I wrote this as advice for the students at my old middle/high school. If I could, I would include a lot more safer sex info.
hello and good morning,
My name is Colleen Kimsey. I graduated from VSAA in 2009. I was in literary arts focus for two years with Jennifer Hockhalter (Czarina Mommy Bunny), had six advocates and the good luck to wind up with Judy Goff. I started the VSAA gayANDstraight Club wehavesnacks, Day of Silence, The Anime Club, and the Poetry Out Loud Competition.
I am asking all of you for a certain kind of sit-upful awakefulness that is so hard to generate in the public school system sometimes
I need you to listen like your real life starts now, not when you graduate, not when you think you have found the person who will hold your shaking heart steady and not when you stop arguing with your mother.
Listen, because I have literally been exactly where you have, I have slumped in those seats, I sat on the red on the first day of senior year with my best friends because it was packed full to bursting with our fresh dresses and hope and ideas.
That’s rare. I want you to know that.
Listen! I am going to give you some advice because I think advice giving is a forgotten art, much like tatting lace or making apple butter. Believe me now, or believe me later, but listen.
Don’t be so afraid, for a start. Things will go wrong and things will continue. I have a friend who jumped off a train and crinkled her scalp like taffeta, but she healed. There are fewer catastrophes than you imagine.
Never interfere in a girl and boy fight.
Stay hydrated.
Don’t know everything. You probably don’t understand conventional English sentence construction, post WWII Soviet politics, how to tip in a restaurant as well as you think you do. Ask.
Spend less time on the internet. Learn how to make seed bombs instead and deploy them in vacant lots until you live in a city occupied by wildflowers.
Being loved will solve less than you think it will. Plan accordingly.
Move through the world as if you owe everyone around you a great debt, which you do.
Know that this is a good place. You will walk the floors of ten thousand places where you aren’t valued and respected as much as you are here. Don’t waste that. Don’t confuse being resentful about having to go to school with this school in particular.
Don’t wear clothes ironically.
Stay hydrated. Put your wallet and phone in the same place every day. I am not kidding about this in any way, shape or form.
There are ways out of any entrapment. Nothing is forever. I can’t promise this, but in my life’s cumulative review so far, everything gets better. Trust that.
This part is for the girls, because I had about ten brave boys in my graduating class and I suspect the demographics can’t possibly change that much that fast:
Your beauty is worth less than you would imagine. Don’t take that to mean you are not beautiful, which you all are in the way all the young and smart and radiant are beautiful. It is just that your beauty has much less currency in the world than your wit, your fierce intelligence, your knowledge of java programming. Plan accordingly.
Less blush, more lipstick.
Stay hydrated.
This part is for the baby gays, because nobody ever talks to you about the things you need to hear.
It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s really okay. It will get less interesting with time.
If it is not okay, you owe your life
Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t deserve just as level a starting line as anyone else. Don’t let them use any book or bias to tell you that you are not perfect, whole and normal.
There is less of a playbook for who holds who’s hand, who pays for the pad thai takeout, how to kiss and dress and behave. Write your own through living.
Don’t try suicide. Don’t even mess around with the little deaths and don’t kid yourself that thin red lines you drew with a straight edge on your inner thighs and secret nooks of your body aren’t an engraved invitation for the ending to come sooner. Ask for help. Stick through the process called healing. It’s worth it, I promise, for the milky way, and the icy air in October and the way your darling’s belly will feel pressed against your own.
Listen, to learn all of this I have had to travel to a place where sunsets light up the smog the way a forest fire lights up a night sky. Let’s make a trade, okay? I’ve given you this, all this, so you don’t have to learn everything the cobblestone and concrete way. I’ve learned all this through the nights I choked on my own snot and my own hysterical sorrow, through ex-girlfriends and ex-friends. Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Trade me all this for your new mistakes. Fail for me in foreign and exotic ways, as unexpected as the feral parrots in San Francisco. When you bust out of this hothouse racetrack, I want you to be as resplendent as a quetzal, as unsheltered as an obelisk. Invent new failures. Commit to making movement. Burn, burn brightly, make some noise, make people sit up and listen, be a source of light and beauty and energy in the world. Come back. Tell me how it goes.
Thank you.
