I find myself in flowers
Mouse
I get my first job in a flower shop by accident. I have to choose something for work experience, and the book I’m hiding in features characters opening one, so I choose that. It’s a coincidence; a series of events I’m not really engaged in. I don’t know what I want to do with my life—I’m fourteen and my new friends won’t stop asking what I’ve got “down there”. I just want people to stop looking at me.
I enrol in floristry school. Our teacher talks about flowers that have male and female reproductive organs, and I hear the plants described in the same terms that the doctors used for me. Suddenly I’m six years old again, desperate for approval and afraid of being wrong in a way that we don’t know how to fix. But, there’s no whispering this time. Nobody looks concerned or disgusted.
Something clicks.
From Alstromeria to Zinnea, every flower has different physical traits and features and they are never hated for looking different. They are loved for it. For the first time, I begin to think that maybe different doesn’t mean wrong. Finding a new type of flower is cause for celebration, there’s no need for hammering it into shape. There never was.
I am not a flower, but I can learn to treat myself like one. I can be exactly what I am and not have to apologise for the way I grow.
I am allowed to bloom.