Rereading the last post. I sound like such a normal kid. But I really wasn’t. I was known as one of the weirdest girls in school. Outlandish is a good word to insert here. Straight A, yes. Dressed extremely weird and extremely different every single day. Some days i had a long scarf on my head in the fashion of a turban with a long non-clingy sack-dress that touched the floor and other days I wore layers of ripped tights with jean shorts and my John Lennon t-shirt.
I was pretty, but I countered that constantly by being class clown. I was almost every teacher’s pet and got away with shit (all small shit) because I made the best grades and I felt passionate about every subject. My perfectionist nature (which came from being the oldest in an alcoholic family before I met my dad) dictated that if I was going to be anything, including bizarre, then I would be the best at it.
I actually joined drill teams for two reasons
- I LOVED TO DANCE. Part of me always wanted to throw academics away and be the next Madonna.
- I was trying hard to remake a relationship with my jr high best friend. We had grown far apart our freshman year because she started running with a very different crowd. She went to parties with alcohol and started having sex and I felt immeasurably left behind because those weren’t things I would dare to do. Growing up with that stepfather I talked about earlier made me petrified of drugs and alcohol and sex.
I was a super-nerd, high-achieving, self-loathing freak. I ran with all the crowds and fit into none of them. I had friends in the heavy metal group, the goths, the nerds, the band geeks, the theatre freaks. They all loved me and I them. But I didn’t fit into any of them enough to feel a part of them. I lectured the misfits about drugs. I gave my lunch money to those who weren’t eating because they were saving for a pair of Doc Martins. I stayed late after physics class to have a few more minutes to shoot the shit about particles with my physics teacher. I protested when one of my guy friends got suspended for wearing a skirt to school.
I went to a low-income school in Houston. We even still called it “the other side of the tracks” back then. But that just meant that those of us who were striving were striving through some mean-life shit. We all got that about each other and our cliques and groupings weren’t like at wealthier schools. People will say that Northbrook, for the most part, really had a live and let live policy amongst the students.
I also remembered that my goal was to be a veterinarian. I wrote my last senior paper on how I was going into zoology. I was going to head off to the forest and be Jane Goodall asap. Animals weren’t going to care what clothes I wore or pressure me sexually from every angle.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a girl these days.
What I do know is that, in 1993, we were still fighting a lot of fights. And I was fighting the fight of wanting to be perfect for my dad who I had just met not long ago. I was fighting the fight of being constantly disappointed that I felt my birth mother didn’t love me like she loved her other kids (my mom was 19 when i was born and my dad was 17, she didn’t tell him i was his because she didn’t want to “ruin his life at a young age”, that is actually all understandable for the time. ) I was fighting inside about feeling like a walking object. I attracted sexual attention with every movement, it seemed. By this age, I had decided that the best thing to do with that was to use it to my benefit at every opportunity. It helped me cope and made me feel less like the hunted animal I was.
Right now, the sun is beginning to touch the first ⅓ of the mountains across the valley from me. The hue is pink-orange this morning on the rocks. There is a ten year old burn scar on the tops of those hills and I stare at it often. I think of the raging fire ten years ago that topped that hill and scared the living shit out of me. Now grass is growing.
Most of us are strong enough to come back. I was about to write that we all are. But that’s not true. What made me stronger can break another. That’s ok. We all survive in our own ways.
But girls are or were raised like animals trapped in cage. Don’t do this or that or that. Be this and this and that. It’s the only way society will ingratiate you to the next level. Also- you always need to get to the next level. Also- we are going to assault you and rape you and make sure you never feel the full pink-orange sun on your face without also thinking of what a sham you are. That all you’ve got is a little grass growing while the next hill still has tall trees and an ecosystem around them that is thriving.
We get burnt up. And then everyone wonders why we didn’t get to our full potential. I wonder. And I’m now pissed about it.
Scarlet Pearl 