I am me

As I lie here tonight in bed, I sit and think about the craziness of the day. Being a teenager is nothing like TV. In fact, this whole period in my life reminds me of the time I went shopping in a thrift store with my Aunt Betty. No matter what clothes I tried on nothing really seemed to fit. The closest I came was Christmas sweater with a poodle on the front—something no one in their right mind would be caught wearing outside of the house. (So, of course, my Aunt Betty bought it for me and made me wear it in our family Christmas picture that year.) Anyway, I just feel like nothing I do feels quite right, no matter what I do.

I sometimes wish that someone had sat down with me before all this, honestly, and had said “Look, this part of your life is going to suck and will make no sense. People will judge you by your clothes, by your weight, and by the amount of money you have. Everything about you will be awkward from time to time. In addition, you’ll have lots of firsts—first kiss, first date, first school dance--and very few of them (especially the kiss) will be as graceful or as magical as you imagined.”

If I had known, I would have felt so much more prepared. The weird thing is my parents generally pay little mind to preparing my brothers and me for this sort of stuff. They spend all their time and money getting us piano lessons so we can go to Julliard or extra tutoring so we can be at the top of our class. They never teach us about the real stuff that shakes us up—emotions, sexuality, love. In fact, I remember going to the library when I was 13 to find out how sex worked. I snuck around through the stacks of books and sat in the far corner on the floor so that no one would see me reading a book about sexuality by a man named Kinsey.