therealljidol week 29: the rent I pay

[j0ydivided]

I grew up knowing what I was. It was an inevitability--when someone gasps and says that they hope you grow up to be smart, when they tell you, faintly, that they think that you are very clever -- when you spend your entire childhood damned with faint praise, how can you not know?

My brother was gorgeous. I remember strangers, telling our parents:

Comments

[meridian_rose]

This is truly touching.

[j0ydivided]

Thank you. :)

[i_17bingo]

I loved this, but I particularly enjoyed the meditation on beauty in the middle with the alien. There was a lot of frustration there, as well as a lot of solace.

[j0ydivided]

Thank you!

[penpusher]

It's a redemption. It's in learning what you are here to do, here to learn, here to teach that can lead you on a path like this one. But that requires an understanding of the basics that Miranda fell into that got her to where she needed to go. The worry is of all of the people like Miranda who never have that chance, because of circumstances, misfortune, bad timing, pre-existing conditions, and who don't connect with their path... Miranda is, very much, the lucky one: getting to live, not merely exist.

[j0ydivided]

I definitely thought about privilege while writing it -- about opportunities we're given or denied, depending on things like timing and socioeconomic status. There's a lot of my own past in there -- a different lucky break, but a lucky break all the same.

[marlawentmad]

I love this sentiment. I am enamored with the repeated lesson. It is so difficult to see how ridiculous our assumptions about the world are without an outsider's gaze. I love the tender moment you created for this between two artists. I am so pleased our protagonist got her validation at the end.

[j0ydivided]

Thank you. :D

[halfshellvenus]

Such a sad and heartfelt piece, and there's such a feeling of peace at the end.

Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.
What a fantastic quote. It paints that underlying expectation with a brush of absurdity that shows it for what it really is.

I can understand completely why it inspired this story, which is such an unusual use of the prompt. I hope that someday, your mother will finally reach the maturity to come to the realization that Miranda's parents did, though I won't hold my breath.

[j0ydivided]

Yeah, the quote is exceptional. I ran across it again recently (someone was talking about the fact that it's been misattributed to Diana Vreeland), and it stuck in my mind. When I had an opportunity to do "the rent I pay", it was what came to mind immediately. I don't like doing literal interpretations of the prompt, and here was a slanted way in which to address it and be able to tell the story I wanted to tell -- I felt very lucky in that sense. :)

I've more or less given up on my mother and I understanding one another. "Eso si que es," or "it is what it is", as one of my good friends would say. I'm never going to have the relationship with her that I want, and she's never going to be anything other than ashamed of me, so -- eh. All I can hope to do is learn by her example. I'm hopeful that if I have kids, I can simply do the opposite of everything she did, and be a good parent.

[halfshellvenus]

That you're thinking about the possibility of kids also tells me how much the truth of who you are and who you can be has started to outweigh the poisonous messages you were fed for so long.

The problem was never you, and it's so nice to be in a place where you really see and believe that. :)