My friend Bethany once told me a joke about a husband and wife. Apparently the husband had a tendency to be overly-friendly to the opposite sex, and his jealous wife decided to do something about it. So, she rigged up their garage door opener to respond to her husband's....errr...arousal. That way, if their garage door flew open without warning, she would know that somewhere, her husband was thinking naughty thoughts, and she could punish him accordingly. The story seems pretty straightforward, right? Not hard to understand, not very confusing. Of course, the range of this garage door opener would have to be pretty technologically miraculous, but besides that, it's a harmless little joke, right? Nothing life defining, certainly.
Well, that's not exactly true. I was in the 5th or 6th grade at the time of hearing this joke. The word "horny" held NO meaning for me whatsoever, unless it was associated with the toads that inhabited the vacant lot next door to our neighbors. I had only recently learned that the classical music station I always listened to was SO not cool, and that girls who didn't shave their legs were TOTALLY gross. So behind was I that I couldn't even name the guys from New Kids On The Block, or sing EVEN ONE of their songs.
I was a total and complete dork, and I knew it. But I DESPERATELY didn't want to accept it.
So this joke, the one about a guy being horny and setting off his garage door because of it, this stupid little joke, well, it WAS life defining for me. I remember that day, walking back to Bethany's house from the Chinese restaurant down the street, the one her parents would let us go to by ourselves. We walked and kicked pebbles and tried not to swallow the dust that was swirling around us like it always does in West Texas in the springtime. Bethany was about to graduate the 6th grade, and I was, as always, homeschooled. Grade-less. School-friendless. Category-less. Unable to define, and therefore unable to fit in.
Actually, that's not totally true either. There was one group I could have identified with. They were the Other Homeschoolers. They went skating at the old skate rink every Friday afternoon, the majority of the girls wore long skirts EVERYWHERE, they talked about science and reading and the cow's eyeball they had just dissected, and I would have rather died than be associated with any of them.
In fact, it was a strange little paradox: When I was surrounded with these Other Homeschoolers I felt simultaneously like the coolest person in the world and very the least cool person possible. The more I thought about how dorky they were, the more I was bombarded with the mental image of just how dorky I looked to all the Normal Kids. Oh, it was painful.
Well, this joke turned things right around for me. I asked Bethany what "horny" meant, and she looked at me like I was crazy. And then she laughed. That's right, she laughed. At me. At my pathetic, dorky, uncool innocence. I'm sure she ended up explaining it to me that day; I honestly don't remember the talk that ensued. All I remember is deciding, once and for all, that I was NOT going to be so stupid anymore.
I decided that my parents were The Source Of All Uncool, and so I would NOT listen to them anymore, either. The Other Homeschoolers? TOTALLY UNCOOL, all of them. Even the ones I was kind of friends with. They were OUT. From now on, I would only associate myself with COOL KIDS. The ones who know about being horny! The girls who shave! And I will listen to the pop station! No more classical. I will forget all my knowledge about Mozart, about Bach, about Mendelson. I will NEVER talk about reading, or books, or science, and I will most certainly not bring up any discussions regarding dissection. If someone says something that I don't understand, I will pretend to! I will laugh at all the jokes, even if they make no sense to me! I will NEVER AGAIN ask what something means. I will sing along to all the songs everyone knows, and if I don't know the words, I will lip sync.
I got really good at mouthing the word "watermelon" and moving my head just right. I became extremely adept at sensing a joke or a story or a word or a pop culture reference that I would inevitably not understand, but SHOULD know by now. And I was awesome at faking it. Fake it until you make it, I would tell myself. And I did. I truly did.
I went to Cool Kids school, REAL school, in the 7th grade. And as soon as I realized that making 100's on every single assignment was also TOTALLY not cool, I stopped that too. Instead of being disappointed that the classes were so easy and so boring, I would pretend to sleep. I would pretend to NOT CARE so much, that I didn't even care about listening in class. I learned how to cuss. And not just dorky cussing, either. I was totally good at it.
The first detention I got was awesome. I was so proud of myself that it was doubly hard to act cool and impervious. The next few detentions came a little easier, and by the summer after 7th grade, I was sneaking out of my house like a pro, going to high school parties, and I had even FRENCH KISSED a NINTH GRADER. I was TOTALLY COOL.
Then we moved. We moved all the way across the state of Texas, from the flat barren landscapes and beautiful full skies of West Texas to the piney woods of East Texas. I started a new school, a private school, and left all my Cool Friends and hard-won acceptance behind. I figured that I had the angry, stone-faced, tough teenage act down pat, and that this new school would only be a little bump in the road; a short delay on the highway of awesomeness.
I was wrong.
Everyone at the new school HATED me. I mean, really, truly hated. They were appalled at my "bad girl" ways. I went, in two years, from being a total, pathetic dork, to being a cool, rebellious kid, to being ostracized for the VERY QUALITIES I had worked so hard to develop. I got suspended from my new school within the first few months.
The only way the school would let me back in was if I went to counseling. I would have just rejected the whole offer without batting an eyelash, but the alternative school that was lying in wait would have made even the toughest teenager a little nervous. So I decided to take the plea bargan, and off to counseling I went.
It was such a wasted opportunity, I felt, to be going through something so easily made fun of as counseling, and not even be able to ridicule it with my Cool Friends. If I would have ever gotten lucky enough to be sent to counseling while at my old school, it would have raised my cool meter more than a few notches.
But instead I was at my new school, stuck with kids who didn't like me in the first place, and were now scared to even talk to me. They were just horrified that someone could be SO BAD as to get SUSPENDED from school, and then be forced to GO TO COUNSELING. I think I was about three steps from hell in their minds. I was the human equivalent of a Biblical plague; they just wanted to stay far, far away.
Now this was a challenge. I could have just given up, but my inner chameleon had only recently proved its expertise. I figured if I could trick those kids at my old school, I could trick these kids as well. So I went about making a new change. I reformed some of my ways. I quit telling stories of things I had done in the past that would have been seen as cool by my old friends but threw my new friends into a tailspin of worry and horror and made their mothers set up "Prayer Chains".
A lot of the changes, just as before, actually did take. You are how you act, to an extent. And some of the reasons I "reformed" were truly genuine. But the heart of it all, just like the last time, was me trying desperately to fit in. To measure up to some standard that I thought had already been set for me.
Fast-forward through high-school. No, keep going. Go all the way through college. Go through my stint as a Biology major. Keep forwarding through Communication, English, Fashion Design, and then Communication again. Go through my friends, my boyfriends, my broken engagement, my breakups and breakdowns. Go through my fashion stages, the Sex and the City stage, the hippie Earth girl stage, the casual-professional stage. Go through my college graduation, my move to Dallas, my plans to move to California, my plans to move to Europe, my plans to move to New York, my plans to move anywhere. Go through my marketing job, my very short-lived country club job, my legal assistant job. Who am I? Who can even tell anymore?
It's a struggle to find ourselves. "Finding ourselves" sounds SO very dramatic, anyway. I'll just say, with no triteness intended, that it was hard for me to find myself. In fact, I seriously doubt that I am at the end of the road labeled "Find Who You Are, Really. No, REALLY".
But I am a lot further down it. I don't flinch at the thought of not knowing about something I "should" already know. I'm not so scared for people to think I am dorky, or cool, or happy, or pensive, or melancholy, or pathetic or awesome. Because I am all those things.
I am a lot of things. I am one thing to one person, and another thing entirely to someone else. But now, that's not because I TRY to be different around everyone. It's just because I AM. I am multifaceted. I am unique. I am naive. I am experienced. I am thoughtful. I am timid. I am silly. I am serious. I am.
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