Your Stalwart Girl.

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

—Octavia E. Butler

I don’t lack punishment; I lack discipline. I have probably been punished for every choice and action I’ve ever made in my life—even the good and right ones. What I lack is the kind of discipline jocks talk about: the ability to set a goal and train the body and mind toward it, to orient oneself steadily in a single direction. 

My accomplishments so far feel like waking up, hungover, inexplicably at graduation, having learned nothing, yet still having a diploma slid into my hand after a hearty handshake with a dean whose name I don’t know, the stamp from last night’s bar still wet on my wrist. True story.

I’ve been like this since I was a child. No rules. No boundaries. No organization. No structure. Never had a curfew or a chore. Parents like moody roommates that pay more than half the bills. So perhaps it’s unbelievable, even to myself, when I say that I am trying.

 

That’s the crux of my problem: how to convert a wayward child, bouncing from distraction to distraction, into a grown woman built on a foundational ethos of study. How to do something I don’t want to do in the moment—even temporarily—in service of something greater.

What would I even want at the end of all this, if not the easiest, closest thing, as I have always pursued? What is it like to be running toward something instead of away from something? And there are other questions I don’t need to answer yet—but will, eventually. I'm all questions and no answers right now.

But, just give me time. Baby, I’ll be your stalwart girl. Just give me time. I will figure it out. I don’t know discipline yet, but I know I can’t mess this up anymore.