Ink stains

All children are born free from expectation. From the moment you are born until about six, you aren’t expected to be anything but a kid. Your environment is always influencing you though. When the first family members come to see their niece or their grandchild or anything else, they often bring colours with them. Pink and blue. From that moment there is ink on your skin, some of it leaking onto you when you touch it for the first time with exploratory and fumbling fingers. That ink is blue or pink. No shading. Just one colour. That stain turns into a line that extends from the tip of your finger to your centre. Some of us never notice the line. Its just a part of our skin, a piece of us. For others, it feels uncomfortable. As they grow, they realise the colour of their soul isn’t the same as the stark one on their finger and up their arm. Some people spend their whole lives trying desperately to scrub it off. But that ink stains. And for most of us it takes, years and years, to wash it away. If it ever does. If we ever choose to. But most of us don’t know how to remove stains. My mother never taught me, nor did my father or anyone else. I had to learn myself. I learned by watching. By observing other people abandon and embrace those ink stains. Some people painted over them. Beautiful patterns of every shade under the sun. Some people painted more colours beside them, displays of rainbow stripes and colourful swirls. Some found it easy to wipe away. Others were cleaned by observant parents every time a little too much ink splashed on them, willing to let them marvel at the colours and decide for themselves which they preferred. But most parents are also stained, and by their age, it has seeped through their skin and into them, into their minds, a thin coating of ink over their eyes. Until everything is either pink of blue. And little can be done to change that. Not that it can never be changed, just that it requires time, lots and lots of time and effort. The eyes and mind are delicate after all, removing anything from either is never easy. Changing the way someone sees and thinks, is equally as hard.

When I was young, I didn’t want people to see the line up my arm and think my whole body was painted over with pink. I didn’t want to come off as a ‘girly-girl’. I despised the idea of representing what I believed to be femininity, what I was taught femininity was. I was trained to think, through an ignorance of deeply ingrained ideas that were consistently reinforced by social conditioning, that being a girl was bad. Somehow. That you had to be a certain way. But more so as a child, that we were a certain way. And there was little that could be done about it. It was inevitable that we were fragile, delicate, slightly dumb, and unbelievably vain. We were destined to be a certain way, because it was a part of our design as females. I hated this idea. And I grew to reject it, almost as soon as I could comprehend it. Even before I knew what I was avoiding, I was trying to escape it, that image that represented girlhood. I hated the pink line that started just underneath my bitten down fingernails; because having long nails was a sign of weakness, a symbol of vanity. As was makeup and playing with your hair or liking fashion and jewelry. Such beautiful displays of expression, that I despised. Because I wanted to be more than a girl. I wanted to be human. I wanted to be taken seriously, even at a young age. I didn’t want to be teased for being obsessed with my own image; at eight years old I was taught not to love myself. I didn’t want to be gentle, because I wasn’t gentle, and I needed people to know that. So, I spent a long time trying to scrub away that pink line, not wanting it to be blue. Just not pink. Maybe red, or purple, or green, or just anything else.

It took me a long eighteen years to finally realise that pink was not a weakness. And it was not the only colour made for me. I was allowed to like things meticulously. I was allowed to love myself. I was allowed to be a female, and not be considered less than.

I have seen strangers painted in colours I didn’t even know existed until I saw them on their skin. And I have met people whose colours are always altering. Pink, and then blue, and then something in between. I see the world changing. Slowly, and only small parts of it. But changing none the less. As I have changed. We are not born pink or blue. We are taught to be either. We are not born hating who we are, we are only taught not to accept ourselves. We are painted over and told it is our original form, our original colour, as though we are not stained at birth, and each moment after. A blank canvas smothered before we even know what we want to make of it. I have decided I am still not sure what to make of my own canvas. And I won’t claim to know who I am. Because I don’t think there is an answer to such a question. I have always thought that we just exist. And that we are always changing. There is no end state to reach. So long as you are who you want to be, than you are who you are meant to be.

I have changed. I have transformed. I have been in a continual state of evolution, sometimes becoming something that I couldn’t recognise, sometimes becoming something that I didn’t want to be. Drifting through uncomfortable states, until I finally found a comfortable form. I believe I am in that form; for now at least. There is still a pink ink stain up my arm. But now it blends with blue. Now my skin is adorned with a melody of colours, differing shades morphing into something that isn’t entirely either or. My skin is painted over in a colour I can’t put a name to. But it suits me well. And I have finally finished scrubbing.