Kristina Johnson

daley submitted a contest entry to If you could send 1 message you’ve learned to every person in the world, what would it be? 2 weeks, 3 days ago

Dear Homie:

When I was a child, the word most often applied to me was shy. Not true. I simply enjoyed watching. Everything. Every night, I would write in my book, a book I had liberated from my father’s store. An order book. Lines and spaces. I could print very well by the age of five so I considered myself a writer because what I printed looked just like the books I read.

Writing has been my best friend since childhood. My bedroom window opened onto a gigantic oak tree with a notch I would climb into once I got rid of my parents, an easy task since they were people who did not necessarily want children. Before therapy became the response to those of us who were non-conformists, and journaling became the go-to for all forms of wretchedness or well-being, I held readings from my book about what I had seen, what my dreams were, and who was mean. My audience was the man in the moon, the stars, the trees, whomever or whatever else was out there. Always a friendly crowd. I still have memories of my father trying to calm my screaming mother when they found me out there in the morning, asleep.

My “formal” writing started with messages stuffed into my father’s empty whiskey bottles, rare commodities since he was a shot-with-dinner guy, and I would set them free in the ocean across the street. I also had my notes to Santa which I stashed in milk bottles my mother left in a container that sat on the doorstep because I heard the delivery man was Catholic and, therefore, a Santa person. I learned that connection in Hebrew school. I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, so the Santa-et-al thinking, along with the bacon my mother stashed in a Tupperware container she labeled “broccoli” in our highly kosher refrigerator, were early signs that I was destined to live a life of creative non and real fiction. I also wrote my own (fabulous) absence notes for school since my mother had withdrawn from a great deal of parenting. Apparently, no one read them or perhaps they knew our lives.

I immersed myself in A-level papers throughout the thousands of years I spent gathering degrees and debt. Eventually, and at times simultaneously, I produced ardent and (hopefully) articulate political protest letters (an ongoing effort), sold some short stories, and even built a life in New York publishing. Prose was my go-to and then, after a ten-year silence brought on by wars private and other, poetry emerged. The shy girl now has two voices.
Carl Jung says that each one of us carries the collective, so I now consider my writing an a cappella chorus. Does anyone else find it funny that the quiet one is now the mouthpiece? My father the gangster is out there laughing somewhere. He always introduced me as the jail-house lawyer to be. Maybe he was a visionary.
Now my title is psychotherapist. People tell me stories all day. For more than thirty years I have been listening to stories. I tell people to keep “talking” no matter the form: Write. Paint. Dance. Grow flowers. Bake. Fold the sheets on your bed as neatly as you want or don’t want. Keep magazines that are 10 years old because you like the memories. House neat, house messy – you need to feel satisfied. Shame is given to you by others. Happy is given to you by you. You decide how much or how little you need the words of others to bring you joy or peace or laughter as much as that bad brownie you baked or the new purple stripe in your hair.

Yes, there are boundaries, and, yes, there are rules. Find your space (mine was in a tree) and celebrate the life you make. Tree notches are everywhere.

Daley, your bestie

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