It’s this way because I’ve already made my mind up.

I bought this patience tee on the right from Depop recently, hoping it will serve as a reminder for me to be more patient <3

This past week I went back home to help my sister move into her new house, but mostly I just pointed at things in the IKEA and said that looks nice. And she’d agree. My older sister is quick to anger (she’s working on it:)), and my younger sister is sort of mean. I love them both, yet, I have known this about them from a young age. It’s true because I said so when I was 8.

Eight years old was also the time I really wanted to be a fashion designer. My best friend Talia and I were always drawing up ideas for our future fashion agency we called K & T Fashion Agency. This was always the dream before the dream changed to having our own variety web show that we would call Kris&Tal.

I loved specific rom-coms or girlhood movies where the main character had pretty hair and colorful outfits, they were quirky girls that had fun and worked at a fashion magazine or in marketing and lived in beautiful cities. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was convinced I’d be a famous writer and I’d have a well-known blog everyone raves about. So, when I saw a commercial for a show called Sex and the City- a beautiful blonde woman with curly hair (I hated my own curly hair until I saw Sarah Jessica Parker for the first time) with her tutu and tank being splashed by a bus driving past. Every time I’d hear that theme song I’d think shopping montage, drinks with the girls, pretty fashion. Mind you, I was 8, but that’s the show I imagined Sex and the City was. I didn’t understand why I was told it wasn’t a show for kids. I knew Carrie was a writer and I wanted to be one to, I’d thought for sure I’d grow up to be just like her. Sex and the City was a show about shopping, girlfriends, and drinking martinis because that’s what I decided as a kid, that’s how I perceived it to be. Imagine my surprise when at thirty I decided to watch it for the first time and it’s actually just a show about sex and lots of it! Am I the only one that didn’t know Sex and the City was a show about sex? She’s literally a sex columnist. I’m only five episodes in and it’s already safe to say no, I didn’t grow up to be just like Carrie… but I’m only thirty and there’s so many more episodes to go, so there’s still time.

I will be forever grateful that I grew up in the right generation. I love colorful stripes, being the sibling with a specific color theme, one direction, and the show Wife Swap. I know what it’s like to be bored and know I am healing mentally and emotionally when I let myself be bored more often without always looking for a quick scroll into parasocial relationships. Big parts of my childhood memories consist of cleaning my bedroom but taking hours to do so because I found this old feather boa, and pretty marbles at the bottom of the toy box, and the library book I was certain was gone. Before I knew it, I was all dressed up and making up my own skits. One day I’ll die and these old posts and videos I’ve created will be something people will look at to feel closer to me. I made my mind up about that when I came home from middle school and my parents plugged the old camcorder into the T.V and we watched videos of my sister who had passed. We all stifled our tears when really, we should have leaned into our grief later knowing it could potentially bring us closer together. I started taking more videos of my life and later of my creative endeavors when my friend Jairus died shortly after turning thirty. I dropped to my knees when my older sister told me the news. Spent that whole night rereading messages, listening to voices notes he’d sent, and the dreaded messages where I temporarily stopped being his friend until I found out he was sick. I thought it was best we stop being friends when he claimed covid was fake. I think I lack patience. It’s like the moment someone says something stupid I’m like you’re done.

I’ve always been this way, and I think my patience levels towards others is dependent on the patience levels I have with myself. My middle school and early high school years were grief stricken. I had a younger sister who was always going into surgery and parents who were sad and worried. When she passed we all moped around for years. The house felt heavy. My sisters weren’t in the room when it happened, and I felt for many years after that they resented me for being there in that moment. Mom rushed home from work, worst call I ever had to make. Dad and I should have grown closer but every time he offered to talk about it, I pretended like it meant nothing at all. I was mean to kids at school because I thought it was better to go with the crowd making fun of Joey, than it was to risk being the one people were making fun of. I’m not sure my hurt heart would have handled that on top of everything else in my life. I couldn’t wait to go home and stay in my room. I don’t think it’s normal for kids to feel that sad but at that age I didn’t have the words to describe how I was feeling. I just didn’t like doing homework, so I didn’t do it. I struggled to sleep through the night, so I was always falling asleep in math. I told my science teacher I hated him to his face because kids made up nasty rumors about him and I took it as the truth. I graduated eighth grade only because teachers assumed my grief was eating me whole. Then one day all at once, it was as if my mom becoming pregnant with my brother suddenly gave us hope for life again, being home felt lighter. Eighteen years later, my brother will go on to have the same science and math teachers that I had, and they ask about me.

There was a brief time in high school during my junior and senior year where I thought I was really pretty and really kind and it felt like everything my parents told me about standing up for others and inviting those who sat alone to sit with my friends and I, it actually started making sense. It’s as if all the years prior I was hearing the things my parents said but not totally understanding them. It’s as if I was healing.

My mom’s cousins would comment about how sweet I was, how I’d reach out over messenger to say hi or inform them I couldn’t make it to whatever Facebook event they invited me to. My mom’s sisters would talk about how their niece (me) was so pretty it must run in the family. They always labeled me as smart and kind and said I was one of the coolest people they knew because I cared so much about so many things… but they changed their mind when they realized that me standing up for what I thought was right would sometimes mean that I thought what they did was wrong.

I stopped being invited over to my aunt’s apartment for Christmas eve when I told her I thought her kids were great and wished she treated them like it, after she got drunk and pulled her daughter’s hair and when the other daughter went to wake up her dad for help, he punched her in the face. My parents would have never done that to me… they also wouldn’t have been drunk at nine in the morning but for my aunt that was normal. In the message when it told her that I thought her kids were great and I felt for them, she responded, “FUCK YOU.” Aren’t you an adult, I replied, and that’s where the messages ended.

My mom acted like I did something wrong with standing up to her sister and her sister’s boyfriend when everyone else acted like it was just taboo, these things happen, we don’t need to talk about them… I was the only one who stopped talking to my cousins’ abusers everyone else forgave them for something they weren’t the victims in. “What do you want her to kill herself” my mom lashed out in anger once, “she has depression!” So did I but I could never justify what they did. Suddenly my aunt was buying my sisters gifts for holidays which they never did before and of course I was excluded unless I wanted to be nice again then she could give me gift too, what color lipstick do you like? Every single time, I would reject and block the new Instagram and Facebook accounts she would try to add me on pretending like what she did was okay. Suddenly I wasn’t the pretty one or the kind one or the one everyone liked. I was the one left out. This is one time where my morals kept me where I wanted to be. In a recent car conversation with my mom, she said she didn’t remember any of this happening. It’s crazy what your mind can block out to help you continue seeing the good in the people you love.

For a girl who felt different her whole life there was nothing more I wanted than to just be liked, but wanting this extended family to give me that attention meant that’d I’d have to go back on what I said, that beating your kids is wrong and should not be tolerated. So, my morals kept me in check.

Over the years my morals had also lost me a lot of friendships and closeness to various cousins and family members I used to love visiting. When the white side of my family exclaimed that white lives mattered too, I went to war on my keyboard and it always ended in someone being blocked. I forgave certain people though, chalking it up to ignorance because I had made my mind up that they were a good person. It was easy for me to see that some people were LOL-ing the posts I shared because they felt targeted or that post made them questioned what they were taught.

When I went back home last week, I saw a cousin for the first time in ten years, and wow have we both aged. He got unfriended years ago in the crossfire of family Trump supporters claiming that racism is “actually okay”. Those were not words he tried to justify to me, but his older brother did so they both had to go. Seeing him for the first time as real adults reminded me that this was a cousin I always wished I was closer to. I have misaimed my missel time and time again, removing people from my life that were associated with people who I had strong moral disagreements with. At the same time, I was forgiving to the people I was close to because I felt that I could see the real them deep down. I let the people I was close to grow into more understanding, more accepting, kinder versions of themselves but I didn’t give others the same opportunity. In dharma class I learned that the best way to bring people to the dharma is to just live it, rather than argue or push dharma down their throats. I stand by my morals, but can I not just use the way I live to best convey these to others. I kind of hate that my morals have kept me from growing alongside the people I used to love.