I've Always Been A Pirate
A personal essay featuring identity, One Piece, and a revelation
Earlier this year I was working on my Masters in Creative Writing. In one of the classes, I was assigned to write a personal essay.
This is that essay.
This is also the essay I submitted to the 93rd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition in the Spiritual/Inspiration category.
You can find my name listed among the Honorable Mentions here.
I have not altered this essay in any way except to create more paragraphs for readability on this platform.
I’ve Always Been A Pirate
Identity has always been a point of contention in my soul.
When I was younger, I did not have the wherewithal to understand what exactly I was struggling with. I thought I was struggling with the aches and pains of growing up or against the deliberate machinations of an abusive stepfather.
I thought my struggle was simply against good and evil, the battle of a young Christian to be thought righteous under enormous pressure from twisted theology and the pervasive suspicion that the theology I was being taught was twisted somehow.
The abuse lasted nine years. It began, essentially, on my tenth birthday, when a proposal meant that my family and I spent the next nine years being systematically abused verbally, spiritually, and mentally.
Nine years later, my formative years had been in survival mode, not developing, not attaining a sense of self. The cliché to describe verbal abuse is to say, “it’s like walking on eggshells.” This is a watered down, for the consumption of the public, way of describing it. It’s really like walking on nails and forcing yourself not to scream in the hopes that your abuser would not take notice of you that day. But knowing, at every second, that no matter what you did, it would never be good enough.
There would be no peace. There would be no safety. Your home is on fire, and you are burning but you will never be allowed to die, because that would be an escape. You just live, roasting in the flames.
Tie this together with struggling with Christian theology and the state of my soul. Identity is essential to the concept of Christianity. Becoming a Christian, spiritually, is to be adopted into the bloodline of God, and to be reconciled into a family that was separated at the beginning of the world.
It sounds like a fantasy story, which is not a comparison I mind. As a lover of books, and of fantasy in particular, I have found inspiration throughout my life in beloved works of fiction that have echoed the tenets of my faith.
There are moments where a fictional character will utter a line that resonates, touching something that has been a thread, an episodic journey, throughout your own life. Story has always been important to me. It was my escape. It was my home.
When I remember my childhood, my fond memories are not in that house in Florida, but in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon or at the foot of the lamppost at the entrance to Narnia.
I believe God will find you wherever you are and speak to you. He has often found me in secondary worlds, created by other people, having adventures with friends who will never exist.
One Piece is one such story, and the East Blue, for a time, was one such place. In One Piece, a young man named Monkey D. Luffy dreams of sailing the four seas and becoming the King of the Pirates. When watching the live-action adaptation recently, there was a scene in Episode 8, “Worst in the East”, that struck me to the heart.
Luffy is facing off against his grandfather, Vice Admiral Garp of the Marines, who has been trying to prevent Luffy from becoming a pirate for almost Luffy’s entire life. Garp has caught up with Luffy after chasing him around the East Blue and this stand-off is a prelude to a fight between grandfather and grandson.
Garp offers Luffy one last chance to turn his back on his dream. He says, “I gave you every opportunity to follow my path, to become a respected Marine. But instead, you chose to become a pirate.”
The disappointment from Garp is clear, but instead of crumbling under the disappointment of a man he loves, Luffy smiles wide, and says, “No, grandpa. I’ve always been a pirate.” (Netflix)
I’ve always been a pirate.
Growing up, I used to be convinced I lost the chance to become. Become a person, a personality with goals and desires and dreams. I had goals, because I was taught that you were supposed to, and I had desires and dreams, because there was always a part of me that refused to burn in the house fire. But I did not believe any of them would be achieved.
Deep down, I knew they were false dreams, created to present to other people to check off a box on the list of “How to be a Person”. Graduate high school (at least), find a job, date, marry, have children, buy a house – these were all life milestones I thought must be accomplished to be a person.
Whether I really wanted them or not was irrelevant. The real goal was to never let anyone know how broken I was. My thoughts were that if you accomplish this checklist, you become a person. You gain an identity.
Before watching One Piece, over the years, I had started to develop the suspicion that I was looking at things all wrong. In Christianity, the concept of identity also stems from the concept of I AM.
In Genesis 3:14, God calls Himself I AM when speaking to Moses. In the Complete Jewish Bible, the verse reads like this: “God said to Moshe [Moses], ‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh [I am/ will be what I am/ will be]’[.]” (CJB). In other translations it is often ‘I AM that I AM’.
In John 8:58, this concept comes full circle. “Yeshua [Jesus] said to them, ‘Yes, indeed! Before Avraham [Abraham] came into being, I AM!’” (CJB).
Circle back to Genesis 1:26 and there is I AM declaring, “[. . .] ‘Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves,’” (CJB).
If I am a being created in the likeness of Someone who is, who was, and who will be, then what am I?
I’ve always been a pirate.
Earlier, I referenced the fact that I have always loved stories. When I say always, I mean I was pretending to read before I actually could, creating stories off the pictures in the books as I garbled out a baby’s version of a tale before licking my finger in mimicry of my Nana and turning the page with a gravity far beyond my years. I felt the importance of story before I understood what story truly was.
I’ve always been a pirate.
The same year the time of abuse began, I sat down and wrote “Chapter One” in crooked letters on top of a yellow legal notepad. I still have those pages, the beginnings of an epic fantasy story involving a cruise ship, a magical cave, and a main character named, improbably, Milo.
My struggle with identity has hampered my writing in a variety of ways, self-doubt and the adjacent effect of depression being two examples, but I have never lost the desire to sit down and write “Chapter One” and then write “The End” in triumph.
I’ve always been a pirate.
I have always loved the crisp air of fall. I have always wanted to accomplish my tasks well. I have never liked pickles, and never will. I have always dreamed of having a home. I have always been angry at injustice. I have always been seeking God. I have always been particular about food and careless about what clothes I wear, as long as I was comfortable. I have always loved the smell of books, new and old.
For so long, I looked at identity as something that must be created. Something to be built from scratch, with tools that are supposed to be given to you as you develop and flourish and grow. I did not experience growth in my youth, but destruction. And so, I thought I lost the ability to become.
In this journey to discover my identity, I realized that I was not building this identity, but uncovering it. Digging past the grime and blood and broken bones of a house-on-fire childhood and holding it up into the light, just like pirate treasure.
Like Luffy, I’ve always been a pirate. I could say, “I’ve always been a writer,” or make it more general, and say, “I’ve always been Kendra,” but Luffy’s version makes sense to me in this moment. Whatever a pirate looks like for me, that’s what I’ve always been. A seeker. A treasure hunter. A fighter. An explorer.
I’ve always been a pirate.
Author’s Note
While I have touched on this period in my life, and the results thereof, I have never fully openly written about this time in such detail - as vague as this is. Strangely, I did not feel vulnerable sending this in for an assignment, and I did not feel vulnerable sending it to a panel of judges in a competition.
This feels vulnerable.
Part of the reason is that this is so much more public. I admit, there was a part of me that was relieved that I won an Honorable Mention, and not the entire contest in my category, because that meant that it would not be printed online or in a magazine.
But there are a number of people, including the professor who first read this piece for that initial assignment, who have encouraged me to send this out. Who have responded to this piece in such a way that it has inspired me to continue writing, to the point where this blog exists in part because of that encouragement.
I would also like to note that I have kept the references, which will be below, as appropriate for quoting other’s work (in the case of the Netflix One Piece quotes) and the Biblical references.
Works Cited
Netflix. (2023). One Piece: E8 Worst in the East [Video]. In Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81037636?trackId=200257859
Stern, D. H. (Ed.). (1998a). B’resheet (Gen) 1:26. In Complete Jewish Bible. Messianic Jewish Publishers. https://www.bible.com/bible/1275/EXO.3.14.CJB
Stern, D. H. (Ed.). (1998b). Sh’mot (Exo) 3:14. In Complete Jewish Bible. Messianic Jewish Publishers. https://www.bible.com/bible/1275/EXO.3.14.CJB
Stern, D. H. (Ed.). (1998c). Yochanan (Jhn) 8:58. In Complete Jewish Bible. Messianic Jewish Publishers. https://www.bible.com/bible/1275/EXO.3.14.CJB