Moxie

“I want to be everybody, and I want to be everything. One life is not enough.”
– Vladimir Sokoloff

1.
They say moxie is slang for street smarts. Something you pick up along the way as you live out the timeline of your life, that ranges from comfortable to completely fucked. You’re lucky if there was someone to guide you as you slowly ease into the nefarious, real world. Such things like, people only care about themselves, or do not mix the colours and the whites in the machine—can help a lot in the transition of being a child and becoming a grown-up. But not all of us are lucky. Learning the hard way is always the first step towards the realisation that you’ll be receiving that kind of education for most of your life.

2.
When I first had my period, I thought something inside me must have been cut off. It hurt like a damn kick to the groin. I sat inside the bathroom for two hours, until I decided that maybe it won’t be as weird when I have a bath. There were no cuts, no bruises, just me, leaking blood. It freaked me out. I had to think hard about what to do about it. After what seemed like an eternity, I got out of the shower, stuffed my underwear with tissues and walked quietly to my room. I learned later on that was just happened was the beginning of the end. I never asked my mother what to do. Today, whenever a part of me bleeds, I learned never to ask anyone how to stop it.

3.
When someone I knew from school died, it was my first experience with death. I was in second grade. Nothing stayed the same after that. I was more aware than ever of my own mortality, and how that could have been me. The day they buried her, I learned that when people leave, there will always be those who got left behind. And very, very quickly, they will soon forget.

4.
It’s almost five in the morning. What inspired this post was an old journal entry dated back in September, almost five years ago. I wrote about things I learned so far, things that still hold true today:

“I know this now: always, there will be several circumstances that will get in between my life and my carefully-planned goals, and these will remind me that my dream and my reality might not always go together.”

“There are people whom I trust but are using me to their advantage. For some reason I let them see my weaknesses and I do nothing to stop them from exploiting these. I will never understand why I let myself arrive at such situations, but the closest I’ve come to it was that maybe there are people who are worth giving up everything. I’m working on becoming selfish. Maybe that will help me one day.”

“I believe that the future will not be easy. It’s going to take me a long time before I become the person I want to be.”

Ah, my younger self. What would I be without my laborious, exceptionally distressing past?