I hate the Serenity Prayer. Not because of the content of the text, but its misinterpretations and use by organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous/Al-Anon make me flinch whenever I come across it. It was used on my mother’s funeral announcements. She went to al-anon. Sometimes I had to go along because she couldn’t leave me at home (for the same reason she was going to al-anon). All to say I don’t have a fond connection to the saying.
I don’t know if my mother lacked the wisdom part or the courage part, but there were things she needed to change that never changed. And she wasn’t exactly serene. Though, with the “God grant me” part, maybe we can push the blame off onto a deity. Maybe it was God’s fault my mother stayed with my abusive father and thus subjecting me to 20 years of trauma.
However, minus the god part, the sentiment of the Serenity Prayer is sound. And there’s plenty of similar quotes out there if you’re also offput by the god stuff. See also: “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need” or “If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”. There’s options. It boils down to: hey, go make yourself a life with what you have.
Which is what I’ve been trying to do. Though, not entirely successfully. I have a rationing problem. Usually it comes out in things like being afraid to wear my clothes I like because I can’t replace them. That’s poverty trauma. But now it feels like I’ve been rationing my entire self. Or hoarding myself to myself like an asshole with a shopping cart full of toilet paper during a plague.
Without recounting the circumstances that landed me in France, you should know that I never liked France. I never disliked France, I just had absolutely no interest in the culture, food, or language. I am wholly uninterested in the French, no matter how hard I try. I moved here out of need, and assumed that all the places I did want to go would be just a train ride away. I was going to travel. I was going to go in search of friends, of a family, of a life. I was going to find adventure in the great wide somewhere outside of this tiny French village (though unlike Belle, I actually like living in a tiny village). And while I still have the option of stumbling onto an enchanted castle with a big Furry with a capital F who might kidnap me, I am for the foreseeable future confined inside the French borders. And even then, you won’t catch me anywhere close to people until the plague subsides.
I’m not a patient person, but I felt like I was doing a really good job of waiting for chance to live in the world again after everything that’s happened to me. Probably many of us have perfected our ability to wait for things in plague times. I’ve been waiting to go to other countries. Waiting for my friends to be able to visit. Waiting for a chance to safely go to school in person. Waiting to write about the world. But a year and a half later, I can’t just sit here and wait on the world anymore. Plans must be re-written or discarded all together. There is currently no longer a world available to me. There is only France.
And so I need to find a way to live here and not box myself up like a precious gift that can only be opened on a very special occasion. There are no holes in this box and I’ll be dead if I stay in here.
