Trying to pinpoint my shift to introversion
In eighth grade history class, I wrote “hell raiser” on my notebook against the warnings of my teacher. I argued with the student teachers who were in classes full of snotty teenagers as the teachers left the room to do things not dealing with..snotty teenagers. I had attitude. In eighth grade study hall I would get in trouble for talking. Nowadays, none of this is usual behavior. I can’t pinpoint the reason behind the extrovert-introvert shift.
In Middle School, cold lunch and hot lunch were separated into gym versus cafeteria. The gym people sat on the floor, the cafeteria people sat at tables like civilized beings. I sat in the cafeteria with kids not necessarily my friends with my cold lunch. There I was introduced to goth clothes and Marilyn Manson. It was a splitting of friends and interests. I began to explore the fluidity of gender identity. I painted my nails with white-out and colored them with marker, scraping it all off with a scissors in the last class of the day.
I think maybe my parents thought that the death of my grandfather affected me more than it actually did. They had me sit in on some grief group for a few days in the office. I cried when I found out he died but what kid wouldn’t cry when their mother was inconsolable?
I failed 8th grade. My best friend from elementary school became popular and I became more of a sidekick. I had to get my parents not to hold me back. I took a two week class before high school began as a transition into high school. One of the boys I went with who wiped his pizza hands on his pants died in a car accident years later in a snowstorm after going to a ballroom dance. I went to one of those funerals, wrote a note to the family that their child would be the catalyst for breaking free from this introversion. It wasnt the case. A few years after that, I worked up the courage to ballroom dance for three years.
In middle school Spanish class we had to record ourselves speaking Spanish. This may not have been the beginning but it’s burnt itself in my memory.
I did well my first year of high school. Although I was in a remedial math class. I remained friends with the less popular kids that were in band class or homeroom. Really though, I had become a bump on a log. I was Darlene from Roseanne, never leaving the couch, watching Darlene lay on the couch. I went home and hibernated in front of the television watching Golden Girls reruns. Women in the last years of their lives had more life, adventure, and excitement than I did as a teenager. I have wasted so much time, maybe that’s why I don’t want to waste anymore trying to fit in with others even in making the smallest sacrifices between things I think are a waste of my time.
Conversations that never happened seem to be a flood in my brain. I’ve recognized so many after-the-fact moments where I would have said something that would have been bad timing.
My silence has always been supported by my own justifications of what the effects would have been had I said something stupid or in bad taste. Like bullets I can’t take back when shot at the wrong people or the right people at the wrong time. This is a different story with my writing. I am unapologetic in what I write. I do not detract my honest words when written down on some form of written medium.
To look around in a room, I wasn’t gifted with cookie cutter symmetry even though I spent so much effort trying to blend into the crowd. It’s such a pity to want to be the same as a child and different as an adult. So much energy wasted. The bullets you can’t put back. But maybe that’s a good thing. To be aimed and cocked and serious without warning.
