I met her through the same telephone line I met The Man. That line gave me some successes and some failures. In both there were lessons. She was looking for someone to hook up with her and her dude, I was flexing my gayness. Why I didn’t turn around that moment when I ran into the dog shit in the hallway I won’t ever know because she was something that was supposed to happen.

I wasn’t wholly savage Nicole then, but I also wasn’t evolved. I was in the middle of it all, and not who I would eventually become. She was my first retained lesson int he experience of competition. Not mine, hers. One of the things that came out of the experience was the solidification of my need to NOT compete. Her presence taught me that. It was clear fairly early that she thought it was a competition, and almost equally as quickly that it was a game I would not play. I still don’t, even though others have tried over the years.

I can imagine that others consider it a flaw, a lack of pride. I simply understand that your need to one up me doesn’t change me. Your craving for a reaction from me is about you not me and I am willing to let you cook on that.

When I consider somethings as I type this out I can point to one more reason why I rejected the moniker Auntie. Her daughters called me Auntie, and I still feel like I failed them both. I couldn’t get Teff to not return to North Carolina. I came to Lexie a completely broken person. Both those girls who I come to love, because their mother the matriarch Yarn is such a failure at being a human being needed an Auntie and this Auntie dropped the ball of Yarn.

The torture that those girls went through, because of their mother rivals the tales I can tell. I wanted more for them, I could not create more for them, and I carried that guilt like all the rest I have over the years. Teff the most I think. If for no other reason I still haven’t processed the events of the last 5 years fully. I will though.

As I reflect I am reminded that one lesson of the many is that the core of me, doesn’t change that much. Some of it should, and some of it will as I walk this new road, but the desire to meet expectations not so much.

That still feels like competition, and I am not all that competitive in that sense.

I can’t control what others expect of me, I can control me. I even do it sometimes. Even though the shift happened before this moment I still think back to a jar of pickles, and the look on her face and realize that what I learned as a younger version of me, that I cannot change another’s mind, I am reminded of that moment and I can admit that I tapped out. I told myself that I would not go back down that road of trying to correct the impression of a woman whose mind was made up, and I didn’t. I know the futility in that, even if I do not know the futility of other things. I decided that the fight to correct perception was not worth the effort so I did not expend it. I redirected that energy to something else. It did not make the situation better, but it did allow me to focus on what I needed to do to survive. It kept me out of the space in my head, mostly that could have made things so much worse. I know what not giving a shit Nicole looks like and I sat her black ass in a corner and refused to let her take root.

It allowed me to survive but it didn’t contribute to me living. I came here to live.

I really have seen some of this before, and even with all my shit that is only about me, there are somethings that weren’t. They aren’t my issue, and its not my place to correct or instruct. There is a futility in that which is clear to my vizion and that is a weight I will not carry, I dropped weight coming here and I will continue that progress. Forward.

While my first two nieces aren’t living the lives I wanted for them, they are living their lives. That is not a failure. That is not something to mourn. I want more for them, but them not having it is not on me. I don’t know if they will ever call me Auntie again, but that was who I was, and also who I am.

Our realities don’t always match the perceptions that others have of us. That is not a right or a wrong it is a thing. In time – sometimes – we can understand that our perception is colored by our own shit. Sometimes that never happens. In the interim, we should move forward. That I what I am working on in this moment.

Aphrodite Brown