Diary: What Dinosaurs Teach Us About Being Unapologetic
I used to have panic attacks in the American Museum of Natural History if I got too close to the dinosaurs.
Such was not so as a child. Adulting and experiences of the world, as an adult, did something to my psyche. It shifted how I experience the things that once rendered me fearless. As a kid, the height and reach of the dinosaur bones were not scary to me. They were, in my mind, massive pieces of another something’s ability to take up as much space as I wanted to. Being in classrooms where I was the only one who looked and sounded like me had a way of coaching me to take up space in rooms that felt tighter than a shrunken Christmas sweater. Albeit extinct, the dinosaur bones reminded me that they were here and took up space that they didn’t have to apologize for.
One night, while journaling, I witnessed my daughter join this same fight.
She is sensitive to ants and cobwebs. She condemns herself when she cannot fill small spaces with large objects and in one moment of play, she was far from gracious when she attempted to fit a gray toy horse, hippo, and a towering dinosaur into a triangular construction made of magnetic tiles. She believed the tiles could handle the trio’s weight, convincing herself that forcing them together onto its wheeled, mobile home for a platform was her best idea yet. The heaviness of the dinosaur sieged the mobile farm and she fell within herself when the tiles went in disarray. Her chest heaved uncontrollably as water droplets clung to the ends of her hair from a water fight she initiated with her toys just moments before. I invited her into a hug realizing she was not only disappointed with the fall, but was also disappointed with the dinosaur and the untouched tiles that somehow fell apart in the process. She did not want to be hugged.
“We all have a dinosaur deep within us just trying to get out.”
—Colin Mochrie, Canadian actor, improvisational comedian, writer, and producer
“I don’t know how to put it back together this way. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Sometimes knowing is too heavy. Sometimes creating over and over again is enough.”
I opened my arms again and as she approached my arms, the tension in her back and voice silenced a fearful tile from adding to the trickle of crash remaining. It fell and rolled under the rickety cart which no longer held her vision for a traveling farm, and her tears rolled with it. She failed to see how limitless of a thinker she was to think of inviting a dinosaur into a space that it would easily conquer. She failed to own that she could be more like the dinosaur.
I offered her a stool and she adopted a few deep breaths to calm the rigor of her upset. The oxygen was a vaccine to the anger that somehow wanted out. She stared at the tiles. They looked back. She picked up the hippo and threw it. She and her toys were arguing without words and oddly, my comfort was not enough to help her sift through these big emotions. I turned to continue writing while the collapsed tiles awaited her imaginative fingers. I lingered in hopes to witness her breakthrough. Tile by tile, one by one, we both became new. I was patient. She was thinking. I was willing to see it all pan out. She was willing to try again. The creatures were no longer on a farm. They waltzed into a hotel.
“Now, Mommy, they are dangerous and MAGICAL!”
She became their angel because she tucked away the monster that once threw the hippo and smashed the plastic farm with a tyrannical hand. The imperfection that once angered her was quelled by a decision to see again. The dictatorship rose and fell in the same breath I held for her just in case rebuilding became too much to ask of herself. Her eyes glistened against the click of the pink heels she kept on her feet while building. She felt closer to the ground when she was a few inches taller than the ants and cobwebs that silently observed in the distance. At the least, I knew that we all gathered and marveled at how quickly we can change and how much space is available to receive our evolution.
This is the first lesson I have decided to reclaim as a scaredy-cat. We all get to stumble through the hazardous rubble of our imaginations and make waves with the air because God uses the curious things to remind us that being alive is the foundation of His creativity at work in us. If we allow ourselves to enter arenas which remind us that we need to be dismantled to confront the molecular parts of us that sting in mirrors, then and only then, will we become unapologetic.
Her poise of acceptance richocheted bullets of truth through my own process of self-worthiness. Standing still, I too searched for air like Walker searched for her mother’s gardens and remembered that I said yes to feeling uncomfortable, torn or indifferent when I said yes to God. She and I both woke up to our unapologetic selves in this moment and rush into them individually, but together.
