Where Differences Meet

A personal essay by Shae McCombs

Why do differences frustrate us, like a screech on a chalkboard? The chalk is not wrong and neither is the chalkboard.

You save yourself for the people that you know and trust. You lay out clues when you meet someone, cautiously, like little breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, hoping that someone will follow you into friend-ship.  how it is for me, anyway. I’ve felt that way since I was a baby girl. I don’t play my music in the car with strangers. I swallow my jokes when I meet someone. I let my fake self go out to play just in case something bad happens. But when I play music for someone new, a connection begins. 

 

I should have recognized the signs of loneliness that come from feeling different in my brother, because I knew it myself. Bredyn is a gentle bear. He claws at friends too hard and they scatter, scared. He hugs me too hard and I get annoyed. Act like I don’t care. He’s too big, he can be too much. His silences are too long. He isn’t self-aware. He’s tough but he’s soft. He’s too chipper to keep a chip on his shoulder. I tell him to stop singing, he tries again. I pray each night I won’t think he’s annoying. I shrink when I think it, but he is what I don’t want to be. 


He cried in my mom’s study. I heard him after the shower water squeaked off  and I thought I was alone in the night. His tears shook my shower from the next room over, my shower, my soul space, my sanctuary, . Gloomy, my mom comforted him with one long hug so palpable, my arm hairs crossed. He dropped words in between his tears. They fell on my ears and stubbed my toes. He said I didn’t like him, I didn’t want him, I didn’t love him. Mom said I do like him. I do love him. He said I was mean. She said I wasn’t trying to be. I said nothing. 


I stood dripping outside the bathroom, outside the study. An outsider invading privacy, privately invading. Listening. Soaking wet. Soaking in. I cried too. Only a wooden door separated our sadness. My gut punched. I was Sherlock discovering I was the culprit, me. I had never felt cruel until that moment. I had never felt so helpless. I had never realized he felt the same differentness I did. 


I think now of a poem I loved by Kaylin Haught. I was old enough to love poems and dislike myself. I was too old to be mean to my brother. 


I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to   


There is so much relief in that poem. The whole thing is one big sigh, one big sink into a comfy chair. Bredyn wanted someone to tell him he was ok, I think. That it didn’t matter if he wore a fedora every day or didn’t. He wanted to know his pauses were fine, his singing was good, that he was kind. There is relief in knowing you can do exactly what you want to do and be ok. My mom told him. God told him. But when differences slide down your back every day, you need more than that. 


He needed his sister to show that she loved him even when it was hard for her to like him. And that should-have-been-obvious truth came in the sound of a heartbreak, maybe almost too late. 

Now I send Bredyn texts. I quote The Muppet Treasure Island. I hug him and tell him his homemade dumplings taste delicious. Now, differences between us stick out like a thumbs up instead of a sore thumb.


I have felt shy my entire life, a side effect of fearing difference. In middle school, the world of huge Smackers chapsticks and smelly markers, I didn’t like recess. The running was too fast, too unpredictable, and frankly, I was too slow. I worried about getting black eyes when I saw a baseball on the ground with no trajectory. I worried about missing the moment of laughter with soft whispers. So instead of pounding on the asphaltwith a mob of kids behind me, I gently tugged my teacher’s Kahki pant, raised Romeo & Juliet and asked if I could bring that book outside. 

Sometimes I read, sometimes I would pretend to read, but whichever one, I now know the world is brimming with girls and boys like that. We are the same in our difference, and once I fell into the lap of  that truth, I slowly shared pieces of me that felt so painfully different, in hopes someone else wore the same kind. 

Freckles. My mom’s dread of difference started with freckles, according to her. 

Old pictures don’t tell the stories she tells us. She has a sculpted face, a willowy body, and a warming smile. The only difference between her and the bruised memories she keeps under her pillow are the people around her, I think. The moment she eavesdropped on a sad boy who said she was unlovable. Moments like that. My mom bought conversation books when she was 12 years old to learn how to socialize because she felt her words fell flat like dull soda when she was that young.

 I can only imagine the look of bewilderment in the eyes of the shop owner as she plopped her books on the desk, and her look of determination. That story is an answer to me when I tell her friends seem to lose interest in my conversation, or I can’t quite get past small talk on first dates, even though I’m bored too and I’d rather talk about things that matter. 


Now my mom is bold and braveness breathes with her when she is strong. She will notice her differences with a keen eye and then immediately follow it with an assurance to herself and to me.


She told me in the dark once, her biggest fear was to pass on her insecure differences onto us, but in a way, I think it’s beautiful that her kids fell in the same jello mold, not of the same differences but the same insecurities because I don’t know that she felt understood until we waddled into grown, imperfect beings. 


If my mom felt more confident, would the differences melt away like chocolate in her mind? I don’t know. I feel acquainted with differences, and the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes a confident awkwardness is not enough to make everyone feel truthfully comfortable around you. But it does make the right people feel comfortable around me.

Now my mom won’t show her face on zoom, but she will pick certain pictures and cradle them with her words and say, I look good, don’t I. And I swear, even the fruit bowl next to her smiles to hear that. 

Not all differences are passed down in a family like scuffed overalls. Babies are born with a personality and differences to grow into. My siblings are no different. 

 Chewing, talking, unwrapping wrappers, cracking gum, cracking knuckles, cracking jokes, bothered. Thayne. He has the kind of OCD and anxiety where noises scratch him with an abrasiveness we don’t all hear. Sitting at the same seat of the table was important. Routine was important. 

Sometimes Thayne found a friend with companion differences, like two apples with the same reddish hue. Sometimes he didn’t. When I asked my mom why Thayne was so smart, in a renovated bathroom, my mom would stop scraping off-yellowish wallpaper, bend down in her overalls and tell me he was special. Which I learned was the word for the good kind of different. 

Winnie the Pooh says it best in A. A. Milne's book, as he's sorting through what it means to be brave about yourself and let people in. 

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, 

and you Think of Things, you find sometimes 

that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you 

is quite different when it gets out into the open 

and has other people looking at it.

Anxiety can start young. Thayne would meltdown in class and cry with tears so pure. He was so smart in so many areas but OCD would block the path of some new discovery like a big bully. So he started medicine young to fight his fits, and my mom thinks it made him quite. He wasn’t silent because words were slow, but because every thought was swirling in his head. Questions were asked and answered all in his brain. He told me that once. 


I’m not sure when he discovered he was “different.” I imagine it could be when he moved to Kentucky and never quite settled into a group. A group that didn’t hear silence in the same way. When he’s around people that feel safe and free, he has the brightest laugh, so loud and fulfilling. Whenever he shares facts about dinosaurs or health insurance or medieval wars that most people don’t know, we either smile or we don’t. I smile.


We all thought he wouldn’t get married for so long. He carried the differences that make marriage hard, we all thought. There’s nothing wrong with being alone, we all thought. He was used to being alone, we all thought. He didn’t like to touch. Touch was too intimate, or the texture was too strong, or some reason I’m not even sure he knows. 


But then the most extraordinary thing happened. Like a fairy-tale no one has ever quite captured, my brother found someone to be his own different with. He’d take my family to watch the stars together and they’d harmonize with their astronomy jargon. She brought out his thoughts and she loved him with them. 


It’s like that child poem by Shel Silverstein, 


She had blue skin. 

And so did he.

She kept it hid.

And so did he. 

They searched for blue

Their whole life through

Then passed right by--

And never knew. 


We take off our masks and hear the scurrying whispers that we’re different, all pointing us in the direction of where we belong. Shel also implies that the masks we make to cover our faces can’t compare to the intricate weavings, signals and adornments of our faces. A mask can’t show the breadth of emotion a face can. A mask can’t really fall in love. 

Tess, Thayne’s wife, partner, friend, companion, told me the most beautiful thing once. All simple and

annoyed like it wasn’t profound. 

She said, in the chipped booths of  Cafe Rio, with crossed brows, that she didn’t understand why her friends or roommates would spend hours in the morning hair-styling, make-uping, or outfitting to look the same amount of beautiful as when they woke up. 

She said that wearing sweats too big for her, and a sweater too formal. My mouth yo-yo’d a little bit because every minute I spent trying to squeeze into the mold of whatever normal seemed essential to me and unnecessary to her. She said the words not condescending or rude, but honest. 

I’m so hopeful for the star-shaped tupperware people who find each other, who find my family, who find me, and everyone else 


Difference is a legacy when my mom passes it on to her kids. Difference is an accomplishment when my brother found his match, collecting differences with him. Difference is hard when I feel alone. Difference is normal when I get to know someone well enough. 


The feeling of difference is scarier than any gap between us. Gaps can be filled. Working through the feeling of difference, with hearts as adept as fingers is tricky, but necessary. 


Our differences can cause frustration and annoyance and cold thoughts that freeze out kindness. But I’m more interested in the differences that bind us. If differences are cats, volatile and independent, then I am happy to set out a milk bowl for them to share, and wait for them to become friends. Bredyn and I are so different, the kind of different that’s hard and hurts, but we’re also the different that works. 

Image Credit: “Free child walking” by Pixabay is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0. 
Image Credit: "White girl model" by PXhere is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.