What Have I been Running From?

I’m tucking my oldest son into bed and talking about a heartfelt movie we just watch, I Can Only Imagine, and I’m telling him that being hurt on the inside can hurt just as bad as being hurt on the outside.

He says, “not just as bad.”

And I’m ready to pounce and tell him, “yes, just as bad.”

But before I can he cuts me off and says, “not just as bad… worse.” Then he chuckles to himself and continues, “I set you up for that one Dad, I knew you were going to try to argue with me, but I actually was agreeing.”

He knows me too well, and made a great point that being hurt on the inside can hurt more than being hurt on the outside. Who is the parent in this relationship?

I’ve told more than a handful of stories now, but I see a common thread in many of my stories that I can’t shake. The thread often being a hurt I felt because of race. The moments and the characters change, but what the stories are actually about is the same. It has kind of been frustrating me because I don’t want all my stories to sound the same and I certainly didn’t want so many of them to be about race.

When I tell a story about race I’m not kind to myself because I create a story in my head where no matter how good the story is, I tell myself that people only find it impactful because they think saying otherwise would be racist (and people are so afraid of being called or thought of as a racist). So, I’ve been determined to tell stories that have nothing to do with the color of my skin, but as the story is being crafted it ends up being that the story is again, to my surprise, about race and identity. The story could be the best story in the world, but at that moment (and at this point), I’m just about ready to scrap the story and find a new one - even to the point of telling a story that is void of heart and emotion.

The truth is, I keep coming back to the same theme, because the pain is still there. I speak about the scar thinking, well that’s done, only to find another scar adjacent to the last scar. And what it comes down to is that I never gave voice to the fact that I felt like I was unknowingly put into a community where I would grow to hate the community or learn to hate myself—then actually I did both. Now I’ve been learning to love myself again, but I have still been running from the community. I think I need to stop running, and just admit that while I was never physically harmed by the community I grew up in, I have a lot of little emotional cuts from over and over again feeling like I didn’t have a place to belong. My parents worked very hard to make enough money to set me up with a great upbringing (an upbringing much better than there own), but in the process I felt abandoned and isolated by a message that was both: you are not accepted - you are different because you are black on the outside AND even more than that you are not accepted - you are different because you are white on the inside.

I’ve been running from this my whole life, but I haven’t found a place where this pain goes away, so every time I open my mouth to speak my story… my story comes back around to this same pain. It feels wrong because the bruises aren’t visible and the injustices are minor (in my eyes), but all the same many small internal cuts can feel just as pain as an external gash, or according to my oldest son’s wise words, “it can hurt worse.”