“I’m a slow study,”
she said with apologetic eyes.
“It takes me awhile to get a thing.
But when I get it,
it’s in the vault.”
I smiled, knowing she knows plenty.
Maybe someday she’ll know what I do:
She’s as bright as they come.
A slow study is only slow in someone else’s opinion.
I’d like to see that knowing in her eyes.
So what? So what if I am not up to “par?” What if I am “substandard?”
What the hell does that even really mean?
When I dissect the judgements I have revolved my life around, it is as if I pulled the curtain back to reveal the sweaty, little man who is the voice of the Great Wizard of Oz.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
There is a Them I have made into a kind of God.
Others against whom I have constantly measured my worth, my performance, my right to be here.
Others who often know no better than what they’ve been taught to believe by the Them that they also believed was The Great Oz.
I’ve pulled the curtain back, and I see what I have been buying into.
It is time to ask different questions. Instead of “What’s wrong with me?” “What can’t I be more like that?” I now ask:
“Less than” …less than what?
“Unworthy of” …as decided by whom?
“Inferior” …to who’s idea of superior?
The standard. Who’s standard? Who sets the standard? The industry? Who is that exactly?
What if in trying too hard to live up to The Standard I overlook or even destroy something that could be truly extraordinary?
Pardon my French, but it has all been one big mind fuck if you ask me.
Well, the fuck stops here.
I belong where I say I belong.
I determine my own value.
I’ve been using the wrong gauge.
I’ve been using the wrong measuring stick, and I’ve been measuring myself against the wrong things. Random ideas I either imagine or have had impressed upon me by others.
No more.
I have another gauge within, one that runs truer than any other, and just like Dorothy’s power to go home again ended up being with her all along, it has been with me all along.
It is my own heart. It is my own unique blend of desire, creativity, will, love, joy, bliss, determination, work, craft and passion.
I belong because I am. And I am. Worthy.
There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
Life On The Skinny Branches 