Bandera

For once I am not writing about school. Whether or not a blog is the place to spill your personal life, I've decided it's alright to blur the line just this once. I'll keep it classy :P

Since I've moved here something seems to have tilted. It's a whole new world, and in more than one sense. Of course I knew I was coming to a new state, a new culture, a new landscape. And yet I find that no matter how firmly I believed I had anticipated everything, this new adventure surprises me at least three times a day.

I've built my life around this idea that my only purpose is to love others selflessly. Cut to 16 year old Maggie discovering Che Guevara, falling in love with the idea of giving up EVERYTHING for purity of vision. That love was infectious...like those blown ink paintings you made in elementary school art class. Unpredictable, the ink tumbles in ridiculous patterns across the page, always reaching farther and wider than you believe possible. Suddenly that love became my driving force, became ME, and I became a girl governed by the desire for extremes. Thirsting always to find that cause I could latch onto and internalize. To become nothing but a resource for a goal, to surrender personal need, desire, identity for something greater. For years I trudged along, going somewhere, feeling in my core that I would find that vision someday. I thought maybe I'd join Peace Corps and live in Africa and save starving children or some such lofty nonsense.

Insert four years of university education, where I learned to deconstruct human interactions and definitions and found myself with nothing left. Studying anthropology was overwhelming...and that's a pathetic understatement. They told me that everything, from the words I speak to the emotions that fuel me, are nothing but arbitrary chances of nature. And I was terrified...I felt robbed of any sense of purpose. If human existence is chance, then what is the meaning of anything? So I became obsessed with the idea of boiling every human culture down to its core, thinking somehow the Truth would reveal itself and tell me how to live. Tell me what was right. There I was, cowering in the corner, until that one professor tiptoed in. He didn't teach...he put me in a boat and pushed me offshore and knew that I would learn to steer. And I did. Suddenly all those raging fears tamed themselves and I emerged something stronger. Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt who I was, what my purpose was and that Truth is nonsense. Choice is everything.

Now here I am in Texas, trying to do his work...to give people choices. Knowing that these children are miracles--crazy manifestations of humanity that make my life beautiful. So now I know why I'm here. I've come as close to that purity of vision, that surrender of self as I think reality will allow me. I love my work. I couldn't have created a better life for myself. I've forged, molded and fine-tuned my public identity. It will always be a work in progress, but it's more exquisite than I ever dreamed possible.

But something crept up on me, and now it won't let me rest. That whisper, so meek and unpretentious and undemanding that somehow it demands attention. I've loved--I love every day, and I love so many and so much. Because selfless love is easy. Loving these kids is easy, because they don't have to love me back. I can tell myself that they'll appreciate me someday, but I'll never have to face that someday. I'll never have to ask for them to love me and wither when they don't. It's easy to give, and to sit up here on my pedestal believing I'm wonderful and divine because I ask for nothing in return. But that's a crutch. It's not a strength. It's a weakness, an insecurity, and I can't stand that living within me.

My secret fuel (my Achilles' heel), buried so deep that no one will ever find it, is that I love myself so dearly. I'm so fiercely possessive of me, of who I am and what I believe, that letting someone else have part of it violates the very atoms that comprise me. Loving who I do and the way I do keeps "me" sacred and untouched. I can give out but never ever have to let anything or anyone come in and claim part of me. And for a very long time, I've convinced myself that this is what makes me strong. But it's not. Loving friends and kids and my family is easy. Because it's an act, a decision, a process and then a feeling. It requires no loss of self-control. Sex is easy. Because it's an act, just skin and hormones and biology. Playing with men is easy, like acting.

Taking one person, giving that person a part of yourself, letting them know what you really are and who you really are, and letting it hang there, suspended and stored within them, is terrifying. I've been fooling myself. Obsessed with strength and brimming with ego, I've been skirting this final frontier my whole life.



So that's my last battle. I know who I am, I love myself more than any person has ever loved herself. But I'm going to transcend that. Look for my flag. It's high, and it's not white anymore.