Let Me Weep as a Human

A Memoir of a Body That Was Never Good Enough

I have a special attachment to the themes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” but the Creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has always been my favorite classic horror monster.

As a pre-teen in the early 90s, I never understood why. While other kids were fascinated by Dracula, vampires, and werewolves, I found them only academically interesting. I enjoyed the lore, but I was never drawn to them. I couldn't look at those characters and think, “That could be me.”

But the Creature… that was me.

As the youngest of five siblings, growing up on a farm outside a stereotypically tiny, rural, red-state town, I was both the “happy accident” and the “last chance.” I was to be the culmination of my parents' accumulated growth, and that of the entire village that raised the children before me. The unspoken mandate was: “Do better with this one than you did with the last.” This was their metric for healing, the weight by which their souls would be judged.

Photo by Sava Savov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/child-sitting-on-the-floor-and-looking-up-15523152/

I was supposed to be a composite of my siblings' best traits:

I was to be as steadfast and willful as my oldest brother—the one who joined the Air Force, the only sibling to serve his country like our father and grandfathers before him. A diagnosed narcissist, he was smaller than me and suffered from severe allergies, yet his will was the standard.

I was to be as physically capable as my next oldest brother, who somehow got all the ‘Running Man’ genes. He was used as a “work mule” (my sister’s words) throughout his adolescence, a role that likely contributed to the oldest brother's narcissism. Can you imagine watching your “little brother” outwork you in every metric that mattered to your family and society?

I was to be as emotionally resilient as my sister, who was thrust into the role of caretaker her entire life. She was my first babysitter at nine years old; to me, she may as well have been twenty-nine. I look back now with a rage I feel guilty for never seeing her express it.

I was to be as intellectually and financially independent as my youngest older brother, who learned to survive in the void between affection and abuse through silence and self-reliance. “The modest one.” “The humble one.” “The successful one.” The family hero by default, because being forgotten in an extractive hierarchy can be the most merciful form of abuse.

But I was supposed to be better than all of them.

The insufficiency of my physical stature for these ends quickly turned from an internalized insecurity into peer-reviewed, proven fact. Year after year—in elementary, junior high, and high school sports—my body was declared not good enough. Inferior. Useless, or at best, expendable filler. By twelve or thirteen, I began experiencing my body as a “meat sack” for my consciousness, two decades before I would ever hear the term and feel it leak from my eyes as if the coiner had been watching my life on a screen.

I am now, largely through deconstruction and decolonization work, trying to learn how not to experience my body as a prison. To not feel its limitations as moral failures. I am not there yet. Sometimes I fear I never can be. Sometimes I fear that all I am are the works my hands leave behind, because my soul never had anything to bequeath the world but violence and grief.

I have always seen myself as a construct of my environment—a part of it, and apart from it, simultaneously. I am as much the deer as the arrow that pierces its flesh. But if I am forced to choose a side, if the choice is between weeping with humanity and cheering with the oppressors, I beg you: let me weep. Please, let me weep as a human, if only this once.