Being real...

I'm real because I'm not the same person I was before.

And I'm wildly inventive with jump construction.

 

 

I had things to do this afternoon. I had lots of things to do. I'm behind on my work, my house looks like it should be condemned and my pickup smells like a foot. A dead foot. So I came home from working and I jumped right on the 'responsible adult' bandwagon and began to check chores off my list.

Just kidding.

I laid on my stomach in the grass in my front yard for 45 minutes and I picked through every patch of weeds I could find looking for four leaf clovers. I'm ate up with bug bites, my jeans have grass stains on them and nothing got accomplished in the life of me. I didn't even find a four leaf clover. But my sanity was restored. I laughed at my dogs while they rolled in the clover patches I was tying to sift through and I took 100 pictures of my horse doing this...

 

All of this took me back to a conversation I had with a friend. He suggested that I may be portraying myself as being 'larger than life.' That concerned me. I want to be real. I don't want to be above anyone else and I most definitely do not want anyone to think I'm cool because if you meet me you will be terribly disappointed. I'm negative cool. I have afternoons like the aforementioned frequently, it doesn't get any more real than a grown woman picking grass.   

So I began to study myself, I wanted to realize all the bad or weird or unkind things about myself. I didn't feel like this was a negative endeavor because I saw it as a way of connecting with myself on a deeper level and being able to link my social maladies with those of the world. I advise everyone to explore their weaknesses, fears, complications and concerns. Start making yourself real right now.

Being real to me is being the person who makes you happy. It's doing the things that make you feel whole even if those things are not in line with your peers. Being real is being truthful with others about your knowledge and abilities but it's even more important to be true to yourself. Don't be who others want you to be. I'm real because I missed a turn into normalcy somewhere along the road to here and I'm real because I chose not to stop and ask for directions. Here's some other things that make me real.

• Most people close to me know I have an unhealthy infatuation with dinosaurs and dairy farming. They both get brought up a lot. I just want a stegosaurus to tear down some brush one day and walk across a wheat field in front of me, I imagine they would be pretty gentle if you left them alone. Every time I see a dairy farm, whether or not its been in production within the last 100 years, I make sure everyone knows about it and I delve into a classic textbook definition of what kind of parlor and milking system they are probably using. I've never seen this as being debilitating amongst peers but evidently it's weird.

• Some of you might think I posses a certain level of intelligence because I'm articulate when in fact I have the spoken word processing ability of a fetus. I transfer my thoughts via writing because I can not speak. I mumble, I stutter, I use the most basic form of communication not limited to waving my arms around, cussing like a sailor and yelling. I'm a yeller; I imagine that this comes from my upbringing because whenever I get into a fit I resemble a drunk Yankee Doodle which is reasonable. Very often I am, in fact, a drunk Yankee Doodle.

• Here's a good one for all my die hard puncher friends that don't already know and constantly remind me. None of my family is involved in any sort of agriculture. Not now or ever. No cattle, no crops. They're not ranchy by any stretch of the word. I was not raised with longstanding family values passed down through generations of corn pickers and tit pullers. I've even encountered some opposition from folks who seem to think that a certain passion or the ability to preserve this way of life is limited to a royal gene pool or where you were birthed. They're wrong.

I just want to be real. I want you to be real too. I want to be who I aspire to be and I'm blessed that nothing physical or mental is standing in my way. I've chipped away at those walls of oppression for too many years to back down now and if you haven't started chipping yet I hope I can give you tools to get to work. Nothing is out of reach if you know who you are and where you came from. I don't know any paleontologists to be responsible for my obsessions, I've passed the point of no return with my capacity for speech and my daddy didn't have to be a cowboy for me to be one. Just be real; acknowledge your capabilities, work past your disabilities and never stop striving to make life your own. I've been accused of running away from things when they didn't turn out in my favor but the way I see it is that I couldn't run toward my next goal fast enough, that's why I'm real.