Giving Thanks for Breaking the Cycle

I'm only here because of others.

(credit: Mario Tama // Getty Images)

[For those who want to listen to this on-the-go, the audio version should be up on Apple’s podcast website soon. You can also listen here.]

Today’s my 35th birthday, and I can’t quite believe I’m here.

I was born on a Sunday, 35 years ago exactly, in the maternal ward of St. Anthony’s Hospital in downtown Oklahoma City.

My mother was 18 when I was conceived and her mother was 19 when she was conceived, and her mother was 17 and so on.

My mother, who died last year, had bigger dreams for me. For all of her faults—and there are many and they are egregious—my mother wanted me to break the cycle of poverty and pain that have plagued my family for generations.

I once read somewhere that every individual is the result of thousands of years of other people’s decisions, not just in the larger scheme of world events but the marrying and fucking and birthing of seemingly countless generations to arrive at a single you.

Every person is the enduring legacy of every choice ever made by those who biologically precede us, and like it or not, deserved or not, unfair or not, we must account for those decisions in ways that can be uncomfortable and, most disturbingly, ways that are unknown to us.

The two lines that converged to form me—bent and fractured in many places, exhausted in spirit, ever mindful of their low place in the world—have tripped over several generations of drunks, deadbeats, child and spousal abusers, sex offenders, and just about every variety of sexist, racist, and otherwise-bigot one can imagine, to arrive at their joint venture, their latest iteration, in me.

Being born into such a tortuous lineage carried an implied commission that I didn’t discover—let alone understand—until early adulthood: reconciling the sins that preceded me with the understanding and necessary grace every human being, regardless of their wrongdoing, deserves.

That might strike some as overtly religious, but it’s not meant to call anyone to Jesus; it’s meant to point out that every human being and their history are complex, and the vast majority of human beings deserve the kind of nuanced understanding that complexity demands in return for a good faith effort at existence with others.

Where would I be right now if I had not been given that?

My family, despite their sins against God and the world and each other, are still only human, and recognizing that truth remains the greatest challenge of my adult life.

That, in turn, begat the second greatest challenge: carving out my own path in the world without feeling as though I owed my breath and blood to the reconciliation of their unrealized dreams and enduring nightmares.

And carve a path I did, imperfectly and tediously and miraculously.

I should not be alive right now.

That I made it out of childhood is a small miracle in itself. That I graduated from college is astonishing. That I survived long enough to finally and mercifully come out as a trans woman is yet a greater miracle.

I am very flawed and very human on my own merits, but my god, having climbed this ridiculous mountain, I can see, for hundreds of miles around, the vast collection of my family’s imperfections and grievances and ugliness, and for all the uncertainty and confusion enfleshed before me, I survived.

I am a survivor of poverty and rape and physical abuse and gender dysphoria and severe depression, a gathering of maladies that required something far more than just me to overcome them.

I survived because of others.

I survived because of public school teachers who took a dirty little kid from a trailer park being sexually and physically abused and put a book in her hands and space in her heart for dreams.

I survived because of many generations of LGBTQ people, particularly trans women of color, who all-too-painfully and all-too-slowly built and sustained a framework of liberation and pride that has saved countless lives from the abyss, mine included.

I survived because of friends whose examples of generosity and empathy and integrity wordlessly demanded my reciprocation because there’s no reason, they implicitly taught, why my family’s history should have me resigned to low expectations and a bare minimum of service to others.

I survived because of food stamps and free lunch programs and many tens of millions of people giving over their hard-earned dollars to the government so that children like me could eat and then grow up to make sure future hungry children would have something in their bellies.

I survived because people who have never met me and never knew me decided that they didn’t need to know a child, let alone give birth to that child, in order to fight for that child.

For all the shittiness and fuckery of this world, my existence is a miracle of humanity’s generosity.

My life has been largely saved by the moved spirits of people I’ll never know.

When the Founders, full of warts and wounds themselves, were hashing out the foundation of our democracy, they settled on 35 as the minimum age requirement to be president.

Interestingly, some scholars have speculated that 35 was seen as a reasonable protective barrier against the folly of youth screwing up democracy. It was seen as an age generally earned by life experience at a time when life expectancy—depending on the source—was mid-to-late 30s.

Dr. Neil York, a history professor at BYU, asserted in his paper on the presidential minimum age requirement that the Founders most likely took their cue from Plato, who writes in The Republic that Socrates felt 35 marked the completion of “preparation in formal reasoning and the lessons on making wise choices” in young people training for a life in public service.

Now, while I am never running for president, there’s something else adjacent to this that Plato notes, which may ring familiar for readers of philosophy.

These youths, as Dr. York summarizes, “would be removed from the cave, but then, as adults, they must descend back into it. They, unlike those who never left, would be expected to be able to distinguish between truth and lie, to discern what is real from what is false.”

Yeah, we should definitely acknowledge that how philosophers defined “public service” thousands of years ago is wildly different from our own ideal and that there’s certainly a lot of arrogance in believing only a certain class of people, through their specific experiences, can discern right from wrong.

But that concept of being plucked from the cave—a clear mark of privilege, even in adversity—and having an obligation to pay it forward, in whatever way we are able, resonates with me.

Regardless of their author’s intention, I see those words as a call to humility and service to others, especially in the ways that are unsexy and grinding and thankless.

The public school teachers, the nurses and doctors, the first responders, the activists of every progressive inspiration, the organizers of every hopeful motivation, all those who have decided their primary calling is in leaving the world better than when they came into it.

It’s not exactly what Socrates or Plato were saying, no doubt, but I am only here through the kindness and generosity of others — much plucking from the shadows by kind souls, in their many forms and through their many graces, is what saved me.

My obligation in this life, as it should be for all of us, is bringing light in whatever way I am able against the shadows that are present and those yet to be cast.

That is how I can give thanks to those who brought light to me, and I hope and pray that I am able and I am thankful for every day God has given me to do so.

Some of you have emailed asking if you can buy me a drink for my birthday, which I very much appreciate.

Instead, I ask that you donate to Running Start, an organization that trains and empowers young women and non-binary folks in preparation for public service. That would mean a lot to me. I’m trying to raise training scholarships for young people who once stood where I did.

And hey, if you could ask your friends to subscribe to my little blog here (it’s free and easy), I would be grateful for that, too.

I would like to believe, for all my flaws, that I have broken the cycle, and now, I have an obligation to help break those cycles still existing.

I am thankful to have made it this far, and I am thankful for the distance still to come.

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Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but if you feel so moved to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $210.

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