Becoming: The American Dream
The only way out is through...
I am as Americana as they come.
I grew up in a small town. My family owned a Chevrolet dealership. We attended Lutheran church most Sundays and my sophomore year in college my family moved next to the fields where the local butcher kept his cows. Before that we lived on 3 acres next to a gully that we explored often. Pallet parties, Whaling Days, the Banner jump and a shockingly large rendering of the Washington Memorial built in a friend’s backyard (you could actually climb to the top and sign the guest book) swim across my memories. Hazy now, after 20 years removed. My senior photos hinting at the millennial green and pink that was want to dominate the late 90’s and early aughts. Digital communication arriving in the form of beepers, car phones and AOL messenger in my formative years… hardly staving off the life altering shift to social media that Facebook would bring.
If you heard the dial up tone, this one is for you.
If you didn’t hear the dial up tone, this one is for you too. History is important.
My Mom instinctively knew I was destined to be a writer. A dream that has yet to be realised on the commercial front (unless you count my captions and campaigns), but I no longer care if commercial success is an outcome. Fiction. Non-fiction. Investigative journalism. It was supposed to be My choice. My destiny. My power. Growing up I was blessed with raw talent. I was strong, fast, competitive, smart, and so unbelievably stubborn. I never gave up. Ever. On anything. And I won, but only at very specific games.
It’s what I was taught. It’s how I was raised. And It continues to be one of the only ways that I know how to live.
Never give up.
Tears well as I type because in my experience, with all of the privileges that I have been afforded (and they are many)… the overwhelming undercurrent, as a woman, has always been to give up. Or, to be more accurate, give in.
Only now, after 20 years as an adult, am I able to articulate what I’ve been through. Or, more accurately, what we’ve all been through. And by “we”, I mean white women detaching from conservative culture now turned MAGA extremism in the short span of a few decades. Extricating ourselves from the swamp, the “deep state”, the conspiracies, while knowing that stinking mess will suck us back into it’s enraging embrace the moment we show any sign of weakness… or pregnancy.
What is a woman doing in a man’s world after all?
And one cannot gloss over the devastatingly painful moment when you realise; it was always this. In one way, shape or form. It was always this. We simply didn’t see it. I simply didn’t see it.
When I analyse the impact of white women like Jessica Reed Kraus, Dani Austin or Brandi Kruse I am not doing it through the lens of judgement, but through the lens of experience and with the hope that maybe we’ll listen to each other long enough to see the full picture. I see them. Their pain. Their want. Their talent. Their desire to serve something that is bigger than themselves.
Maybe this is me projecting, but it is a knowing that white women decide to acknowledge… or not acknowledge.
Their willingness to take the public hits so that men can broker a deal behind the screens, hopefully for cash rather than praise. Equity rather than respect. A seat at the table that will be gone tomorrow.
But my telling is not their story… that belongs to them. I am only capable of sharing how they exist in the system. The part they play. The part I play. The ripple effects their words and actions have on this burgeoning new world that we are clumsily clawing our way towards.
Once again, maybe that’s just me. Maybe I don’t know anything at all.
But all of this I know to be true because it’s my story. Admittedly, I am not sure where to start, or if my words matter at all, but this one feels right so here it goes.
At the age of 24 I was in love. Head over heels. Beyond. Or at least that’s how the first serious relationship of my adult life felt. Now I know love to be something entirely different, but we’ll talk about that later.
Wrapped in the safe cocoon of my parent’s insurance, with a manager’s salary of around $38,000/yr + commission and a new job waiting for me in Cali, I was unstoppable. I think I met him on a night out at a now defunct downtown Seattle bar called Frontier Room, only a few days before my 24th birthday. The details are fuzzy. I was moving from Seattle, Washington to open a Nordstrom on the 3rd street Promenade in Santa Monica, CA. A stepping stone to my dream job. A buyer. I loved fashion, or so I thought. Our third date was his sister’s wedding. A lovely affair in a park by the water. I flew back home to the demise of my monthly budget, wore a yellow mini dress by Alice & Olivia that I still couldn’t afford despite my employee discount, danced the night away and slept on the ground in tents. Who needs a hotel block when the party doesn’t have to end and it’s a balmy summer night?
This is the part of the story where you (and I) realise my life chapters have always been defined by men. I no longer see that in my future.
An aspect I embrace, despite the urge to resist it. I intimately know the patriarchy and am now determined to dismantle it… all because of the ending to this particular chapter. It’s heartbreaking. Or at least it was for me. And I didn’t really grasp why it happened until just a few short months ago, well over A DECADE after the fact, with multiple serious relationships and an entire 4 years of marriage now under my belt.
“Whatever Princess Heidi wants, Princess Heidi gets. How is my son ever supposed to provide for you?” Spittle hitting my face as I was confronted with a rage that I wasn’t aware existed.
Those words cut me like a knife. Twisting in my gut and leaving me breathless, devoid of feeling. Negating every dream I had for the future and replacing it with a doubt so strong it still stings. It’s odd remembering the first time I shut everything down in order to restart at some undetermined time in the future. Closing myself off and retreating to a darkness so deep I didn’t need my senses.
Nothing compares to that first betrayal from a woman I had come to love and trust through years of loving her son.
All because my ambitions weren’t my own, they were her son’s to give, not mine to realize and according to her he wasn’t capable. It haunts me. Not the relationship, but it’s ending. How everyone around us took sides, but us. Clamouring for access to the carnage, the gossip, the bits and pieces we both left behind, promising to never speak ill of each other while everyone around us reveled in doing just that.
We were so obviously not meant to be and I had never been so sad.
Simultaneously, I had never been more protective of myself.
My dreams. My aspirations. My desires. They were mine and belonged to no one else. To this day, and probably most days moving forward, my favourite animal is me when someone tries to fuck with my dreams. But, I’ve also learned what I really want and what it actually takes to achieve it. Back then I thought I wanted to reach my “goals” by the time I was 30, but today those dreams are much more prolific. Sprawling across my psyche. A tapestry of experience that is always just one stitch away from perfection. From becoming.
But today, all I want is the freedom to continue becoming. Not just for me, for all of us. And that’s exactly what I will continue fighting for, strategising for and investing in…
We’ve closed another chapter and now it’s time to write the new one.
I love you all.
Until next time,
Heidi