Breath & Shadow

ESSAY

ERIKA JAHNEKE

Response to "What I Don't Know"

I don't know who I am now that I'm no longer "promising" or the crip chick in the front row whose grade messes up the curve. Life gives out so few gold stars that I never think I'm good enough, especially when I consider how little money comes from my "honest day's work." I don't know when I stopped belonging and stopped hoping for a disposition that matched my blonde hair so that I would fit with Phoenix's three hundred days of relentless sunshine. All I know is that it never arrived, and I've stopped waiting.

I don't recognize my country as we are taken into this generation's divisive war. I felt like I knew things better when protest songs were period pieces. I don't understand, given the lasting wounds of previous conflicts, how we got here again, and I wonder if it's smart of me to be following the news so closely, given how hard it is for me to come out from behind my keyboard, much less to hold a banner on the front lines. I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but at least I know I wear my ignorance bravely.

I don't know where the expectation came from that there'd just be a smart, sensitive husband, without my having to meet him or work things out — like I could just order him from the Crippled College Girl's catalog — and later on, to complete the set, two healthy, irrepressible, Scout Finch–like children. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with my life if teenaged me was wrong, but maybe there are adventures waiting that she was too suburban ever to wish for. I hope so. I don't want to tell time in television seasons.

I don't know if survival is a blessing or a curse, if I would take the cure were it offered or stay here bearing witness for the people America doesn't see. I don't know if I'm here for a reason or if life is just a ride. If life is a ride, maybe my little car has been sitting near the entrance, broken.

Once, I was a very certain child who crafted worlds to entertain herself. She knew everything deep inside herself and waited for the world to catch up. Sometimes when I create, I see her form flash behind my eyes, but mostly we don't talk anymore. Who knows why friends grow apart? There are a lot of people I miss, too, some of whom promised love, or at least wrote "Keep in touch  .  .  ."  in my yearbook, in a letter, in an email signature.  .  .  .  Why didn't we?

I didn't know I was going to write so personally in this piece. I prepared myself a cardboard woman with a cardboard question on her full, red, cardboard lips, but there's a limit to how much you can dress up cardboard under five hundred words. I have a lot of real questions and a prepaid platform to ask them from.  .  .  .  I figured I owed it to all of us to give it a shot.

Erika Jahneke is a writer, activist, and media geek who, if she could sing, would aspire to be the Curtis Mayfield of the disability community. Her next project is an essay about pop culture and 9/11.

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Arden Hill
Gary Jahneke
Chris Kuell
Erin Lewy
Elizabeth Stewart
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