Growing up, I chased specific labels: strong, fierce, fast, funny, pretty. But all of those labels were outward facing—they described an energy you project into the world. Being a Bravey is different. It’s inward facing, a choice you make about your relationship with yourself. We all have dreams that we’re chasing, however big or small, and we can all decide to be brave enough to give ourselves a chance. I think that’s why the term resonated with so many people: Anyone can be a Bravey, and the permutations of what that means are infinite. It’s a switch you flip in your mind.
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In writing a book about chasing dreams, I am, in fact, chasing one of my dreams: to write something that I know will matter, to you and to me. Chasing a dream is a never-ending negotiation, as in, you have to keep navigating, pivoting, adapting, and persisting. It’s a process that unfolds continually and never in a straight line.
So much of my own growth was thanks to the mentors who, whether knowingly or unknowingly, let me learn from them. Now it is my turn. To really matter to those who might look up to me, I need to share my full story. I need to hold a magnifying glass up to the moments in my life when I was growing into myself.
This book is about glamorous things like going to the Olympics and making movies, and it’s also about difficult things like suicide and depression and puberty. For every fun moment of victory in this book, there are uncomfortable and humiliating moments, too. I am the sum of all of them. I want to show you the whole picture, the bad pain and the good pain. This book is gore and glory. This book is about making a life, not just living a life. We will grow up together here.
A life can’t be replicated and it doesn’t need to be. But by sharing my story so far, I can show you what being a Bravey means to me. In turn, you can decide what being a Bravey means to you.
good thing i didn’t accomplish all my goals yet
because then what would i do tomorrow?
FOUR MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER
I used to feed the ducks that lived in the lagoon behind our house. My dad went with me sometimes, but most often I went alone—the lagoon bordered our backyard and it was easy for me to slip away undetected. My favorite day to feed the ducks was Saturday, which was when moms and daughters were out in force. I’m sure other people were out there, too, but I have always cared most about moms and daughters.
Moms were aliens to me, foreign creatures I could only see outside of my home. I’d observe them from my vantage point atop a pile of wood chips as they walked down the bike path along the lagoon’s edge. Obsessively watching those women was a compulsion stronger than being glued to Saturday-morning cartoons.
The moms would always walk with a bag of stale bread in one hand and their daughter’s small hand in the other. I so badly wanted to experience that feeling of having my hand held by a woman who was walking half a step ahead of me. Wherever she was going, we’d head there together.
The mom-daughter duos all blend together in my mind: the daughter watching as the mom separates pieces of stale bread for her to throw into the water, as if the child can’t tear up bread on her own. If the ducks ever got too close for comfort, the mom would swoop in, a protector shielding her precious youngling from the squawking assailants. She’d shoo the scary ducks away and then crouch down and look at her little girl closely, their faces in a vacuum away from the rest of the world, and tell her that everything was okay. She’d wipe the tears off her daughter’s cheeks and brush the wood chips off her daughter’s ankles as if to make her whole again. It didn’t even seem like it was a special occasion that the daughter was being comforted by her mother; it was as natural and innocuous as breathing. In those moments I wanted very badly to climb into the bubble they created, to feel the warm air inside. I felt resentful but still curious, unable to look away, like when you’re little and you have to watch your brother open presents on his birthday.
I liked to watch how the moms talked to other moms, acting as translators if their kids wanted to add anything to the conversation, always so understanding of each other, nodding and smiling and laughing. I thought maybe my mom didn’t realize she could have gone to the park to find people to talk to.
I liked how the moms would listen to their children’s overly descriptive monologues as if they were sharing critical information before the mom would tactfully decide whether or not to insert her own wisdom. One of the most common exchanges was when a kid would tell their mom they were hungry, but when the mom would offer healthy snacks like apple slices or celery sticks, the kid would say NO to all of these options so the mom would counter with, “Well then, you must not be very hungry after all!” Then a negotiation would ensue, and the kid and the mom would come to an agreement on the ratio of apple slices to gummy worms the child was allowed to eat. I never negotiated with my dad for anything and I had no idea how these kids could negotiate with their mothers—what leverage could a child possibly have? I would have gladly eaten those apples with the cores already cut out!
Every little girl watches and looks up to the older women in her orbit. There’s an innate desire to admire them and to want to be like them. I know this because my cousin and I used to spy on my aunt while she was getting ready to go out to dinner, imitating her with our fingers as she strapped on her bra. Little girls linger while their mom is on the phone with her friends, soaking in the gossip that they’ll most definitely misinterpret and regurgitate to their friends. Little girls stand very close and watch their moms in the bathroom stall at the airport. They look closely at their moms while their moms clean them up. These are looks of deep need, as if their mothers always make everything okay.
I imagine all little girls as potatoes, wondrous nuggets of raw potential just waiting to be shaped by their mom-chefs. Whether your mom tenderly styles you into a Hasselback dish, tosses you in the microwave, or is totally absent, she is going to affect you. My mother took her own life before there was much time for her to shape me into anything. I was four years old, almost five. The greatest legacy she left me was her suicide. I try to imagine what it feels like to be washed, dried, peeled—to be turned over under warm water, then pushed gently into an oven and basted every now and again. But it is another thing entirely to never be touched at all; to be left alone in the cabinet to sprout eyes and fend for yourself.
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Before she died, my mother was in and out of my life like a jack-in-the-box. By the time I was four years old I knew she was sick, I just didn’t understand quite what that meant. At that age, sick meant a sneeze or maybe an ear infection. It had easy-to-spot symptoms and was cured by taking gooey sweet red medicine. But none of that applied to my mother’s mental illness. Depression is an invisible disease. Back then people generally didn’t understand that depression is an illness like any other. Depression is something that you have, not something that you are. The stigma around depression begins with the way we talk about it and the way we label it. But I didn’t understand this as a kid. I was looking for sneezes but all I saw were screams.