Our Best Stories Are Raw, Dark & Speak Of Light.
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You may call me crazy.
Seriously, I won’t be offended. In fact, I will probably smile and agree. In my 38 years here on our little green planet, the word crazy has come to mean a whole range of wonderful things to me.
It means I speak my mind, tell my truth, and cherish my story no matter how ridiculous it may seem to others (or how awful I may look). It means I seek to make sense of the confusion, loss, disappointment and heartbreak that living inevitably brings.
It means I continue to take risks, try new things and make mistakes — and understand that failure is sometimes the most important part of the journey.
We are born into a world of expectation, a finely lined roadmap of the path that is acceptable to follow. Do well in school, listen to and respect your parents, go to church, go to college, find a well-paying and solid career, get married, have children and live happily ever after.
If you just follow the map, you will be happy. This is after all, the American dream promised to us all.
However, this dream has unspoken rules that accompany it and a silent reality that no one tells you about. It is possible that you are not the class or color of person that our culture has intended this dream for, and it shall be that much harder for you, if not closed to you completely.
It is possible to go through these steps, diligently following the plan laid out in front of you, never finding your true self and living a life that chronically feels as if something is amiss.
It is also possible that parts of the map don’t make sense to you, and therefore you erase all the well-planned lines, and jump in with no idea where you are going.
The achievement of this dream is as much about preventing the harsh realities of the world from touching us, as it is about making our families proud. Our successes validate our parents, the never-ending, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses game of image control.
The silent whispering of expectation is so insidious that making other people proud of us becomes more important than being true to ourselves.
We are soldiers in our family’s army of See, we are better than you. When, in reality, class-stained image is the blanket of insecurity that we wrap ourselves in to feel like we are good enough.
The truth is, the image is fake. It is the shiny topcoat protecting the glimmering red nail polish underneath. Good people exist despite the image society may see… and bad people exist even under the shiny pristine exterior.
Proof of this can be found on the news daily where church leaders are denounced for torrid affairs and gang members are walking neighborhood children to school to ensure their safety.
It is not the dream itself, which confines me; it is the expected image that is tacked onto it that I find suffocating. To me, the outward image is not nearly as important as the story of the person inside.
I have been rebellious from the start, stubborn and fearless to a level that my own mother can say, “You were always a mystery to me.”
I can remember riding in the car at the age of three and marveling at a group of Hell’s Angels that roared passed us. My mom, seeing the glimmer of fascination in my eyes, teased me, “Never date a boy who has tattoos or rides a motorcycle.”
To myself I silently thought, “I will have a tattoo.”
There was such a beautiful honesty in their disregard for upholding the image of proper society. I was all in, if for no other reason than to feel the freedom of outwardly rejecting the imposed societal image. I am happy to report I have many, many tattoos, and love every single one of them.
Call me crazy, but my mind doesn’t think trashy, classless and uneducated when I see tattoos. My mind sees beauty, art and probably a damn good story.
We are a culture that throws the word crazy around to explain what we don’t understand, to dismiss another’s feelings and emotions, to devalue people’s experiences because they don’t fit in with our concept of should be.
I have always been the clichéd, live-and-learn kind of girl. I have learned what I want by discovering what I don’t. The world has too much to offer and experience for me to simply pass up the opportunity for an adventure.
Something about the choice without a clear outcome has always drawn me in. Wrapped up in the unknown, often with the potential for disaster, is the tiny glimmering possibility of something amazing.
I have made my fair share of mistakes.
I have jumped first and asked questions later, often with longer-term consequences than I could have imagined. I have loved good men and I have loved very, very bad ones. I have hurt my family, disappointed people I love and stood for the wrong things.
I have been silent when I should have been loud, and I have been loud when I should have shut up and sat down.
In recent years, I have begun to look back and reflect on it all. Where is the big picture? Where do I want to go? Who am I? At times this has been an overwhelmingly emotional process.
I’ll be honest, openly expressing my emotions, I have learned, can make other people very uncomfortable and question your sanity.
It has been a sad, depressing process that has required me to take a very hard look at myself, my past, and my unwritten future, and paint a picture of it all that makes sense to me.
I have truly learned who my real friends are by their willingness to be seen with me in public crying over my margarita or even better, holding my hair while I vomit whiskey and emotion all over their guest bathroom. These are the kind of people you hold on to.
We all have a story to tell.
The sharing of our stories is beautiful, although the stories themselves are not always pretty. There is no knowledge of happiness without sadness. No achievement without failure. No appreciation for what we have without the tragedy of loss. Our stories are our humanity.
Our stories are what relate us to each other.
The best stories don’t sugarcoat or tie our human experience up in a shiny red bow. The best stories are raw and real, and speak of our dark as well as our light. My story is full of loss, grief, and mistakes. It is also full of love, self-awareness, humor, success, and adventure.
I love my story, and loving my story has allowed me to love who I am.
Call me crazy, but I think that’s what it’s all about.
*****
Jennifer Dowdy was born in 1976 on a hot sunny August day in Los Angeles, California. She grew up in Lakewood, California, moving to Eagle Rock, California, when she was 8. At 15, she spent a year living in a residential school for troubled youth in Provo, Utah. Upon her release, she moved to Greeley, Colorado, with her mom and younger brother where she graduated from University High School in 1994. She married in 1997, settling in Farmington, New Mexico, with her husband, where they welcomed their daughter Chloe in 1998, and son Mason in 2002. Jennifer worked as a pastry chef and server while earning her A.A. from San Juan College in 2004 and B.A. in U.S. History and Gender Studies from Fort Lewis College in 2006. She has loved to write since she was a child. She rediscovered her love of writing while in college, writing about subversive women, the history of tattoos, and social theory. Jennifer and her husband divorced in 2010, and she has spent the last four years figuring out how to be a single mom, single woman, sole breadwinner, and most importantly, herself. At its best moments, it has been a thrilling, liberating and profound adventure. At its worst, it has been lonely, dark, and terrifying. In an effort to express this journey, she began writing once again about her experiences, observations, and inspiration. Jennifer Dowdy currently lives in Farmington, New Mexico, with her two children and their cat, Lola.
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