Aging out of your skin

When was the first time you cared what people thought about you?

I got my first pair of glasses in second grade, plastic pink frames that covered half of my face. (They were in vogue in 1988. They’d probably be hip now.) At that age, no one cares if you have glasses. In fact, weird body tricks are fascinating since you’ve basically just learned that you have eyes at all. But I still had those pink square glasses in sixth grade, and in middle school, nothing was cool. Unless you were cool. But you probably weren’t.

And I wasn’t, and the teasing was incessant. I did not have the right hair (waist-length, red, permed) or clothes (I drew my own t-shirt designs with magic markers). I was a teacher’s pet and had David-Sedaris like OCD and, worst of all, I was oblivious. I was in community theatre! I could remember everyone’s names and birthdays without writing them down! I was double-jointed! I was awesome! I approached friends with gusto, inviting them over with an extroversion that has since disappeared.

At one point, I was booed off-stage during my reign as the 6th grade’s Quiz Bowl representative. In the bathroom, an older girl - out of fascination, not compassion - asked if I was going to cry. But it had never occurred to me. It didn’t feel great, the booing, but crying? About what? The people who were booing didn’t even know me, so what did it matter? But I had noticed that my friends hadn’t clapped for me. When asked why, Nicole said her hands hurt that day. Jamie didn’t answer at all. And then I asked for the first time - what was wrong with me?

We moved and I started 7th grade back in the US, after living overseas. I had the same hair, same glasses, but I bought a fabulous black faux-leather backpack with gold buckles. Sleek shit. People would see that backpack and beg me to sit at their lunch table. I had never tried to fit in before, but I figured with something as slick as that backpack, I’d have no worry.

But on the first day, a popular kid in my neighborhood dumped his lunch on my face, his egg-salad sliming all over the pack. At the basketball court during lunch, an greasy older kid said he’d do me, but only if I put a paper bag over my head. One boy, a tall, lanky musician who would serve as my attractiveness-protoype for years, came over to my house after school only to tell me he could see the resemblance between me and my pet dogs. A friend’s sister, who didn’t know I was in the other room, told my friend that she felt sorry for me because I was so ugly.

I had my first panic attack in gym class when a blonde volleyball player laughed at what she called my “horse teeth.” I missed the last two months of 7th grade because I started throwing up each day before class.

That summer, I cut my hair, got contacts and started dressing like my classmates. I grew breasts and hips and the teasing stopped. But something was changed, of course. Boys no longer threw their lunches on my head, but I learned to shrink when necessary. Any vibrancy was hidden. I didn’t approach people; I made them come to me. Years after high school, a friend told me people thought I was an ice queen.

At parties now, I feel OK. I don’t think I expect to be teased, but there’s something in me that wouldn’t be surprised if I was. I’m friendly. I’m not an ice queen. I’m shy, but you wouldn’t know it. There is an exuberant, flamboyant, nerdy side of me that comes out only in front of Chris or when very, very drunk. But today, I went to the eye doctor and had to pick out frames. I haven’t had glasses in years, partially out of laziness and partially because this happened as I tried on each pair: in the mirror, my shoulders caved in and I shrunk again. I remembered my first contact lens fitting the summer before 8th grade and how I threw my old pink glasses in the bottom of my dresser drawer and buried them under books. How when I broke a contact, I went to school blind rather than wear those glasses again.

I only came back - in public, sober - once. I was at a party at a friend’s house. Twenty-three years old. I’d had a beer, which with my Irish genes is the intoxication equivalent of saying I’d had some oxygen. A drunk art student I didn’t know was running around with a red oven mitt on his head. He smiled at me, took off the mitt and threw it at me. I put it on my own head. He grabbed utensils and dish towels and decorated me until I looked like I belonged on some type of childrens’ cooking show. I was laughing; he was laughing. He took a picture. A pretty girl walked in the kitchen, looked at me. Turned to her friend and said, “Wow, how humiliating.” I stopped laughing.

But so it goes! Growing up is containment. You put it all out there and you take it all back. Nothing more or less. What’s my point? That I’m still 13 with big teeth and a sandwich running down my face? Too cliché. Here’s a poem by Bukowski instead:

BLUEBIRD

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

Posted by: Zosia | 09-25-2007 | 03:09 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (5)

So much daring

I have this tendency to lie dormant for months, and then rise to explode with change. I never plan it this way, but it’s been my modus operandi for years, so I guess I can’t be surprised when I suddenly find myself dropped in an entirely new life.

There’s the new house. The apartment’s a wreck, covered in boxes and debris - once I start packing, I don’t stop. Even it means we have two weeks left until we move and our clothes and dishes are in trunk of my car. Last night we ate spaghetti with chopsticks on paper towels.

There’s the new kitten, Phoebe. Cutest animal I’ve ever seen, but she’s trouble and my older cat, Raja, wants her to die immediately. Every hour on the hour, Raja chases Phoebe under the desk and punches her several times in the face. It would be adorable if it wasn’t so violent.

And then the biggest thing. You know how I’ve gone to school on and off for the past eight years. The first three years were great until stuff happened and I had to take an extended break. But I never got back into it after the break, save for one semester at a community college in Bloomington where I got straight As, was the editor of the literary magazine and had a horribly obvious crush on my philosophy professor.

But after that, I started dreading each semester. And then it went beyond dread, somewhere into the vague, hazy region of a nervous breakdown that kept me out of real life for several months. When I finally returned to my life, and to school, this semester, I found myself knee-deep in the dread. On the second day, I spent thirty minutes wandering in the hot sun, unable to find my classroom. Instead, I found the ancient building that housed my German class from the previous semester.

I liked that building. I spent too much time in the quiet, dark, cool bathroom, pepping myself for classes I didn’t want to go to and writing memorized poetry (T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, etc.) on the wall in the third stall from the door. I went up there this time around and caught myself in the mirror, like a cliché. I was a wreck. Crying with a sweaty hot face. I looked out the window a bit, watching a cop talk to a kid on blue scooter. An ambulance came soon after, and the kid climbed in back. I went back into the bathroom and made a decision. I wrote it on the wall. Then I went home, and dropped my classes. For good. This isn’t a break (well, if it is, it’s a LONG break). This is me finally saying fuck it to school, and getting on with my life. It’s tough; there’s the wistful, romantic part of me that loves academia. And does being a college drop-out mean I’m dumb? Undermine my intelligence?

But as I wrote elsewhere, what do I really love about school? I love the details, the thousands of lives on a reel around me. I love the tactile feeling of a pen in my hand. I love the interplay and dramas that can occur only in a school setting. I like getting crushes on professors. I like knowing things. Learning things. But I hate being there. I don’t like sitting in stuffy, chalky classrooms, bored. I hate the crowds and the noise, all the invasive smells and bright colors, elements I can handle in the evenings when I’ve had a few whiskeys, but not in the daylight, where such details assault me. The work has never been difficult. And maybe that’s been part of the problem, too. What’s always preceded my dread and my craziness has been a feeling of uninterestingness. This is different from being bored - I’m a quiet person. A loner. I don’t need action. But I need interesting. School wasn’t interesting anymore, and beyond that, it was ruining me. I’m close to graduating, but it’s not worth it.

So there’s that. I’m job-hunting, packing my stuff, breaking up cat fights, and holding on for the next thing. I knew as a teenager that I wasn’t going to have a steady, one-country life. My life hasn’t been abnormally unsteady, but it’s been rocky and changeable, mostly because I can’t sit still. I went through a phase of being unaware. Then when I recognized this quality, I felt superior. Bohemian, I kept calling it, though it was anything but. Then I wanted desperately to be something - someone - else, something quieter and consistent and less prone to my personal brand of wildness, a wild that is not wild by dramatic standards, but wild, nonetheless. And now I’m beginning to accept this, my little fate. I almost like it, defective brain and all.

So! We’re caught up, then. I’m OK, you’re OK, let’s do it.

Posted by: Zosia | 09-13-2007 | 03:09 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (1)