored in communication. Knew I’d take the journalism track. Interned at a magazine my sophomore year when print journalism died all around me. As death commenced, the birth of online journalism, blogging, happened. Someone who worked at that magazine moonlit as a blogger for one of the biggest and culturally-impactful sports websites of its time. A website that I loved and thought I wanted to be a part of someday. When he was promoted to editor, I sent my congratulations. Then one day, I left a comment on a post and he came to me saying, “have you ever blogged before?” I wrote something I thought was good but he pulled me aside and taught me how to make it better. It was far from mentor-mentee but it was the first time that anyone invested time to help me get better – or saw the potential in me enough to do it. 

So he gave me a shot. Wrote some blurbs here and there. Got me on that website I dreamed to be on so much. I felt like I was going to be somebody. Started doing guest posts on other websites that I frequented as a commenter. Wit, charm and a command of language will get you far. Was I on my way? Maybe. But so was depression so crippling that I couldn’t eat or sleep. So was my Dad and brother trying to stage a so-called intervention to keep me in college. So was me crying and telling my Dad that I needed to go home. There was drop out number one. 

So I came home with nothing. Lost all of the connections I thought I had. Channeled all of that same wit and charm into tweeting. I built a solid follower count in college – about 1200 – riffing off about sports, rap and general mischief. That audience – although rebuilt and in the 700s – followed me back home, working retail not knowing that would become my career. So I started blogging again. People would read, messages would come into my mailbox asking me if I wanted to write for X, Y, Z website. That’s when I started saying no. ‘No’ because I didn’t think I was good enough. ‘No’ because I didn’t want to learn that I wasn’t good enough. I had enough with the dream. Really, it shifted. I wanted to go back to school and be a women’s studies major. My feminist kicked in. Reproductive rights, women’s issues. Black women’s issues. I went to a women’s rights conference and felt a jolt I hadn’t before. I wanted to change the world. Forget writing at that point. What could I ever do with that? 

And then my Dad died. 

I write about that time a lot so I don’t want to rehash it. But that’s where every dream went to die. Every last one. I’d try to get into my social justice writer bag but hated it. I’d try to wax off about sports but it seemed like no one cared. I’d find a beautiful community of Black women writers through fanfiction, a love I picked up in high school thanks to B2K and message boards. Writing fanfiction made me so happy. I was back to crafting worlds through my fingers and letting others read them. Found out that the community is full of women like me, those of us who want big things but our big fears get in the way. Yet they’re the ones that encourage me to try again at making this dream a reality. They tell me that I’m good enough to be read, good enough to be seen as a writer. Professionally. Like, a job. 

Yet I sit here scared. Envious of those who’ve done it, to the point that I’ve blocked them so I don’t have to see it. I hate that. I hate that I think there’s no space for me and that anyone already in that space beat me to it and therefore can’t be looked at. I don’t have a hater bone in my body. I have a bunch of scared and fearful ones that rattle when someone else decides that they rather not succumb to their own rattles and get shit done. Me? I start to rage and get mad at God then mad at myself. They say that if you don’t follow your divine assignment, God will find somebody who will. I think God is tired of me, truly. I keep crossing paths with the women who passed me in line as reminders of God’s omniscience. 

So if you ask me what I want to do? What makes me happy? This. Writing. Sitting here, thinking of what words to say and how to say them. I started a blog that sits empty. I want to write about sports again. Narrative storytelling. The why and how we got here. Emotions over analytics. Stories over scores. There’s a story behind everything that we do and know and love. I started reading sports nonfiction to get ideas of how to do this. Playing Through the Whistle by SL Price was the first. I finished it in a day and walked away saying, “this is what I want to do.” I chose the book at random from the library because I needed something to read at work. Maybe it wasn’t by chance. It was a reminder of the assignment that can somehow still  get done.