Last week I wrote about a little boy I met at Reverie Coffeehouse. He was two and a half. He walked over to me holding a doll and said, “My baby.” He didn’t show his mom. He showed a man he had never met, and he did it with pride. If you haven’t read that one, I recommend you go read it first.1 This is a continuation of that story.
A couple of weeks after that morning, I was in Freeport with my friend David.
We were walking and talking about Project Little You and why it needs to exist. Somewhere in there David said something that made me think a bit differently about it.
Identities are what put us in the boxes that keep us from living as our whole selves.
Identities are a tough nut to crack. No one necessarily forces them on you. They get presented to you. By people. By culture. By your lived experience. You should be tough. You should be self-reliant. You should be quiet. You should not feel your emotions.
We essentially choose what identities we accept as “ours” and how tightly we hold onto them. And while that sounds simple in theory, it is very complicated in practice.
We’re wired to belong. For most of human history, belonging was survival. Get pushed out of the group and you don’t make it. So, when life presents identities we often accept them out of fear. The fear of not belonging and the fear of not being able to survive.
And those identities might serve us for some time. But if we let them define us too strongly, we can lose who we are. And the desire to just survive prevents us from thriving.
David and I ended our walk standing in front of the MET, a coffee and art house in Freeport. We were wrapping up, and both of us really excited. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do, but we were going to do something about this together.
Then a guy walked up to us.
“Fuck Starbucks. There’s a fucking local place right here.”
And we said it right back. Fuck Starbucks. Support local.
He was an interesting guy, and he shared a lot of his story. He told us he was from Vermont and came up here for the first time ten years ago. And now he comes every year. He said he should just move to Maine. This place does him well. He loves it here.
He said he was a Navy brat. Moved all over as a kid. New base, new school, new everything, over and over.
Then he told us what that gave him. A high level of emotional intelligence. He said you must have it when you’re a Navy kid.
He wasn’t bragging. He stated it as a fact. It was an identity he held very strongly. I am emotionally intelligent.
And then the conversation took an odd turn. The next thing out of his mouth was that he had just left his “bunk bitch.”
He asked if we knew what a bunk bitch was. We had no idea.
He said she ended up not being worth it. He couldn’t deal with her anymore. So, he just left. She asked him how she was supposed to get back.
He told her to take a bus. “Take a bus, bunk bitch,” may have been his exact words.
He talked a little more and then he went on his way.
David and I walked away and looked at each other.
I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to make this man the villain of the story, and he isn’t one.
He wasn’t performing for us. He walked up to two strangers on a sidewalk because he wanted to talk to somebody, and that is not a small thing for a man to do. He told us he’s good with feelings and he meant it. He told us about the bunk bitch in the next breath and he meant that too. Both of those things live inside the same man. And he didn’t seem to see how they rub against each other at all.
So why is this a continuation of a story about a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who walked up to a stranger and showed him, with pride, his baby?
This man had just turned sixty-seven. He told us so. His birthday was a few days before.
Two males walked up to strangers on an ordinary day and led with what was inside them. One of them said “my baby.” The other said “bunk bitch.” Sixty-five years apart in age.
I have a hard time believing that man was calling women bunk bitches when he was two and a half.
Something happened in between.
Nobody ever handed him an identity called the guy who says bunk bitch. That’s not how it works. He got handed pieces. Be tough. Don’t need anybody. Handle it yourself. Don’t get attached. A woman is disposable.
He took the pieces. The way we all take what we’re presented, because that’s how you stay in the group.
Sixty-five years of that. The box closed a long time ago and he’s still standing in it, telling strangers on the sidewalk that he has a high level of emotional intelligence and following it by calling a woman a bunk bitch.
After the man went inside to get his coffee, David and I started walking to his car. We looked at each other and essentially said, “Wow, what we are talking about with Project Little You is really needed.”
As I was reflecting on the whole situation, I couldn’t help but think about something I try to always keep top of mind. I believe that life is continually presenting us open doors to what we want. And little signs that the path you are on is right, or maybe wrong.
I can’t help but think that these two people, one little and one big, were brought into my life to let me know that I am on the right path.
And the path is starting to get much more real. In late March or early April, Heart-Strong is launching our next major initiative. It grew out of a children’s book I am working on. It’s called Project Little You. The mission is to help people hold onto, or find their way back to, the courage to be fully themselves.
We’re launching the book and the larger initiative with a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Since Kickstarter is all or nothing, we’re asking for pre-pledges first. This helps us set a goal we know we can reach. It also helps us plan for how much we can accomplish with Project Little You over the next year.
If this story made you curious, I’d be so grateful if you would take a look at our pre-pledge page.
https://www.heart-strong.org/project-little-you-pre-pledge
And if you think the world needs something like this, we’d love to have your support.
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org
He Didn't Show His Mom. He Showed Me.
I was working one morning at Reverie Coffeehouse, making some updates to the Heart-Strong website. I was sitting in the corner where they keep the kid’s toys.