of
when i was a kid
i hid my heart under the bed because my mother said if you 're not careful someday someone 's going to break it take it from me under the bed is not a good hiding spot i know because i 've been shot down so many times i get altitudesickness just from standing up for myself but that 's what we were told stand up for yourself
we were being asked what do you want to be when you grow up i always thought that was an unfair question it presupposes that we can 't be what we already are
we were kids when i was a kid i wanted to be a man
i wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet
when i was a kid i wanted to shave
when i was eight i wanted to be a marine biologist when i was nine i saw the movie jaws and thought to myself no thank you
i said i 'd like to be a writer
and they said choose something realistic so i said professional wrestler
and they said don 't be stupid
see they asked me what i wanted to be then told me what not to be and i wasn 't the only one we were being told that we somehow must become what we are not sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be i was being told to accept the identity that others will give me
and i wondered what made my dreams so easy to dismiss
granted my dreams are shy
because they 're canadian
see my dreams got called names too
duke the dumpster droese stole my entire shtick
i was crushed
as if by a trash compactor
i thought to myself what now where do i turn
one of the first lines of poetry i can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded i hate myself from age fifteen to eighteen i hated myself for becoming the thing that i loathed
standing up for yourself
doesn 't have to mean embracing violence
when i was a kid i traded in homework assignments for friendship
then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time and in most cases not at all i gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise and i remember this plan born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me yogi then pointed at my tummy and said too many picnic baskets
turns out it 's not that hard to trick someone and one day before class i said yeah you can copy my homework and i gave him all the wrong answers that i 'd written down the night before he got his paper back expecting a near perfect score and couldn 't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero i knew i didn 't have to hold up my paper of twenty eight out of thirty
but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me puzzled and i thought to myself smarter than the average bear motherfucker
this is how i stand up for myself
when i was a kid i used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing
i thought they were both pork chops and because my grandmother thought it was cute and because they were my favorite she let me keep doing it not really a big deal one day before i realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees i fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body
from there i was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home
i told her whenever i 'm sad my grandmother gives me karate chops
this led to a full scale investigation
and i was removed from the house for three days until they finally decided to ask how i got the bruises news of this silly little story quickly spread through the school and i earned my first nickname
i hate pork chops
i 'm not the only kid who grew up this way
surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme
about sticks and stones as
so broken heartstrings bled the blues and we tried to empty ourselves so we 'd feel nothing don 't tell me that hurt less than a broken bone that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away that there 's no way for it to metastasize it does
she was eight years old our first day of grade three when she got called ugly
we both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs but the school halls were
outside we 'd have to rehearse running away or learn to stay still like statues giving no clues that we were there in grade five
and they 'll never understand that she 's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word mom because they see her heart before they see her skin because she 's only ever always been amazing he
was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree adopted
not because his parents opted for a different destiny he was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy started therapy in eighth grade
had a personality made up of tests and pills lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs four fifths suicidal a tidal wave of antidepressants and an adolescence being called popper
one part because of the pills ninety nine parts because of the cruelty
he tried to kill himself in grade ten
when a kid who could still go home to mom and dad had the audacity to tell him get over it
as if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first aid kit to this
we weren 't the only kids who grew up this way
to this day kids are still being called names
the classics were hey stupid
every school was a big top circus tent
and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers from clowns to carnies all of these miles ahead of who we were we were freaks lobster claw boys and bearded ladies oddities juggling depression and loneliness playing solitaire spin the bottle trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal but at night while the others slept
but i want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be and if you can 't see anything beautiful about yourself
get a better mirror
because maybe you didn 't belong
we grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them
we stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called
we are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway and if in some way we are don 't worry we only got out to walk and get gas we are graduating members from the class of we made it not the faded echoes of voices crying out names will never hurt me
of course they did
but our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act
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