7 Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me [Long, Overdue List Poem]

1. SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN SINKING SHIPS: your lungs will often leave you capsized as they fill up in waters too shallow for you to swim in. Sometimes you will drown in the noise inside your head but most days it’s the silence that will eat at you raw. Revel in the moments when the world goes quiet. That’s when you can save yourself. That’s when you can hear people like you screaming for help.

2. NOT ALL BRUISES HEAL: learn to forgive like you are God when the wounds reopen, when the welts begin to surface remember you deserve peace. Learn to walk proudly with all your scars, including the ones you gave yourself. You are broken. You are  whole. You have pieces missing. Remain unashamed when other people point this out, they’re probably just as lost and crooked as you are.

3. SOMETIMES, THE BAD GUYS WIN: remember this as you lay with one cheek to the ground and the other beneath the foot of someone too undisciplined to accept the brown of your skin and your love for dust bunnies and library corners. Sometimes, the best way to deflate an ego is with a smile. You’ll have your share of victories. Things look different from the ground.

4. THERE WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH TIME OR MONEY: some things end as quickly as they began, some open doors will lead to nowhere and there will be days when you’re holding onto the shattered shards of an hourglass willing time move into stillness or into a fast stacatto pace to match the erratic polevaulting of your heart. There will be days when the only money that you have is in a monopoly game box and the only time you had run out 5 minutes ago. There will be days when you have too much of both of these things. Share them. They will leave you soon anyway.

5. IT’S OKAY TO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD: there are saints who have sinned against themselves more than you ever could, you are no less holy because you don’t believe in the absence of a man who is always too busy being somewhere else. You are good not because you’re constantly on ashy knees begging for forgiveness, you are good because you bleed when no one asks you to, you echo like a coin bouncing on tiles, trying to find a place worthy enough for you to lay your head down and rest. you are good because you are human and you offer just as much redemption and solace in the temple of your body.

6. THEY MAY CALL YOU GARGOYLE: know you will never look like the girls glossed and barcoded on magazine covers. The whole world may not think you are beautiful. But, darling, you have a beating heart and breathing lungs and though they leave you capsized and homeless they are yours and if you arm yourself with an argonaut ribcage and a sword wielded from compassion you will always be more beautiful, more warrior than a girl armed with a shield of conceit.

7. SOMETIMES, YOU NEED TO WALK AWAY: because there our hands need to heal from the blisters we get from holding on bunch-fisted to things that never belonged to us. Sometimes, people are just passing through. Trying to find their way home. It’s okay to lose parts of yourself to them. What are we if not stained glass windows, made from many sheets of sands and hourglasses in as many colours, stealing light during the day, so it shines on the dark corners we’d like to forget we have.