When I was really young, I knew who I was. I felt like I knew where I was going, what direction that my life would take. There weren't a whole lot of demands placed on me; no school or jobs to do we all remember the freedom.
Of course, I don't remember many bad things; my child-hood is a dreamy phase remembered by warm, sparkling beaches, smiling mothers, and lots of new, undiscovered things. Humans don't remember pain as anything other than a feeling that we are strongly adverse to. I don't remember much of pain when I was young, but that's a different song.
The first step: diving into the public school system. I was shocked to find out that instead of playing with Tonka trucks and stuffed penguins, I was supposed to have been playing with dolls, slap bracelets, and yo-yo's. What's more, preferring to play with the rough-and-tumble boys ostracized me from the girls and left me to their mean little whims. (Not ALL five-year-olds are nice ones, you know.) And after a while, (noticing that I was, in fact, a girl) the boys that I played with viewed me as something of a deviant. Girls were giggly and liked to have their hair pulled. They quickly tried to shove me back into my place.
But, the damage had been done, I suppose. When I think back, what I remember most distinctly as an emotion that pervaded my sense of self all throughout my childhood was this impending notion that I was different from "everyone else." I had different ideas, different family, different clothes, everything. (In the self-absorbed world of most youth, I also kind of failed to realize that everyone was different from everyone else; a revelation which may have prevented a good deal of agony come adolescence.) I remember thinking, "I have to fit in." Determined, I heartily tried to squash myself into things. Teacher commented wryly on my fluid energy, which never flowed in a straight line; it was forever gushing and squirting all over the goddamn place. I was borderline uncontrollable. I was a dirt dervish.
My parents, bless their little hearts, decided that since I was obviously different I must be "gifted." I was whisked promptly away and enrolled in the Challenge program, which is an accelerated program for elementary students with exceptional ability and sporadic attention spans. Through this program, I have met some of the most talented and disturbed children to ever grace God's good earth.
I've never really had that "lifelong" friend that most people my age seem to have. You know, the one who your mother pushed you next to in the sandbox, and you threw sand at them or stepped on their castle, but it was cute, and later the two of you just became the best of friends, and to this day nothing can separate you. Hell, the longest I've known one of my current friends would be around two years. I've never felt like a social magnet; most of the time I simply prefer solitude over company. No, that's not right. I prefer connecting with people in a one-to-one manner, and really do enjoy the opportunity to socialize with people I don't know as long as it's not in a huge, intimidating environment.
Throughout elementary school, I was treated as one pariah among many (about 28 of my Challenge classmates.) We were fondly referred to as the "Challenge Nerds" by our jealous peers, and left to form our own social hierarchy which consisted of a strange network of friends who were all in with everyone else. It was a tight-knit environment that was elusive if not exclusive, and I struggled once again to find my place. I had a handful of girls who were, in my eyes, mysterious boxes of pent-up frustration, keys to doors, the ones who were just enough like me that I could identify with them, but unlike me enough that I could consider them cool.
Wait a second. Unlike me?
Like many, many young adults, I figured that everyone else had one up on me. They were in on a big secret that lent them a certain piece of mind. Tragically, the people who openly displayed emotions that I felt deep inside were the ones that I wrote off as unstable, and not "having it all together" like my friends, who had mastered the art of correcting any minor deviations in their personalities. Truth be told, they never corrected anything. They just hid it very well. Just like me, they never thought that they could express themselves freely without this fear of social rejection. It was that time in life when you have to start defining yourself. It's not enough to just be yourself; you have to call yourself something. Though we were all repressed and bursting at the seams, we seemed to understand each other.
The last years of elementary school were a happy time for me, though. I had good friends, good experiences, and relatively few emotionally scarring incidents. It was probably the last time that I could consider myself a child. I was a child, and one who was flirting with the dark, devious, and deceptive world of complete adulthood. Sure, I wore the lipstick, kissed a boy (blushed madly about it for days afterwards, too,) and inspected brassieres with the technicality and precision of a neurosurgeon. I hid things from my parents, (because that's what teenagers are supposed to do), read trashy romance novels with my friends in the stacks at the library, and giggled.
"Oh my God," you might say. "You were so brash!" (The alternate response might be, "You were such a dork!")
I dissent. Why doesn't anyone remember what it's like to be young? We've culled a strange habit of "selective remembrance." Sure, you remember that your sister pulled your hair, but do you remember stealing her toy first? Noooo. Do you remember discovering sexuality at a young age in such a manner that you can allow yourself to admit it? Today? Now? Sure, we were the ones giggling in a library stack, but did the adults in our lives acknowledge that sort of thing?
Sexual curiosity among pre-teens is looked at as a deviance. With resignation, adults realized that it was a good idea to get "sexual misconceptions" out of kids' heads before they reached middle school, or tried to educate themselves. Embarrassed teachers gingerly pointed at female genitalia projected onto the overhead screen, forced into the whole shenanigan by liberal-minded programs like "FLASH". The handouts made adult bodies seem like weird and disgusting things, and "our own changing bodies" sounded more like crazy, unpredictable mental patients (or, if you were a girl: huge, walking uteruses.) Anyone who has been subjected to this will know immediately what I'm talking about. Slightly fleshy and "politically correct" drawings that simply tried too hard not to draw attention to the "bad parts" succeeded in doing only the opposite. It was a horrifying spectacle.
("FLASH" stands for "Family Life And Sexual Health." If you can think up a worse acronym for sex education, let me know. We'll have a good hoot over it.)
Our teachers told us things that we already knew and discussed heatedly in a much more animated and interesting fashion during lunch hour. It was almost boring really, except we got to watch the boys squirm, and that was fun. They also did one thing that has forever left its mark on me: they advocated things. So what? Well, what happens when a teacher tells you that "abstinence is what good people do until they're married," and you have to tell her that you, or your sister, or your parents, or your whole family was born out of wedlock? Or, what if the forbidden "abortion talk" is breached, and you have to shift uncomfortably in your chair because well, maybe you're Catholic or Mormon, or maybe your mother or sister had one?
I made a very awkward transition into middle school. I had to leave all of my friends (except one sketchy character who made me miserable more than anything else), and forge through uncharted and very disturbing territory. I hated middle school probably more than I have hated anything in my entire life, (except for that one time in which I had stitches sewn into my face, sans anesthetic, but that was extremely short, and relatively fascinating compared to middle school.)
Here, you saw awkward sexuality in full bloom. All of a sudden, everyone had these BODIES and FEELINGS that they didn't know what to do with. It was a nightmarish chapter out of a health book. Seventh grade was truly the worst, though, I had no place, no real friends, and I was gawky. Really. Honestly, gawky. I know you'll have a hard time believing it, but trust me on this one. Mouth full of braces, couldn't tell my right foot from my left hand, broke everything in sight, wrote bad poetry. I was a mess. The emotional trepidations were overwhelming. All of a sudden, I wanted to scream and cry and hide out in my room all the time. (Being the quiet sort, I never really did any of that.) I once broke six dishes over the span of two days. I was exempt from dish duty for a while, but that didn't last long. Apparently my mothers' zealous desire to turn me into a human Whirlpool overran her compassion (and fear) for my less than ballerina-like state of physical consciousness.
You also got "bushed". This was before they removed the foliage and replaced it with tasteful beauty bark. If you were a seventh grader, walking innocently aside one of these (soaking, no less) green beauties, you might find yourself suddenly examining the inside of a plant until recently unfamiliar to you.
Eighth grade was a smidgen less tortuous. I gained a few good friends, and a tentative sense of balance and coordination. I was also into wrestling, and that gave me a bit of a booster. I also met possibly the coolest teacher I've ever had. Mr. Burdine. That man was (unknowingly, no doubt,) my hugest inspiration ever. He taught me how to be an individual. Rather, he let me get away with it. Instead of forcing me to participate in the inane lesson o' the day, he gave me a few of his favorite poetry books that I could read in the back of the class room, and did something that no teacher has ever done. He encouraged me to be myself. In the classroom. I'm not saying teachers should allow such free reign over all their students, problems would obviously arise, but we had an understanding. Conversely, it's also probably why I struggle a bit at forcing myself into a class curriculum. On a field trip once, the man even let me paint his nails a delicate shade of blue, which, he informed me, didn't come out before his important dinner event the following day. He and I were similarly amused.
At the end of a fairly good year, I was once again ripped away from most of my friends, and shuttled off to a big, strange place where there were "real" teenagers, unlike the "fake" ones at Sylvester. What awaited me? A big, strange thing.
high school!
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