Love Letters LOVE LETTERS
I’ve been told (usually as a precursor to a pending breakup) that I am “a lot.” I feel big, I talk loud, and I have strongly held opinions on plenty of entirely inconsequential things (Do you think the kind of glassware a bar serves your drink in doesn’t matter? Well, you’re wrong. Please allow me to share this PowerPoint presentation I’ve prepared on the subject). Lizzo’s lyrics “All my feelings Gucci (it’s Gucci)” from her song “Exactly How I Feel” are tattooed down the side of my left arm, which is to say that I—quite literally—wear my feelings on my sleeve. Maybe it’s a lot, but this is just who I am, and as far as I’m concerned: This is who I’ve always been. I’m gonna show up. I’m gonna tell you how I feel. I’m gonna keep being here until you reject me, and then I’m probably gonna write about it on Facebook, tell about it in a story, or publish it in an essay so the whole world will know how I’m feeling.

My mom has always told me that I was such a good baby, one she describes as easygoing, easy to put to bed. I never cried too much unless I was hungry, and—before being potty-trained—I was known to silently find a corner in a room or crawl underneath a nearby table, turn my back to the rest of the world, and poop my diaper in private. It isn’t lost on me that my mom’s definition of a “good baby” is just to say that I was quiet and either didn’t have a lot of needs or didn’t express them much. But I mean… I can’t say I agree with the interpretation that “good” means “doesn’t speak up for herself.” Still, all things considered, I was a generally happy baby who met most developmental milestones as were to be expected. Except—I didn’t start talking until I was three. My parents weren’t worried about it. She’ll talk when she’s ready, they said.

I think a lot about what parts of my identity exist because someone has told me that this is what I’m like; versus me believing from the inside that this is who I am. Like can you remember the first time you heard a recording of your own voice? I thought I sounded like one of the Chipmunks, but everyone else insisted that my voice sounded perfectly normal, just like how I always sound. So which reality is real? Or maybe both are true. Maybe I—at the same time—am an “a lot” woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, who shows up, tells her story publicly, and seeks connection to others; and I am also that little girl who was easygoing, slow to speak, and seeking to experience her most personal moments in private.

My big sister, Veronica, was a thumb-sucker, and our parents spent hours worrying about her teeth bucking forward and anxious that her bad habit would rub off on me via observation. At that age, Veronica and I had a typical big sister/little sister relationship: I constantly wanted to be around her, and she generally regarded me as a nuisance—a shadow, a pest who was always trying to get into her business. Our parents were right to worry that I might take up sucking my thumb, because for me, Veronica was everything, and anything she was doing was something I wanted to do too. Veronica loved playing with Barbies, so I liked playing with Barbies. Veronica’s favorite color was green, so I covered every page of my coloring books with scribbles of green crayon. Veronica loved her Blankie, so I, too, wanted to be near Blankie—consequences be damned.

Just before I started speaking, I had my first and only bone break. It happened because I was standing on Veronica’s baby blanket. Outraged that I would disrespect Blankie in this way, Veronica—two years my senior, so about four or five at the time—yanked Blankie out from underneath me and I fell, the weight of my toddler body crashing onto my chubby little right arm, breaking the bones within. I’m sure I cried, waited for my mom to come and pick me up, and then perhaps felt a tinge of shame for getting Veronica a scolding. Even if it was her fault, I never wanted to get anyone else in trouble, least of all my big sister.

It would be days before my mom—a pediatrician(!)—would notice my arm was broken. You see, back home in Ghana, kids were trained to do things with their right hand, as the left hand was considered dirty and reserved for wiping one’s butt after pooping. Both Mom and Uncle Ato have almost identical handwriting, possibly because they were both hit with the same rulers over their knuckles for writing left-handed in school. A few days after Veronica pulled Blankie out from underneath me, Mom noticed I was feeding myself with my left hand. Hmm… she said to herself, I thought that kid was right-handed.

I imagine a slow-motion vignette of the last few days began to play in her mind. The montage ends with her walking into a room and seeing me lying on the ground, body weight over my right arm, crying, while Veronica sits happily, thumb and a tuft of Blankie stuffed into her mouth.

Like many stories of my childhood, this one has become something of a family lore. When my mom tells this story now, she recounts it with a smile, an almost twinkle in her eye as she laughs at the missteps of her younger self. Veronica tells it as a moment when she was mean to someone she loves—it’s become a story she uses for teaching lessons to her kids and children’s therapy clients. I tell it as a testament to how much I love my big sis. The story of me, Veronica, and Blankie has been told and retold so many times that it almost feels like a memory for me, but I am perhaps the only person involved in the story who does not have any actual memory of it happening.

The year would have been about 1985, back before we lived with a camera in our hands or back pockets at all times, ready to capture and semi-publicly archive every seemingly meaningful moment of our lives. No one was there to document that my arm breaking happened the way we all say it did. No one snapped a photo of my snapping limb, in fact: I can’t recall ever even seeing an image of myself with a cast on my arm. I know it happened because my family tells me it did—and I believe them.

I believe that I didn’t start talking until I was three. I believe that my arm was broken. And I believe that I was an easy baby, despite the fact that “easygoing” is not an adjective I would ever pick to describe what I know of the woman I have become. Because that’s the thing about identity: So much of it is nothing more than what others see in you. Your voice is normal, not a Chipmunk’s voice, this is how you sound, who you are, who you’ve always been.

In the end, Veronica’s thumb-sucking likely did contribute to her eventually needing braces, but I never sucked my thumb. I sucked my tongue instead. It was a quiet activity, one that didn’t sound any orthodontist bill alarm bells, and it’s something I continue to do to this day—often when I am trying to keep myself from saying what I really feel.

First you’re laughing… then you’re cryingggg, Veronica used to croon in a song she wrote about me. I was just your average second child—and a quick scroll through Google will tell you that we are rebellious peacemakers. Loners who want relationship. Troublemakers who want to please others. I want to be around you. I want you to want me to be there. But ultimately, I want it when and how I want it—on my own terms.

Veronica and I would create what felt like elaborate Barbie homes, cars, and entire neighborhoods that were—in reality—little more than a desk, a chair, and a couple of open-top shoeboxes. We furnished the homes with rolled-up washcloths stacked on discarded bracelet boxes for beds, pieces of cardboard wrapped with tinfoil for mirrors, and little white “tables” repurposed from Pizza Hut delivery boxes. Sometimes we played nice, and other times we would topple over each other’s Barbie homes, rip up the other’s shoebox car, or the ultimate offense: Give the other’s Barbie a haircut (that never worked out well). But then we would talk it out, make up, and rebuild—together. Veronica was my first friend.

By the time I entered kindergarten, I was ready to make more friends. Veronica and our little sister, Affi, had taught me how to play nice with other kids, and I didn’t have too hard of a time transferring those skills over to interactions in the schoolyard. But the butterflies that fluttered in my belly the first time I saw a kid named Justin—well, those took me by surprise.

Justin was my first crush. He was cute, short, and clear-skinned with brown hair. I mean, I suppose we were all clear-skinned and short back then—it was kindergarten, after all. What I liked most about Justin was that he would wear this one sweater: it was light brown and had green, red, blue, and maybe a few yellow brick-like block shapes woven into it. He was just so dang handsome in that sweater! And he was so nice!… Or, at least, his sweater was nice. Actually, now that I think about it, I remember very little about Justin beyond his sandy brown hair and his cozy-lookin’ sweater. I knew about as much about Justin as future-me would know about any dude I’d eventually swipe right on, and literal marriages grow from Tinder, so suffice it to say: I knew enough to send the 1980s kindergarten version of a first message.

After a few weeks of school, I decided to write Justin a love letter. I needed to tell him how I felt. I wanted to write an ode to his sweater. A poetic waxing on the lesser-noticed nuances of his sandy brown bangs. It would be a declaration of the kind of love that grows in indoor sandboxes, reading nooks, and LEGO corners. The only trouble was I couldn’t write a love letter because I didn’t know how to read or write.

Enter: my big sis. By now Veronica was in second grade, so certainly she could do this for me. Of course when I asked she said no, as big sisters are oft to do in response to the random requests of their kid-shadows. Maybe she was mad about some recently destroyed Barbie house, or maybe I’d let it slip to one of her very mature second-grade friends that she still slept with her Blankie. But like any kid sister, I was determined to get my way. I imagine it took several days—a lifetime to a kindergartener with a crush—but eventually: Veronica wrote my love letter.

The next day would have been a crisp autumn morning early on in the school year, just a few weeks before we would dress ourselves in costume and demand candy from strangers. I can see myself walking the short distance to Westside Elementary School with Veronica, love note hot in my hand and faith warm in my chest. I would have scouted Justin out from among the gaggle of blond- and brown-haired boys in our classroom and walked right up to him. No longer quite so easygoing, I’d developed into a confident, willful child, and if photos from that time are any indication: I was likely dressed in neon colors paired with zebra print, my natural hair pulled into a puff-pony perched on the top of my head.

Justin, on the other hand, was a shy kid. In fact, my attraction to shy folks who find me (hopefully! but more likely temporarily…) charmingly disorienting is a tendency that has carried through to my adulthood.

Justin received my note, and would have responded with a look of reluctance and confusion. Because, here’s the thing: Justin was also in kindergarten. Which means that, like me, Justin also did not know how to read or write. He took the letter—my open heart spilled onto a page for the first time ever—turned around, marched right up to Mrs. Wilson, gave her the note, and turned me in. And just like that: my very first crush ended.

Theresa and the kindergarten love note is another of my family’s lores, a story I’ve heard, told, and retold as though it were an actual memory in my own mind. Whenever I tell this story now, I recount it with a smile. An almost twinkle in my eye as I laugh at the missteps of my younger self. Did it hurt? Were you sad? Did you cry?? people will ask me, and my response is invariably a shrug accompanied by a chuckled No. I was a child, it was a silly crush, and it’s just a fun story about my past. I don’t sit around wishing for the past to be different than it was, and there is no part of me left wondering—had things gone differently—if I’d have ended up married to some kid I met in kindergarten. I might have been temporarily embarrassed, but this is a good memory. A happy memory.

I think people ask me if Justin’s rejection hurt because that is what they hear in the story. But just as my recorded voice sounds different to everyone else than it does to me—“hurt” is not what I hear. For me this is a story of triumph. It was the first time I had a big feeling about a person outside of my family, and I told them exactly how I felt. I think of it as a moment of me becoming who I am. I don’t like to make the first move, but (to this day) I’m usually the one to make it because what I REALLY can’t stand is not saying how I feel. I can suck my tongue for only so long, and then I’m gonna shoot my shot.

The last time I uttered the words “I love you” to a partner, he responded with “I know,” and then changed the subject to make fun of me (again) for my insufficient Star Wars knowledge. There was a tinge of pain, but that was quickly overtaken by something that felt akin to good. Akin to happy. I think of that Star Wars moment the same way I do about my failed kindergarten love letter. The note I wrote to Justin was not about him. It wasn’t even about his sweater. It was about me. Telling someone how I feel is always more about me than it is about them.

My current Google Drive still holds the last love letter I wrote, which is to say it was sent not too long ago. It was a tale as old as kindergarten: I wanted him, and he didn’t want me back. The difference was, of course, that he had already made that clear. I had convinced myself that maybe—hopefully!—if I was able to find the perfect words to tell him exactly how I felt, he would feel differently. This time, I had told him I was going to write him a letter, and he had asked me not to. I did it anyway. I spilled my open heart onto a digital page, printed it out, and dropped it—sealed in a handwritten envelope—into the big blue box a few blocks from my home.

He never read it. Years later he moved halfway across the country (without telling me he was leaving), packed the still unopened letter into one of his moving boxes, and took it with him.

I want this to be a fun story of my past. A moment where I suffered a temporary schoolyard embarrassment, picked myself up, dusted myself off, and kept on moving. But it’s not, and admittedly the tinge of hurt lasted longer this time. And yet: Not unlike the letter to Justin, this one was—ultimately—a letter to myself. A declaration of my feelings. An opening of my heart. So in that way, it’s almost fitting that I’m the only one who has ever read it.

That isn’t to say that I am unfazed by rejection. Just like my big sister used to sing, I am laughing, until I’m crying. To an outsider looking in, I am living 100 percent out loud: being my honest and flawed self on social media and telling stories about my life in front of crowds of strangers. I am still the kid who will give you a love letter without thinking about whether or not you can read it. My heart may be permanently tatted on my sleeve, but I am still human. And so with each failed attempt to connect my heart to another, I’ve continued to grow a self-protective, external sheath of armor that has become, ever increasingly, more and more hardened. As a result, I’ve become less and less likely to genuinely believe that it’s safe to tell anyone how I feel. Justin rejecting my kindergarten love letter perhaps should have taught me that it’s safer to hold back. But the lesson never stuck—armor be damned.

It is not smart, nor safe, nor well-advised to write your feelings down on paper and give them to another person, having no assurance that they will hear you the way you intend to be heard—and yet here I am, writing this book.

Since learning how to express myself I haven’t really learned how to stop. And for many (perhaps even most?) I am still “a lot.” But this isn’t a flaw I want to fix—in fact, despite a lifetime of evidence and experience to the contrary, I don’t even see it as a flaw.

I want to be near you. I want you to want me to be there. But I am not interested in being who you want—or believe—me to be. I’d rather tell you, show you, who I am. And heads up: the going will not be easy.