Dear Sunday: Foundations before Walls
In my last year of college I had to ask for help from my mom and granny to pay my rent. This would be the first time I had to ask for anything since freshman year and this was way bigger than a cell phone bill or pair of gymshoes. I knew I would need the help early on and so I asked early, maybe as early as the week before school started back, maybe even before that. I had to prep them for that kind of money. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for them and I knew that it would be impossible for them to help without giving them time to figure out how they were going to do it.
I was planning to go on leave from one of my jobs for at least two maybe three months to have the time to work on my fashion show. The fashion show was a whole class, the last class in the fashion design program, the one all of us design majors anticipated from the moment we declared the major.
As an underclassman I’d watched year after year as the seniors stressed while prepared for their shows. I’d been a model in the shows the last two graduating classes before mine. I watched closely as they fitted me into their designs, I moved out of their way, giving up the seat I was in during class, the minute class was over and it turned into open lab because it was their spot. From the beginning of that year I started preparing my mom and granny to be able to help me with my show, by allowing me my time.
They came through. I was able to go on leave from my reporting duties at the school newspaper but maintain a staff position as long as I kept up with my weekly fashion column. Done.
Well not done, they still support me, not necessarily with outright cash or rent payments, though I did live at home with my mom rent free while starting a magazine. A magazine that never went beyond hidden corners of the internet and even though it went into a coma in 2014, I kept it on life support until finally letting go and unplugging it from my heart after moving to Los Angeles. Sorry, still of soft spot but I digress.
Since the unplugging I’ve been in a state of unrest about where to go next, how to organized my ideas and make better moves for the next projects and phase of getting ideas out, got swept back up in that all to familiar cycle of needing a job, being tired of being the “broke” friend, being better that this part-time job, being to old to keep going through this, thinking I would be in such a different phase of life by this age, wishing I was one of those people that knew by the age of nine what they wanted to be, so surely that they’ve been that damn near since then and yet here I am, still.
The positive wall I’d worked so hard to build and maintain to have something to lean on started to crack...
under the constant negative tones of my partner, the thinking you’re getting somewhere after some back and forth only to get no response from that last email from a potential employer, to being told they’re restructuring that position only to realize that’s code for we’re not really as inclusive as we want people to think from another potential employer, the pressure of finding out I’m pregnant.
After a rough couple of weeks I found my way back around to the foundation my positivity wall built on, and that’s gratitude.
Without it, it’s difficult to see all the support I have. All the support that’s gotten me here, that continues to allow me to chase my dreams with a peculiar freedom. I mean I live in California! Everyday I wake up with the opportunity to do my thing, everyday I have a chance to make something happen because people are in my corner, still supporting me. My main job is to make the most of this opportunity, not waste it by thinking about all the should’s, that just aren’t because that was never meant to be my story. How ungrateful of me to hide all the support I have from shame of not “having it all together” by now, for not having a “real” job, which I knew at the age of nine I never wanted.
It doesn’t look how I thought it would exactly but I know that I’m well on my way because I’m able to see how so many of the things I said I wanted have manifested in some way or another. I am only this far because of support and I’ll go even further because I don’t take it for granted.
Jakina | Sunday November 5, 2017
