task one: tell us about the first thing you ever really loved
Love is a gamble, something not worth bothering with but lovely to write about. It's an endless cycle of hellish nightmares and exuberant joy, but the end results leave you no better than the first breaths. I've never found the point in letting myself be in love, but I've found a reason to love.
The family that I grew up with was unusual to most, being raised to call people who i never had the pleasure to be related to my family when my actual blood consisted of people we never spoke with, but that was never a bother. I loved the people who my father surrounded himself with, and they were more important to me than anyone who dared to call themselves my real aunts and uncles, or even the grandparents that i barely remember meeting when I was younger. From the sound of this, you would think that I'm about to go on an emotional journey about how important family is and why they're the first thing I've ever really loved, but that isn't the case at all. In fact, if we were to take this in a completely selfish route, the first thing that has held true meaning to me to the point where I have actually loved it would have to have been my hair.
I warned it was selfish.
It's just hair, right? Something that means absolutely nothing except carries our entire identity within it based on how we cut or colour or style it, but to me it meant everything. It was a freedom of expression, it was a four-year-old telling, no, begging their father not to make them get a haircut because it was so much fun to play with, (even if he probably abhorred the idea considering how much I ended up getting stuck in the strands). It was the pure and simple idea of getting a chance to shy away from people's stares by tilting my head and letting the locks fall in front of my eyesight. Maybe it didn't mean much in the end, but when I was younger and people constantly questioned where my mother was, why I called two people who didn't even look remotely like me my aunt and uncle, it was my shield.
You should have heard my aunt the first time someone told her she should get my hair cut because I looked like a girl, because it would be confusing for me and that I would get teased in school. The way she chewed them out... I genuinely wish I had had something to record it at the time so that I could play it back every single time someone said something absolutely idiotic to me. I learned my first swear word that day, which was probably one of the first of many things that gave my father high blood pressure, but it taught me more than most things I've learned throughout the years have. There is no end to what people will do to protect those they care about, even if it's just over something small like a nervous tic or how they choose to wear their hair. Had I not had the chance to experience that freedom as a child and had been controlled by society's expectations, I would have grown up to be a completely different person; one who didn't spend late nights writing and early mornings dreaming about worlds unbeknownst to the human mind. Without that, I wouldn't be me.
And maybe that doesn't come down to my hair. Maybe that wasn't the thing that I loved, but rather the intangible love that my aunt had had for me to defend me from judgemental, closed-minded people, but I'll probably never know. The two are so deeply intertwined that I can't consider one without the other, so the materialistic item would have to be the answer to this question. After all, who are we without the things we surround ourselves with?