Apology

I have been trying to write to you for the past two weeks and can't seem to come up with a single scrap of interesting material.

I'm really sorry.

The older I get, the less I seem to want to share with other people. I can't tell if that is a result of maturation in that I don't feel the need to be heard or sympathized with any more, or if it is a result of depression and self-defeat in that I don't feel like any of my life is worth sharing anymore.

To be honest with you, I'm a little bit scared about the future. I am scared in ways I never thought I would be. I'm afraid that I will sell myself short. I'm afraid that soon everything will be over, and I'm also afraid it will never start. I'm afraid that I will never be satisfied. I'm afraid I'll be alone in my head forever. I'm afraid the opinions of others will be allowed to run my life, and I'm afraid NOT to let them.

I'm afraid of how dumb all this sounds, and how you'll probably get to the end of this post and be like, "God, what a retard."

But I just want you to know that I actually AM really tired of censoring myself for other people so I can control what they think of me. Its so flipping hard sometimes! And I'm doing okay at it right now, but I don't know how long I can hold out. So be prepared. There might be a little explosion on the horizon.

Right now, though, I just seem to be waiting.

Popular Kids Meet the Equalizer

"How is your daughter doing in school this year?" I hadn't had a chance to talk to the girls from Valuations since I'd come back to the office. My return to teaching had become only a hiatus from my desk job. I was back after six months. I'd been placed in the middle of the office floor this time, far away from Valuations, where I used to sit.

Tricia sat diagonally from me then, and I'd heard many a story about her daughter being bullied at school, and many a phone conversation between Tricia and the school principal. Now we sat across the table from each other at a department luncheon in a Mexican resturant.

"She's doing well!" Tricia remarked of her daughter, "I think she's finally worked up the guts to stand up to those mean girls."

"Good!" I said. "Middle school girls are the worst. I'm tellin ya. That's where I just came from, and I think its probably the first time in kids' lives where cliques start to form and you start recognizing popular kids and not-popular kids. They don't really seem to be aware of that in elementary school."
"Yes!" Tricia said. "And you know what they're picking on her about this year? Her clothes! If she doesn't have on Hollister or American Eagle she doesn't even want to show up at school."
"Yeah, uniforms have really changed things like that in Metro schools."
We nodded, as did the other ladies next to us at the table.

I always hate department luncheons with no seating charts. Everyone mingles, but you never know who you're going to sit by. If you get stuck with someone who's your superior, you get nervous. If you get stuck with people you don't know, you get left out. If you get stuck with someone you hate, you get annoyed. Its a total crap shoot.

Megan Cates was sitting next to me, adjacent to Tricia. Megan was fairly new. She was mid-twenties, blonde, a tad chunky, and rumored to have tattooed eye make-up, meaning that her eyeliner was permanent and would never come off. That weirded me out.

"I don't even think we had popular kids when I was in school," she said. "Everybody was pretty nice to each other. There were groups that hung out together, but I don't think any one group was quote unquote cooler." She chuckled, and took a sip of water.
"Did you go to a small school?" Tricia asked.
"Well, it was a small town, yes."
We digested that for a minute, crunching our free chips and salsa.
"You mean you seriously never got picked on?"
"No. I can't remember a single insult." Megan smiled. "I guess kids aren't like that anymore. I wonder what causes that."
"TV," Paula chimed in from the other side of Tricia.
"Probably," I added.
We crunched our chips again in silence, listening to the commotion at the other end of the table.
"Well if I've learned anything from teaching its that your experience in school is totally unique to you. Nobody has the same experiences. I don't remember kids being crazy hooligans and running teachers out of their classrooms, but I went through Honors and Advanced Placement classes where that didn't happen that often. Teaching Standard classes and low performers really made me realize that things haven't changed, but my perspective has."
Megan nodded to me, but I didn't stop there.
"So... maybe there were some other kids who DID feel picked-on at your school."
She paused.
"Well come to think of it, yeah. Actually. I guess there was this one girl who was kind of a bully."
That wasn't what I had asked, but I was interested.
"All of my daughter's bullies are girls!" Tricia added. "People don't really call girls bullies. I guess they think they're too feminine, but they can be just as mean and awful as boys."
"Well, this is actually a pretty funny story," Megan started. "When I was in high school I was active in a lot of clubs and stuff. I was on the yearbook staff, and I dated Jeff, who is now my husband--"
"--Oh! That's so cute!" Paula was still listening too.
"Yeah, so I dated my husband for like two years of highschool before we went to college." She took another sip of water and her grin got all big and loaded like this was a super juicy story. "Well. There was this girl at school who I guess wanted to date Jeff? Anyway, she just got so mad at me for dating him. And she was kind of a weird girl, too. Like she's still weird. I think she's a lesbian now or something, like she seriously does DRAG shows and stuff as a MAN, which is funny, because she was mad at me all Senior year of high school for dating Jeff, who is a man." She laughed, and made this face like 'WEIRD-O!' and continued. "Well, she was on the yearbook staff with me, and before the pages went out to be printed, she got into the lists and deleted my picture and my name out of the yearbook altogether."
"Oh no!" Tricia and Paula across the table gaped.
"Your Senior picture!"
"What did you do?"
"Nothing," Megan said. "I mean, they gave me my money back, but there wasn't really anything we could do. The books had already been printed. And they knew who did it, you know. So they kept her from walking the line at graduation; she got an F in yearbook class. But let me tell you. My friends gave that girl hell about doing that to me. I mean, she probably wished she'd never even met me."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh," Megan mused, "They called her some terrible names, drove to where she worked, slashed her tires. You know, stuff like that."
"Oh my god! That's horrible!" I was taken aback.
"Well she reaps what she sows, huh?" Tricia seemed unsurprised.
"That poor girl." I said.
"Well, I wasn't in on any of it, of course. She tried to press charges against me or something for damaging her property but I wasn't even there, you know. And that whole rest of the year was just hell for her I'm sure. But she probably deserved it." Megan smiled. "Other than that, though, nobody was mean or clique-y in my high school. Everybody pretty much got along."

The waiter came a few minutes later with our food, and cross-table comparisons to lower priced Mexican resturants began. But I couldn't stop thinking about the girl. I couldn't stop thinking that the only reason Megan hadn't experienced any bullying and thought that her school didn't have cliques was because she was in the biggest clique of all.

Everybody probably got along from her perspective because they weren't about to cross her or her friends, and she was probably too self-centered to even notice that people didn't like her. I mean, if the girl really did become a lesbian later she was probably going through some intense times in high school. Megan and her friends probably weren't the only ones who thought she was weird. And who knows! Maybe something actually HAD happened between her and Megan's husband Jeff, to make her really angry. Some of the best people I know had the worst times in high school. In fact, it's all the popular kids who end up never leaving town and making anything of themselves. The weirdos are always more successful.

Isn't it strange when you're years and years beyond high school, but you can still feel the old us-and-them principles creeping in? I suddenly knew for a fact that had I been in high school with Megan I would NOT have been able to be her friend. She wouldn't have glanced twice at me. More than likely I would have made friends with the girl that got terrorized. And yet here we were having lunch together just because we worked in the same building.

Man, adolescence sucks.
When I was teaching middle school kids my favorite kid was a class clown who made jokes to roll the insults off his back. He came from a broken home and was the youngest of four, the only boy, and his mother had recently become pregnant with some random guy's kid even though she didn't take care of the four she already had. I wanted so badly to explain to him how adulthood was an equalizer. That he really could be whatever he wanted to be. That no label would ever stick with him his whole life. That he was brilliant and hilarious and good no matter what people said or how many times he was sent to the principal's office.

But you can't explain those things to someone who hasn't experienced them. His future felt like a white void where he didn't even exist yet. It didn't matter what I said, he was not going to be able to fill in those blanks. His only reality was now. And for all he knew it would be all he'd ever know.

And thats how I imagine that girl that Megan was talking about. I imagine her balling up her fists because the only reality is now and she's trapped; she can't move.
It makes me wish I could teach again, just to talk to her.

I put down my fork and looked at Megan laughing at something Tricia said.
She was a temp just like me.
Adulthood really is the equalizer.

Prelude to My Non-Gothic Life

I heard my cousin say something depressing.

My aunt is supposedly studying theology at a local university. This came to me as a surprise because she is a grandmother, and has already aged beyond the standard "college age group." Additionally, religion is not something that is openly discussed on that side of the family. Thus, I had no idea that theology would be of any deep interest to her, or, for that matter, worth spending thousands of dollars on professional study.

"Why, hell..." My cousin Ben said, after hearing this news. He was wearing a polo shirt and ripped jeans. I could not decide if the jeans were designer or just worn from many nights of drinking and running amuck. He slouched deeper into my grandmothers forty year old couch and worked the wad of dip around in his lower lip. "I'd probably set the place on fire if I set foot in a church. I'd straight up burst into flames."
My uncle and my cousin Gina laughed.
"I have no business being there," Ben said. "No sir."

How sad, I thought. That's probably the BEST place for him. But it would be too weird, too out of the norm to board that train of thought. It would also be too weird and out of the norm for me to suggest I thought so.

That side of the family has layers. They're like onions. There are things you get to see, the "appropriate" parts, and then there are the hidden, unseen things. Motivations for bizarre actions go unquestioned. Its the epitome of the Southern Gothic movement in literature. There is no need to ask why this and why that and whats up with this. One is polite, and cheerful, and nothing is ever wrong. This is not to say that something is always wrong, but occasionally there will be something that it seems everyone talks around. And still occasionally I wonder if I'm the only one who smells the rats.

There are nine cousins, and I am the third oldest. Three of my cousins are married and have children. Two older than me, and one younger. I like watching them. I like to see they way they interact as married people, as families. I hope to myself that they're happy, that they're safe. I wonder if they'll play charades and gestures and pictionary with their emotions. I wonder if there's hope for me. I wonder if all the bad modeling will lead us all to the same highs and lows. I wonder what we'll do when our grandmother passes away, and the house and the glue that presses us together a few times a year will still adhere. I guess one day we'll find out.

Still there are some things I am certain about. I want to make sure I smoke out all the rats in my relationships. I want to shoot down the elephants in the room and transcend awkward levels of communication. As much as I love Southern Gothic literature, I really don't ever want to live in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Or McCullers' Sad Cafe.

And I still wait for the fresh start that will be the prelude to my non-gothic life. So as Ben giggled like a school kid, and my cousin Gina changed the conversation, I stayed polite. I didn't say a word, and I tried to think about something else.

Advice I'd Give My Daughter

Sex is not power. Anyone can have sex, and most guys would have sex with a bar of soap if it looked like it wanted it, so make sure you don't lower yourself to that level. Don't be the soap. Be you.

Even if you don't quite know who you are yet, its good to pretend you're important. People will treat you the same way you treat yourself. Every time. Its like the Golden Rule flipped inside out. So don't mope around thinking you're a piece of crap, and don't put up with anyone who wants to treat you like one. Because the people that do that are only doing it because they feel like pieces of crap themselves. Look for this, and you'll realize its true.

Make sure you look good. If you like the way you look, or at least put effort into it, you'll realize you feel better about yourself. This means that, yes, sometimes shopping therapy is necessary. Because its good to feel fabulous. All the time, if possible.

Accept the fact that no one is going to rescue you. Do not be fooled by romance novels and chick flicks. Do not live your life waiting for something to happen to you that will change everything. In the end, you are the one who brings about all the changes. Don't surrender that right to anybody else.

Be the change you want to see in YOURSELF. Stop thinking of yourself in terms of what other people see, and think of yourself in terms of what you see in yourself.

People can change. But don't expect it out of anybody but you. If you wait for someone to change, you could be waiting your whole life. Realize that sometimes timing just sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't matter how cute he is, if his life is a mess you can't expect him to clean it up just because he met you. The only thing you will ever have control over is yourself. Don't ever forget that.

If you're waiting to do something while no one's watching, you shouldn't do it at all.

Feed the fish in the fish tank, and know you are needed.

Secrets are not beautiful. They won't keep you warm at night, and they trap you in ways you can't even understand right now. Be honest with yourself AND other people. Its beautiful and it will make you feel good.

Religion is not "gay." Despite the hilarity of some televangelists, faith in God is the best possible thing to have in your life. Talk to him. But most importantly, listen to him. If you stop and just listen, he'll always tell you what to do.
Matter of fact, stop right now and make an effort to listen. This time, when you ask a question, don't you strangely feel like you already know the answer? Stop and do this at least once a day. It will change your life.

Don't drink. I know you will, though. Please remember that alcohol is a depressant, it makes you gain weight, and that even when you think you are totally in control, you aren't.

ps- If I catch you drinking I WILL kill you.

Don't get wrapped up in what you think is cool. Remember that your life is short. Time passes quickly. Your youth will fade. You'll be thirty one day. And you'll look back on all the things you did at your age and think... what? Do everything with your future in mind. The present is its best predictor.

Drugs will make you barf. Including herbal drugs. Especially herbal drugs.

Sometimes you have to stop talking to people who allow you to behave unhealthily. If they're holding you back, you don't need them. Don't feel bad letting them go, and don't feel like you have to explain a thing. Change your phone number. Delete your social network. Read a good book. Buy new clothes. Dye your hair. Reinvent yourself.

It is impossible to screw up so badly that you can't ever have a fresh start. The only thing keeping you from the best version of yourself is you.

Be good to your family members. Don't hide things from them. Don't be ashamed of them. They are a part of who you are, and they'll never stop loving you.

And finally,
Eat fruit.
Drink milk.
Don't smoke.
You will thank me later.