I Want to Talk About It

I want to talk about Captain America. I want to talk about Freedom and Justice and being the guy who's willing to fall on the wire when it needs to happen. I want to talk about worldviews that slap you as they walk away and about how you get back up again anyway. I want to talk about how he had a date.

No, actually, you know, let's talk about someone real. Let's talk about Mae Jemison who is a dancer and a doctor and an astronaut, the first African American woman in space. Let's talk about freedom and achievement and the barriers that don't appear to have kept her down. Let's talk about the arts and the sciences and about practicality and creativity in scientific and technological research. And let's talk about the fact that the first time I heard about her was via Barbie on tumblr.

I want to talk about the google doodle for Australia Day and Ineka Voigt, the teenager who designed it. I want to talk about how we talk about our past, the conversations we should be having, the conversations that should have been had, the actions that we need to take to remember and heal and progress. Let's talk about apologies that could never be adequate.

666 ABC Canberra: Clarissa Thorpe

I want to talk about this Humans of New York post and the comments on it. I want to talk about how 80% of the 200 comments I surveyed are positive, either some version of "Christ will strengthen you in your ministry and also here's a bible verse!" or "As long as you have passion and fight the good fight, you do you, girl!" and how the other 20% are ambivalent or speak of deep pain. I want to talk about planting and harvests and about how people aren't seeds or soil- they're complex human beings who have been healed and hurt by other complex human beings and I know it's exhausting to put that asterisk on every single conversation we have about our faiths, but we have to carry the burden of our pasts until the memories have been eroded away by the wind and rain of better futures.

HONY

I want to talk, again and again, about Sarah Kay. I want to talk about how words brought to life again and again to worm their way into my soul, no, not even worm, to beam directly into the parts of my heart that I'd rather leave at home on any given Monday or Thursday or day. I want to talk about how you still have to be brave even when you're beautiful and about how difficult it is to walk through life with your hands held open in front of you. I want to talk about making lists and having ideas and how encouragement and thoughtfulness and love are the underpinnings of every truly great step forward and together.

I super want to talk about Mary Shelley. Have you read Frankenstein? It is not what you think it is. It's so much better. It begins with a ship sailing to find the north pole, a bold adventure to the ends of the earth, and it ends in the same place and in the in-between, the story pulls you from location to location, from the first tragedy of Frankenstein's rejection of his monster to the pain that follows throughout to big questions of what boundaries we can push and how creation should be regarded and what we need to make us happy and why we are so unhappy. It talks about Paradise Lost more than you'd think from just having seen the movies. Did you know she was eighteen when she started writing the novel? Eighteen, unmarried, and pregnant while writing, then nineteen and married and pregnant while revising. Yes, I very much want to talk about the miracle that was Mary Shelley.

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Then again, I also want to talk about George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (but mostly because of Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin and James Clerk Maxwell and Max Planck and Carl Sagan and Bill Nye and Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor and Mark Ruffalo and Matt Damon and Deadpool and Iron Man and Jesus and Paul. I want to talk about imaginary things and real things and desperately important things and things that only matter to my poor little tired heart.  And it is in the choosing of those things, the things we talk about and think about and carry every day, it is in the choosing of those things that we make ourselves into who we are and the world into what it will be.

And to think, I wondered at my struggle to decide what I wanted to say.