“I heard a preacher once say, ‘Sometimes when you’re feeling buried, you’re actually just planted.’” — Bobby Berk
I’ve seen multiple people with the same laptop sticker, a watering can used as a vase for flowers. The sticker offers a suggestion: bloom where you are planted. It’s cutesy self-expression, but has always irked me for two reasons. First, watering cans are supposed to tend to growing plants, not hold cut ones. Second, I’m naturally stubborn. If someone tells me to stay put, my first instinct is to get up and go.
I didn’t know until recently that the phrase on the sticker is tied to the bible. It cautions that wistful daydreams about a different life, a better life, will stunt your growth. The laptop sticker, on the other hand, is designed to be easily digestible. It’s all about thriving. The sticker wants you to advantages of the opportunities that are no doubt at your fingertips.
Midway through the fifth episode of the first season of Queer Eye, interior home designer Bobby Berk and devout Christian father of six Bobby Camp are digging in the Camp family’s new garden. Berk gives gardening tips and offers the preacher’s insight. Camp jokes that he never thought he would be gardening with a gay guy in his front yard.
At that point in the show, Bobby Berk had mentioned a couple times in passing the troubles he faced growing up gay in the bible belt. But Bobby Camp was the first nominee Berk opened up to. Berk told Camp that his life was the church community. And then, the people he relied on rejected him.
Part of the magnetism of Queer Eye comes from conversations able to bypass the typical confines a makeover show. Or, maybe Queer Eye forces us to question if there’s one pattern a makeover show should follow. Queer Eye makes you feel good because it lets you feel bad. Every episode is therapeutically charged, and no more so than when a member of the Fab Five gives the audience glimpse in to their own story.
Bobby went from living on the street to working in Applebee’s. After working in furniture stores — jobs he found after leaving for New York with $100 in his pocket — he worked his way up to creative director. He’s a television personality, but there’s no pretense that his success came overnight. YAnd, after all he went through, the words of a preacher are still Bobby’s touchstone.
No one is born in full bloom. Sometimes, you’re down in the dirt, right where you don’t want to be. Sometimes when you’re feeling buried, you’re actually just planted. There’s no demand worked into the wording there. There’s no imperative to bloom. Spreading your roots is growth. Sprouting above the dirt is growth. Growth no one can see but yourself is growth.
Becoming yourself takes time. It sure would be nice to bloom. But recently, I’ve been looking to see where I was planted.
