Its interesting the adjectives we use to describe our actions or our life choices. When I first moved to Berlin, people would often say I was “brave” and “courageous” for following my dream and deciding to do what I chose to do, but what they don’t realize is the amount of fear involved because I wasn’t just following a dream. I was chasing a lifetime. A lifetime of linguistic specialist, speech pathologist, front-loaded learning, a parents divorce, that I was running not toward anything, but I was finally flexing my wings.

So you see, I don’t run, I fly, and the problem with dreams is that when they are uttered, we give power and raise gods, that’s a really intimidating thing to think about, to think about that possibly, “I could give birth to a god,” and here’s the other thing you have to understand, but, for women, we can do it twice over. With our physical bodies and with our minds. We do it thrice over with our emotions and our communities with our interpersonal understanding of each other’s commiseration.

So you see, people say that I am brave for going and doing this, but what they don’t realize is that I was giving birth to a god that expands beyond our adjectives.