Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

  “I write about famous people, about when their new movies come out, what they’re wearing on the red carpet, who they’re dating and having kids with,” I said. “Those things don’t really matter. Yeah, it’s fun, but there are stories I want to tell and don’t know how to yet.”

  I felt I’d said too much in the comfort of late-night intimacy. Insecure, I shifted my focus away from Aaron and into the emptiness of my mug and onto the clock above the espresso machine, which pointed to a bit after three A.M. We decided to split a cab, which slowed across the street from his apartment, lit by the lights of La Esquina’s taco stand.

  I stared at Aaron. I wanted him to kiss me. He leaned in and pressed his cheek to mine and whispered good night in my ear. As the taxi pulled away, I watched his boots stomp across Kenmare Street and soon read his text: “You’re a complete pleasure.”

  I had yearned for true love ever since my junior year of high school, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in Mrs. Chun’s English class. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that Janie’s “soul crawled out from its hiding place” when she met Tea Cake. I wanted to come out of my hiding place. I wanted a love that would open me up to the world and to myself. I wanted my own Tea Cake who wanted all of me. I draped myself in all of these expectations when I arrived for my first date with Aaron a week after our rendezvous at the coffee shop.

  I spotted him through the windows of the New Museum, all six-two of him. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and rustic brown boots, which reminded me of North Dakota and horses and steadiness. The skin of my armpits stuck to my leather jacket’s lining as we leaned in, our cheeks reconnecting. “Shall we?” he said, flashing the tickets to the exhibit.

  The first floor acted as an icebreaker. I told him I didn’t care for supermodern art, whatever that meant, arguing that displaying the contents of a woman’s purse was not art. He smirked as I spouted my opinions about the exhibit, which included a woman sleeping on an all-white bed, a “performance” that drew a crowd. I giggled inappropriately at the sight of intent onlookers tuned in to this unmoving, sticky-haired blonde. After a couple of glares from fellow museumgoers, we excused ourselves to the second floor.

  In the stairwell, Aaron grabbed my waist. I was standing two steps ahead of him. “I think it’s time we kissed,” he said.

  It was an invitation, one that didn’t fit my itinerary for our date. I imagined that he’d kiss me when he said good-bye, under the glowing gaze of the moon and my neighbor’s twinkling lights and the sound of the city cheering us on. Not in the daylight with these brighter-than-white walls and the reflective metal rails. It was too sterile, too open, too early.

  When I looked around to see if anyone was there to witness this impending kiss, Aaron laughed at me. I must’ve seemed about thirteen, like a girl contemplating taking a drag from a friend’s cigarette. I leaned forward, placing my lips to the heat of his. We fit, the cleft of our mouths meeting and the pressure of his deep pink lips against mine.

  “Now that that’s out of the way, I can concentrate on what you’re saying,” he said, smirking. His charm threw me, and immediately I wondered if he had a girlfriend at home, because there was no way this man was available. I didn’t know how to be truly happy. I had to cope with it by dismissing it, by forecasting its inevitable end. My belief system operated on the notion that the good things in my life were a universal hiccup where doom surely loomed. Happiness was fleeting and accidental; goodness wasn’t in the cards for a girl like me.

  Video installations boomed on the next floor, allowing me to work through my awkwardness about the kiss during the final pieces of the exhibit. I squeezed my right hand into my left, my lifelong tell of nervousness, the same way I would when Dad focused on me as I searched for an answer to one of his probing questions. I felt out of control, as if I had crossed a threshold into fast-forward, no-turning-back closeness with Aaron. Getting close meant intimacy, and intimacy meant revelations. Sensing my discomfort, Aaron suggested we take a walk.

  We headed west on the movie-set-ready blocks of Bleecker Street as the sun descended over this second island that I call home. Girls in printed frocks and summer maxis passed us, making me feel even more out of place in my leather jacket on this spring day.

  “Let’s play a game,” Aaron said after a quiet couple of blocks. “We’ll ask each other questions back and forth. The only rule is that you have to answer the question. Wanna go first?”

  My first question for him was the one I’d been asking myself since we met: “What are you afraid of?”

  It didn’t take him but a few seconds to answer. “You,” he said, looking down at the gum-spotted pavement. “Because I told myself I would commit this year to me, not a girl, not a relationship. See, I’m a relationship guy.”

  Hearing him say that being in a relationship was part of his identity, in an age when men were believed to be afraid of commitment, had me feeling like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone. This was not what years of watching Carrie Bradshaw skip around the city had taught me.

  “I’m most comfortable in relationships,” he continued, “but they distract me from myself. So my answer is simple: I’m afraid of you because I’ll break my commitment to myself.”

  I was taken aback by his openness, which a part of me, from the world I’d grown up in, received as weakness. Aaron seemed available to the world because he knew, somewhere deep within himself, that the world was available to him. He probably never had to fight for anything, I thought. He probably had people in his life who listened to him, who waited with a grilled cheese sandwich on the table when he got home from school. He probably had that kind of childhood on the farm.

  While I stood in judgment of a life I never had, the pressure of the date, of the kiss, of what was to come, left me. I didn’t have to say anything about my past, I assured myself, because he didn’t even want a relationship.

  Then he took my hand, placing my fingers in between his. “Okay, it’s my turn,” he said. “And I’m going to steal your question.”

  I’m afraid you won’t love me once you know me, I wanted to say. Instead I led with another truth: “I’m afraid of getting too close to anybody.”

  We stayed in each other’s company until dinnertime, when we kissed and cuddled to the sounds of Portuguese lyrics at a Brazilian restaurant, the one where he said, I see the little girl in you. I wished I could see her. She didn’t have the chance to just be, to frolic, to play. She was the wrong kind of girl. I let him gaze at her and knew that this night was the beginning of love: I knew right then that he saw me like no one had before, and there was no turning back from this kind of closeness. I let him see that vulnerable, wide-eyed girl inside me, and I kissed him until the dusty stained-glass lantern dimmed to darkness and the soft samba melodies silenced.

  We said good night for the second time on the corner of East Fourth Street and Bowery after he showed me how to salsa and I giggled while moving my hips. The pressure of his hand on the small of my back told me it was okay to let him lead me.

  In the coming weeks, Aaron and I took a nighttime stroll through Central Park; heard my intellectual girl-crush, Zadie Smith, talk about writing at my alma mater, New York University; licked ice cream cones outside Lincoln Center; saw a bad romcom during the Tribeca Film Festival; and had our first sleepover.

  When Aaron arrived at my place—a ground-floor studio fitting my full-size bed, desk, and TV—he came bearing gifts: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and two red tension balls. “I figure they’ll help you relax and write,” he said.

  We watched my favorite relationship movie, The Way We Were, and discussed my love of Katie and my longing to be with someone who’d push me as much as Katie pushed Hubbell. Eventually, we kissed our way into my bed, and these kisses were freedom kisses—uninhibited by my self-conscious, overthinking tendencies. We gradually bared our bodies to each other, with my legs spread, my body yielding to him. He touched me like I had never been touched before, and I trusted him to
see me. Just as I let my guard down, I put it back up, like a reflex, and he returned to the pillow beside me.

  After a moment’s pause, I studied his face: His eyelashes crowded the edges of his lids, creating a sweeping, almost epic frame on his knowing brown eyes. I wondered if this man next to me, the one I had let touch, taste, and smell me, was ready to really know me. What does it mean to truly know someone, to claim that you’re ready, ready to love a human being, not just a sketch of all your fantasies come to life? I wanted him to see me. My internal utterances must’ve manifested themselves into movable energy, because he smiled, widening the scar beneath his right eye like a pencil mark I would make in a book to note something significant. I moved my middle and index fingers across the jagged line.

  “I got that when I was twelve or thirteen,” he said, reaching back two decades to tell me a story about a boy running away from someone without care or caution. He’d snagged his face on a low-lying tree branch. The remnant of that carefree moment was forever on his face. “You know, I’ve never told anyone that before,” Aaron said, traveling back to bed from that North Dakota emergency room.

  I felt privileged but wondered why he’d chosen to tell me, out of all the people he’d known in his life, all the people he had loved and those he thought he had loved. Why was I worthy? And wasn’t that the question I’d asked myself the entire time: Why me? Why did you choose me in that bar? Why did you take me to that coffee shop and not just fuck me and discard me? Why did you tell me in dozens of little ways that I am special?

  He couldn’t answer those questions because he didn’t really know me, just like I did not really know him. But he was trying to be known, offering many of his life’s stories and memories since our meeting. It’s in these moments, in bed, in the dark, when you share and create new memories, that a relationship is built. I was holding on to everything I had not to be fully known; if he knew me, then this would end. The mere thought of it ending overwhelmed me, and he saw it, using his fingers to wipe away my tears.

  Days later, I listened to a message from Aaron: “Hey, just calling to see what you’re up to tonight. Nothing? Great. Come over. I want to talk to you.”

  My stomach ached when I heard the message. I felt past the lightness of his message to its weight. His call was in reaction to my crying in bed. I scolded myself for being vulnerable in front of him. Something in his voice told me that he knew. He had to know.

  When I arrived at his apartment—a three-bedroom share without a living room—I sat on his bed as he closed the door behind him. Aaron’s bedroom was a ten-by-ten space, softly lit by a lantern that illuminated remnants from our three-week courtship: a flyer from the exhibit; two pairs of movie stubs; and a photo of us from one of our dates. In it, my curls were a harsh yellow, shocked as a result of the previous day’s highlighting session. Despite the frizz, I appeared pleased standing next to Aaron, who looked just over the photographer’s shoulder. “You make a perfect pair,” the man had said after fanning our Polaroid to dry. I remember Aaron thanking me with a kiss for indulging him in the touristy act.

  Now I placed one of his pillows between my legs to shield myself. I knew from his expression that I was the one who was going to talk tonight. I looked into his eyes one last time and saw that he was anxious: He didn’t sit down in his own room. I realized then that he had something to lose, too, with what I had to say. There was a dream in him that could be wrecked by my revelation.

  I had presented Aaron a distorted me, and I couldn’t give him me while wrapped in secrets—stories I’ve never told. They trap you, and you become so wound up in your own story, in the pain inflicted on you in the past that you’ve worked hard to keep at bay, and the people and actions and all the things you’ve been running away from, that you don’t know what to believe anymore. Most important, you lose touch with yourself: The self you know, the you deep inside, is obscured by a stack of untold stories. And I had been groomed to believe that they were all I had in this world, and the keeping of them was vital to my survival.

  I felt I had endured enough. From some cavernous place, I reached inside myself and grabbed the courage to take a long trip back to a place I never thought I’d revisit. I took a deep breath and exhaled. “I have to tell you something.”

  Part

  One

  The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers—to say nothing of one’s children—to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Chapter One

  HONOLULU, 1989

  I was certain the sun’s rays would filter through the legs of the table under which I slept and Grandma Pearl would wake me from my fold-up mattress with the scents of margarine-drenched toast and hot chocolate. I knew my sister Cheraine and her best friend Rene, a towering Samoan girl with waves flowing down her broad back like lava, would walk me to school, the heels of our rubber slippers smacking the warm cement. I was certain my first-grade teacher would part her coral-lacquered lips to greet me with a smile as I carefully placed my slippers in the blue cubbyhole labeled Charles. I was certain that when it was time for recess or bathroom breaks, we would divide into two lines: one for boys, the other for girls.

  I was certain I was a boy, just as I was certain of the winding texture of my hair and the deep bronze of my skin. It was the first thing I’d learned about myself as I grew aware that I existed. There was evidence proving it: the pronouns, the penis, the Ninja Turtle pajamas, the pictures of hours-old me wrapped in a blue blanket with my eyes closed to the world. When they opened and I began learning the world, my desire to step across the chasm that separated me from the girls—the ones who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes labeled Kawehi, Darlene, and Sasha—rose inside of me. The stature of this faint desire, whose origins I can’t pinpoint to a pivotal aha! moment, grew taller and bolder despite the cues, rebuttals, and certainties of those around me, who told me through a slightly furrowed brow or a shake of the head that even attempting to cross that void was wrong.

  When I look back at my childhood, I often say I always knew I was a girl since the age of three or four, a time when I began cataloging memories. No one—not my mother, my grandmother, my father, or my siblings—gave me any reason to believe I was anything other than my parents’ firstborn son, my father’s namesake. But it was my very first conviction, the first thing I grew certain of as a young person. When I say I always knew I was a girl with such certainty, I erase all the nuances, the work, the process of self-discovery. I’ve adapted to saying I always knew I was a girl as a defense against the louder world, which has told me—ever since I left Mom’s body in that pink hospital atop a hill in Honolulu—that my girlhood was imaginary, something made up that needed to be fixed. I wielded this ever-knowing, all-encompassing certainty to protect my identity. I’ve since sacrificed it in an effort to stand firmly in the murkiness of my shifting self-truths.

  I grew to be certain about who I was, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I was learning the world, unsure, unstable, wobbly, living somewhere between confusion, discovery, and conviction. The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it.

  The first person I ever valued outside of my family was Marilyn, whom I met in kindergarten. She lived in the same two-story building as Grandma Pearl, in Ka’ahumanu Housing, the public subsidized complex in Kalihi that was the setting of all my early memories in Oahu. Marilyn had a stick-straight bowl haircut and a wide gap between her front two teeth that didn’t prevent her from smiling. She was the first person with whom I had things in common: We were the same kind of brown—like whole wheat bread—because we both came from brown people (I was Hawaiian and black, while Marilyn was Hawaiian and Filipino); we both lived with our maternal grandmothers; and we both loved playing jacks, hopscotch,
and tag. We were always barefoot, the khaki-colored bottoms of our wide, flat feet turned black from the earth. When we wore ourselves out, we’d rinse our feet with the hose in her grandmother’s front yard and rest on the ground under the clothesline, the moist grass pressed into our backs. The wind blew around us, making the floral dresses that hung above us dance, swaying like hula dancers. Humidity was in the air, and so was fragrance: Tide detergent and gardenias and lunchtime rice. The sun’s rays filtered through the clothes and touched our skin in shifting patterns. Marilyn looked unblinkingly at the sun, glowing and dark, like a shiny copper penny I’d pick up on my way to school.

  “Truth or dare,” Marilyn said as I lifted my back from the grass. I see myself in my favorite McDonald’s T-shirt, the light-blue one I wore in my first-grade school photo.

  “Dare!” I said over Grandma’s birds of paradise that peeked over her bushel of tea leaves.

  “Okay, you see dat dress ova dea?” Marilyn boasted in her Hawaiian pidgin, pointing at a pink muumuu with a mustard and white hibiscus pattern that hung on her grandmother’s clothesline. I nodded. “I dare you for put dat on,” she said.

  “Ho, that’s so easy!” I said, standing up, reaching for the dress.

  “No, I not done!” Marilyn scolded. “You gotta put it on, den run across the park, all a way to da rubbish cans and back.”

  The dress flowed forward in the wind toward my destination. I half contemplated the trouble I could get into for dirtying a clean dress, but chickening out on a dare was not an option. Truth or dare was more than a game; it was our way as kids to learn intimacy and trust. I trusted that Marilyn wouldn’t ask me to do anything drastic, and she trusted that I wouldn’t tell any of her truths, like the time she’d told me she had a crush on Keoni, the husky boy who smelled like Uncle Toma’s dirty socks.