What Came Standard for Everyone Else

An inventory of the missing curriculum. Prerequisites never offered. Enrollment: compulsory. Instruction: absent.

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How to fight without destroying.

Not conflict avoidance, which is the counterfeit they sell when they don't want to teach the real thing, the version that requires you to stay in the room when staying in the room is hard, to say the true thing at the regulated volume of someone who wants resolution more than they want to be right.

Nobody taught me that.

I learned to fight the way I learned everything in the rooms that raised me: by watching what the room did and deciding whether to replicate it or run in the opposite direction with the same energy.

I mostly ran in the opposite direction with the same energy.

The energy was the inheritance.

The direction was at least mine.

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How to need someone without it being a weapon they can use against you.

Specifically this.

The lesson that needing is not the transfer of power from the needer to the needed, that asking is not the same as owing, that the I need you said plainly in the first person to a person who can receive it is not the opening move in a negotiation they will eventually win.

I needed people with my hands behind my back for years.

Needed them in the passive voice. Needed them in the implication. Needed them in the behavior changes that circled the need without landing on it, in the hope that someone would triangulate to the correct conclusion without me having to hand them the coordinates.

Some of them did.

Most of them didn't.

That's not their fault.

I never taught them where to look.

I was never taught that teaching them where to look was allowed.

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How to exist in a room without performing your right to be there.

Without the constant, exhausting internal audit: Am I taking up too much space. Is my volume appropriate. Does my presence require justification that I have not yet provided.

The audit runs.

The audit has always run.

I have turned down the volume on the audit through considerable effort and considerable expense, and it still runs, a background process, a program I did not install that came pre-loaded on the operating system they handed me without documentation.

The documentation would have said: you are allowed to be here. Proof of right of occupancy: you are here. That's the proof. That's always been the proof.

Nobody sent the documentation.

I have been writing it myself ever since.

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How to receive a compliment without immediately locating the catch.

How to accept help without tallying the debt.

How to be angry without converting it first into something more socially acceptable, more digestible, more I'm just a little frustrated rather than: I am furious and the fury is legitimate and I am not going to manage it into a smaller shape for your comfort.

How to say no to the thing you don't want to do without constructing an elaborate justification for why the no is reasonable, as if no were a verdict that requires an appeal process rather than a complete sentence.

No.

Complete sentence.

Four years of practice to say it without the apology attached.

The apology is still sometimes attached.

I am working on it.

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How to let someone love you without waiting for the invoice.

This is the advanced module.

This is the one with the prerequisite list that includes everything above and several things not on this inventory because the inventory is already long and the reader has their own version of it and doesn't need mine to be comprehensive, only honest.

The honest version is:

I did not know that love could come without the invoice.

I thought the invoice was the system. I thought the invoice was just how love worked, the cost disclosed upfront or disclosed later but always disclosed, the price point of being wanted being the thing that made you smaller and more manageable over time.

I did not know the invoice was optional.

I did not know there were people who did not send one.

I know now.

I am learning what to do with the knowing.

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How to stop.

Just: stop.

The performing, the justifying, the constant low-grade labor of a woman who was taught that her presence was provisional and has been renewing the provisional status every day for as long as she can remember.

Just: stop.

Be here.

Unconditionally.

Without the performance.

Without the audit.

Without the invoice or the apology attached to the no or the need held behind the back in the passive voice.

Just: here.

As a fact.

Not a performance of a fact.

Not a justification of a fact.

The fact.

You are here.

You were always allowed to be here.

The curriculum failed you.

You are writing the missing lessons yourself one hard-won Tuesday at a time.

That's not nothing.

That's, in fact, the whole education.

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What came standard for everyone else arrived late for you.

Or didn't arrive.

Or arrived broken and you spent years trying to use it anyway and wondering why it wasn't working.

It wasn't working because it was broken.

Not because you were.

File that.

In the folder with all the other things you should have been told and weren't.

The folder is getting full.

That's not a problem.

That's the curriculum you're building for yourself.

Better late.

Better yours.

Better.