Leaves of Arugula

I'm sitting in Arugula, not the leafy green, but a room at Whole Foods that bears its name. I cannot help but think of other leaves, Whitman’s leaves, blades of grass. Whitman wrote of these blades emblematically, of course, as a notion of all that grows.

What are my leaves? My single-blade contribution to the field at large. Perhaps these thoughts, keeping me here when I could be anywhere else, are a worthy uncovering. Or, maybe my unkept paragraphs and ramblings could supply me with hints to the veins of my leaflike identity.

Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Walt Whitman

I am growing, and it is uncomfortable. Not for the reasons most people claim to be uncomfortable, though. I don't mind change. I don't mind the solitude or going inward when the world provides no echo for my cries and inquiries. I don't need validation or a clear path to walk upon. I don't need a crowd, a map, or a destination even. I'm uncomfortable because growing out of current contradictions will surely bring new ones, and the time required to embody them. I grappled mostly with the recognition that others deserve growth, desperately stuck in a range of choices already constrained by an unequal landscape. My growth may look like “choice,” and it is, but it’s also shaped by circumstance, privileges (even subtle ones).

Perception is as real as fact, so if I do not believe growth is possible, it is not. If I do not believe I deserve growth, then I do not.

For me, the guilt described above arrives in thought, not flesh. It is a logic that robs me of clarity. The self-interrogation... Who am I to move forward when others cannot? Who am I to believe in possibilities while others just survive? These questions loop until movement feels suspect, until growth itself feels like a theft.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/4e7320_71a5449a6def4394b672dbec8575a781/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Americans want to optimize to the point of oblivion. We trim our calendars, our diets, our thoughts into efficiency spreadsheets. I, right now, want to optimize my writing and the span of time that was set apart specifically to just write. In America, when the facts say a methodology is failing, we clutch it like a badge, find a way for it to work to prove that we are different, special. I feel this pull in myself. I want my words to be unique, my room of Arugula to hold meditations no one else could write. I fear being another blade in the field, flattened by the sameness of it all. And yet, my insistence on being separate is itself the most American thing about me (what a contradiction). Individualism has become our collective ritual. We fight to delineate ourselves, only to mirror each other in the fight. Fucking ironic, isn't it? And maybe that’s why I reach for optimization, not just to feel in control, but to disguise the guilt with spreadsheets, to make contradiction look like a plan.

Here comes my reframe (btw, I hate the word reframe)... here comes my embodiment of contradiction (that sounds better). I reconcile myself with growth by thinking of Whitman. I'll think of messy, unkept, contradictory notions that force upheaval. I'll think of regeneration, nothing of I, me, we is net new. Most importantly, I'll think to let growth be as it is, unpruned.

Whitman wrote us a permission slip:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

I am someone who has always blurted out hard things (since I was little, lol), silence might serve me better. I enter into arguments with people that I know won't be productive, it leaves me raw; I could always walk away. I haven’t yet learned to speak softly, or to save my voice for the right battles, though I often think I should. Maybe I never will. Growth does not erase the uneven ground on which it happens, nor does it absolve me from the discomforts of contradiction. But I must grow, because to refuse growth is to let the contradictions rule me, rather than carry them with me.

We grow not because change resolves the contradictions, but because change holds them. Arugula is my patch of Whitman's field. A single leaf, but one that belongs to the whole. To grow is not to stand apart, nor to dissolve into sameness, but to carry the contradiction of both. And that, I think, is enough for now.

In Arugula,

Mandeebeth