That Time I Peeked Into My Hero’s Journal

 

Whenever I walk into that apartment, I’m flooded with an acute mixture of intimidation, admiration, and comfort.

The walls are a deep red and adorned with as much Biggie street art as they are with master’s degrees. At the window, the gauzy cream curtains billow calmly in the breeze, giving way to glimpses of busy Brooklyn below. My cousin, chief interior decorator and owner of the apartment, has a way of creating balance like that.

She is everything I’ve always wanted to be, the type of woman to propose that we get law degrees together “just for the hell of it.” When my siblings and I were younger, she was one of few people who my father would allow to kidnap us overnight during our stays in Brooklyn. I studied her. I learned how to be cool and smart, and to keep a quip on the tip of my tongue. I learned to demand the gravy I paid for, even if the Jamaican spot is three blocks back. When we breezed down Atlantic Avenue belting out Keyshia Cole and Mariah Carey, I learned that heartache was like a tattoo; painful but eternally interesting and essential to the building of character. When her baby son died, I learned that bad things still happened to the most persevering people. 

Aside from our 15 year age difference, the thing that set her apart from me, and gave her a greatness so unattainable, was the gauntlet she’d run before she was 30. Where she grew up in the projects, lost her mother to a bullet, lost her grandmother to cancer, and became a young single mother to three boys, one of whom she’d lost as an infant, I was given everything. I had two parents in a stable home near a county that fluctuated between the richest and second richest in the United States. I had financial support, a safe socioeconomic status, and access to resources abounding.

She always prevailed, taking from this life what was rightfully hers: multiple degrees, her new title of school principal, and plans to build another school which she will oversee. She is dedicated to her sons, to her students, to her community, and to honoring and preserving the pre-gentrified essence of Bed-Stuy.

Still, she makes it a point to give me accolades at the corner of each of my privileged accomplishments and clings to my words when I detail my dreams. I’m waiting for her to say enough is enough. When we talk, I sit tensely, anticipating the day when she bursts at her hand-sewn seams and screams that I’ve been given everything and have no excuse not to have my life together.

Standing in her red living room a few weeks ago, I began to peruse the book titles, a habit I’ve kept since she started allowing her smaller cousins into her space. And that’s when I saw it.

The journal was tucked  away on a bookshelf behind a propped up educator’s magazine with her face on the cover. It only housed two entries from 2013. The first was what you might expect when peeking into the thoughts of someone you admire: a list detailing what great leaders do. The second, though, was an entry about her insecurity, something I had trouble believing even existed. She felt like she did nothing right, she said. She wished she could start over.

I was blown away. I wanted to scribble through the next few pages and tell her how much I admired her, how much I wished I could be half the woman she was. I wanted to tell her that if her path weren’t so jagged, then I would have never believed that absolutely anything is possible. I wanted to dare to hug her and tell her how amazing and inspiring she was, mistakes included.

With that entry she taught me another lesson: our heroes are human. They have doubts and fears. Sometimes they can’t see the path they pioneered but for the mistakes they’ve made.

In seeing my cousin in the light of a mortal, I learned the value of heroic hardship. Plucking the petals of a hero’s vulnerability reveals the seed for the next hero to grow. I often feel incompetent, like I want to do things over and do them right. And knowing that those before me have felt the same way gives me the courage to stay the imperfect course, to get excited when the going gets tough.

I’m sure my cousin will know exactly who she is when she reads this, and I hope she’ll forgive me for prying into her privacy. But when you get a chance to peek into your hero’s journal, my philosophy is that you take it.