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Hello Kindred Spirit,
I was watching the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender recently, and there was a scene that stayed with me.
Toph, who is a gifted Earthbender is blind, and her parents are fiercely protective of her, their teenage daughter.
When her mother catches on to Toph's plans to become a practicing Earthbender, she is alarmed. She tells Toph that she is too delicate, too fragile to pursue something like that.
"You're a flower," her mother tells her.
Toph's reply is immediate, fierce:
“I am not a flower. I am a rock,” she says.
This was one of my favorite moments this season.
Not because I saw myself in Toph.
But because Toph so FULLY owned who she was that I found myself thinking:
I am a flower, just like Toph is a rock.
By this, I don’t mean that I am special.
I mean that like a flower, I can be open.
And I can also get easily bruised.
Unlike some people, words don’t simply bounce off me.
Often, they sink in.
I think I am the opposite of the “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.”
And I think there are many physical injuries you can forget, no matter how intensely you felt them in the moment.
But negative words are sticky.
They swirl. They poison. They become part of your story.
And such words have harmed me at times.
When I was a kid, it was when I was called “Shy.”
I was called that so often that it became an identity, a label that took me years and years to unpeel.
So now, when I see adults repeating a certain word for a kid, I wonder how much they are shaping them to become exactly that.
A self-fulfilling story.
And missing the deeper point of the child’s behavior – that every action is trying to express something.
Sometimes, a child is called “stubborn" when they are trying to do something their own way. Or they are thought of as “high-maintenance” for expressing a real preference.
Or called “picky” for something innocuous like saying that scratchy clothes bother them.
When I hid behind my mom at parties, I was “painfully shy.”
I don’t think I would have had such difficulty letting go of this “shy” label if I hadn’t been called that repeatedly.
So, words have shaped the way I saw myself.
And at different times in my life, I have wanted to be like Toph – a rock that is unmoved, that is unshaken.
I do love stones.
And sometimes, I have wished that I could be like one of those polished stones you find on the beach, that people stack on top of each other, in Zen-like fashion.
They look so serene and beautiful.
But the thing is, I am not a rock.
I am a flower that needs water and sunshine, that gets crushed if someone stomps on it, but that also has roots down into the ground.
And a flower is resilient in a different way than a rock is resilient.
When your very nature is different, isn’t the way you adapt different too?
Resilience for a flower is not about becoming harder.
It's about growing deeper roots.
It’s about trusting the ground of your own being – your own nudges, your own instincts, your own desires.
It’s about savoring those things that openness brings to you.
And noticing that you have a capacity for your own protective structures, just as roses have thorns.
I think, at one point, I used to think that pretending to be a rock would protect me. Other people would not see who I was.
They would not be able to get to me.
But pretending to be a rock doesn’t make you invulnerable.
Because you are still who you are. And other people see that too.
Everyone has a relational radar, and they can feel that about you.
Avoiding unhealthy people is about having boundaries, not about minimizing or downplaying the effect toxic behavior has on you.
And just as Toph pushes against being put-into-a-box, I feel the need to resist having my resilience put into a box too.
Resilience is not just about things that are obvious to others.
It’s more often about battles you’ve fought on your own, scars that you alone can see, and things you’ve persevered through.
Many of us will not get outer recognition for things we’ve endured. And there are injuries that can’t be easily put into words.
But what has helped us through them is our own nature – receptive to new ideas, adaptable, fluid, able to regenerate, able to grow through cracks, able to find new paths forward.
I think if you made a list of things you’ve persisted through, it would make a long list.
And whether you think of yourself as a flower or not (I know it could be a loaded metaphor), your resilience comes from your real essence, your own true nature.
I know it can be tricky to own it.
And there are people that are not safe enough to reveal your full self to.
And maybe, it’s harder to fully declare yourself a flower than it is to declare yourself a rock.
But whether we declare it to others or not, we have to declare it to our own selves.
Maybe that’s why I loved Toph’s words so much.
Maybe, the true essence of courage is not to be a rock OR a flower (either one is perfectly good), but to say no to someone’s false idea of your self.
And instead to say, This is my nature.
This is what hurts me. And this is what lights me up. And this is what is true about me.
I hope, wherever you are, you let your resilience look like YOUR resilience, not a weak version of someone else’s strength.
Because the world doesn’t become more when there are flowers pretending to be rocks or rocks pretending to be flowers.
It needs each of us to add our own self to it.
With love,
Ritu |
