Thigh High, Bright Red, Sparkly Boots

When I was a little kid, I had my mom paint my toe nails. Now, it was the summer, and we went swimming a lot. I stepped into the pool with my friends and they made fun of me. I have that memory iced into my brain. I remember looking down through the shallow water and feeling ashamed of my rainbow-colored toe nails.

My mom and I laugh about that story a bunch as I’ve grown up. And today, it came rushing back to me. Over the last few months, my mother and I have been lucky enough to see a bunch of Broadway plays and shows. Today, we saw Kinky Boots.

Wayne Brady was awesome. But that was not the only part of the show that was amazing. Cindi Lauper did the music and Harvey Feinstein wrote the story.

Spoilers ahead for sure.

Anyway, the story follows a young man who just lost his father, leaving him with the family shoe business. Except, the shoe businesses in the area were not doing well, especially his. To turn around the business, the young man, Charlie, stopped producing leather “man shoes” and started producing bright red, knee-high, kinky boots.

With the help of colorfully dressed Wayne Brady, Charlie and his band of factory workers turn the tide of foreclosure around. In the process, he dumps his fiancé, finds a new girlfriend and rocks a pair of knee-high red boots.

At the intermission, I wasn’t so sure about buying a T-Shirt. But as soon as I heard the spectacular final number, I rushed out to buy one.

I haven’t given much thought to gender until recently. But I think it is similar to how I think about mental health. Just because I am labeled as bipolar, doesn’t mean everyone else is completely sane. We all exist on some type of a spectrum. Placing divisive boundaries around each other is one of the most dangerous things we can do.

The six steps above are awfully similar to what I believe in with empowering myself to overcome the negative parts of my bipolar disorder. I channel that anger and discontent into finding a meaningful place for myself in the world.

I believe I am extremely lucky to be on this earth. I believe I am extremely lucky to have not killed myself at some point along the way. Many people with bipolar disorder kill themselves, but for some reason I didn’t. There are a few ways to explain that. One is that I am some superhuman kid who had enough will power to outlast my suicidal ideations. The other is that I have an incredible support network that carried me through my worst moments.

One holds me accountable for a lot. The other rests me gently in the hands of the people around me. Kinky Boots showed that self-acceptance and love is the way we can change the world. Call me naive and young. The greatest challenge I will have in my life is to hold those values through all of the shit life will throw at me. And life has already thrown a bunch of shit at me. The hardest part is getting up and seeing the world through new, laughing eyes.

I wrote a bunch of poems on the way home from the city. They were inspired by Kinky Boots and Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness. I wrote about my decision to be clean of alcohol and drugs. I wrote about the limited time we have left on this planet. I wrote about what makes my life worth it. I wrote about why I am alive today. Here is one of the first drafts.

Your First Adventure

Our love is great, wide, beautiful and dark.
Like little memories on pinpricks of thoughts,
fingertips on wet cheeks, tears collected on shirt
buttons trying to hold together cloth, it always seems
to fall apart, unless, there is something greater
that we can’t quite comprehend, existing in spaces in between,
fed by heart emojis and phone calls that last
way past bed time. Think last looks, goodbyes that
don’t end because goodbye really isn’t forever, only
until the next time we see each other, which might be tomorrow
or the sound of the tree that rattled against your window
on that night, i’m still here, don’t forget.
Because, it’s there in funny faces and laughter
that echoes in heads over and over and over, like a ferris wheel
that never stops going. Picture sitting at the top,
never coming down. We are forever, it just might not be
in the concrete you pace beneath your feet, or the paycheck
you receive at the end of every second week.
Think hugs before subway turnstiles, first loves and
breathing life out of your pores. In and out, flowy air,
I challenge raw therapies. You are never alone,
only isolated to fanciful boxes.

Live outside tiny rooms in your head,
life starts at the end of the train tracks.

Rip out yonder.

There is more out there than what we do on a daily basis. In school, I was never a “Creative Writer”. But now, the thought of getting paid to write something is the best drug I could find on this planet. Death, cancer and mental illness squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste. I am left splattered on thousands of blank pages and this WordPress site.

Just as in Kinky Boots, Charlie has to find self acceptance and love to keep his father’s business going, I have had to stretch to the edge of my psyche to keep myself going.

There are parts of myself that have been aching to escape for years and years. In the last few months, those parts have found homes in poems, short stories, essays and blog posts.

I like to write because it is a way for me to connect with the outside world. It is a way to help balance my inner struggles with the external world. I am constantly walking a line between delving into the insane parts of myself and becoming a recluse and engaging with my friends and family in a healthy manner.

My head is wild and deep and if I go too far in I think I might never come back. I am grounded in the people who care about me, and of course, my dog, Snoopy. Little white dogs and Justin Bieber are my saviors.

So the next time you think you are completely crushed, or that your parents, teachers, or whoever else out there has some problem with you, think deeper. There is always a way out. You might just have to stretch all the way out to the edge of your brain. It is elastic and never ending.

I once preached about the Navy Seal 40 percent rule, which states in the words of Jesse Itzler,

“He would say that when your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40 percent done. And he had a motto: If it doesn’t suck we don’t do it. And that was his way of forcing us to get uncomfortable to figure out what our baseline was and what our comfort level was and just turning it upside-down.”

Autopilot is comforting, but it will never last. It is truly possible to do anything. It is possible to be anything. And it is possible to be anyone. 40 percent is garbage, I truly believe willpower to be infinite (as long as you have some good people doing it with you).