The homecoming float is being erected in my friend’s barn this year, and the sophomore class is going to kick some ass! Woo-hoo! I repeat this to myself as I get ready to go work on the float, as I brush my hair and try to flatten down the frizz and dabble with some of my mom’s foundation to maybe cover up a freckle or two. I don’t have any cool clothes, and I’m still dying for a pair of those wooden clogs with no dorky straps, but I can’t get them.
I call to my mom that I’m leaving for Katie’s and head out the door. It’s about a ten-minute walk, and it’s a beautiful, cool, crisp fall night. I can smell someone’s fireplace in the air, and when I’m walking in this atmosphere it’s as if nothing in the world is happening around me. I simply am, and I realize how much I missed that feeling since moving into the village this summer.
I walk confidently, as I’ve taught myself to do, because when I’m alone I can do anything, be anybody. As I come up her driveway, I hear voices—laughing, joking around, mock indignation—and freeze inside. I’m here; I have to go in, but once I go in I’m invisible. I’m not one of those people who go to pep rallies and football games and homecoming dances. My friend is one of those people, but she’s been my friend since fifth grade, before these things mattered, and I’m afraid she’s kind of stuck with me now.
I enter the barn and take in all that’s going on: the flat wagon on which the float is being built; the rolls and rolls of crepe paper being tossed about by the boys who really didn’t come here to work; the popular girls up on the float trying to create something out of nothing. I hang back and lean against a wall, wrestling with my ever-present dueling demons of wanting to be seen and wanting to be invisible, and realize that I’m trying to do the same thing as the popular girls are trying to do with the float: create a personality, a life, where there isn’t one.
I LOOK AT MY SENIOR PICTURE FROM HIGH SCHOOL.
Each time, I’m again surprised by my clear, smooth skin. And my eyebrows, of course. Any time I see a picture from back then, I am fascinated by my eyebrows—what they used to look like, whether they were even, if they matched my red hair exactly—because now, even when I allow them to grow, however minutely, they’re blond. It’s as though I don’t have them, anyway, which, in turn, helps me justify plucking them out any time I’m anxious. It’s your basic vicious circle.
High school opened the floodgates to my self-loathing. The real and imagined anxieties of puberty, combined with the real and imagined anxieties that were already in place, proved to be more than I could handle, and a depression kicked in that would last for years. Any shred of happiness that had managed to survive adolescence disappeared when high school hit.
Fortunately, it was also in high school that I was introduced to the “fake it till you make it” theory of survival. A female friend of my brother’s, who was a year ahead of me, was as insecure and self-loathing as I was—that’s probably why we connected—but she was funny and so it wasn’t as readily apparent that she had “issues.” We hung out whenever we could for the simple reason that no explanations were necessary about anything. We understood each other. She took me to a party one night in high school, and I was very nervous.
Before we went in, she took me aside and said, “I have this trick, okay? I use it all the time. You just pretend to be having a good time—really pretend, like you’re in a movie and playing a part—and before you know it, you’ll really be having a good time!” She then went into the party and started mingling and chatting with people and looking to all the world like she belonged.
I tried it for a while but soon realized that my gift was not found in pretending I was having fun. It was pretending I didn’t care if I had fun. Pretty soon, faking that came easily.
A poster hung in my bedroom for many years. It started with the words, in huge letters, “I AM ME.” It then went on to extol the virtues of being an individual, concluding in equally large print, “I AM OKAY.” Sometimes people make me laugh today when they prattle on about the power of self-affirmations, as if they’d discovered them. I was using one forty years ago to keep a gun out of my mouth.
It was also in high school that I discovered the many facets of alcohol. The drinking age then was eighteen, and so most high school graduation parties legally served alcohol, usually in the form of a keg. Since I had two older brothers, I was attending graduation parties in ninth grade.
I loved what alcohol did to me. Long before the concept of self-medicating gained popularity, I knew I loved being drunk. There was a phase of it in which I was happy and confident and everything I wanted to be in real life but wasn’t—when nothing was wrong with me or different about me and I was just as cool as the next kid. The hole in my heart that I kept trying to fill with love did not need to be filled when I was loaded. The bad news was that in order to maintain that phase, I had to stop drinking when I reached it, which I never did. Almost without fail I went into the next phase: the angry, crying, throwing-things phase. And even that wasn’t so bad as far as I was concerned because I never cried otherwise. It felt good to cry.
I drank every chance I got from tenth grade on. There was a bar conveniently located down the street, which also conveniently served minors, and weekends would find me there shooting pool and hanging out with an older crowd. The bars stayed open until 4:00 a.m., and I figured the later I stayed out, the better the chance my parents would be asleep when I got home—and, of course, the more I could drink.
Somehow, through this bars-open-until-4:00-a.m. behavior, I gained a reputation as a slut in high school, which was so off base as to be laughable. I’m not sure I ever kissed a boy in high school, although it might’ve happened and just been so shrouded in alcohol as to be unmemorable. Maybe people assumed that since I was out at the bars and shitfaced, I was going home with guys. I wasn’t. I stumbled home alone, sometimes crying, sometimes hysterical, but always alone.
My mom used to say that people thought her conceited in high school, misreading her shyness for arrogance; maybe people were misreading my propensity to stay out all night for being easy. I guess it could happen.
Actually, I’d decided long before high school, through careful reading of women’s magazines and Teen Beat, that the way to be cool was to be aloof, uncaring, untouchable. This would make boys want me. Boys didn’t like girls who were needy, clingy, or dependent—all the things I was—and so, in true “fake it till you make it” fashion, I pretended I was totally independent with no need for friends or love. I didn’t pay attention to the boys at school or the men at the bars; I did my own thing and made it clear that I needed no one. Then, one day—poof!—it was true.
I had pulled off a kind of magic trick. I had perfected a sense of aloofness that masked, even to me at times, my desperate need for love. I had cemented, for a long time to come, my inability to have a normal relationship based on mutual love, trust, and respect. Since I had none of those feelings for myself, I certainly couldn’t have them for someone else.
The possible labels were rock, jock, poindexter—and dork. The rocks took vocational classes and wore blue jean jackets and jeans and smoked cigarettes outside of the gym doors. The jocks were the athletes, or the cheerleaders, or the kids who dated the athletes or the cheerleaders. They dressed well, typically came from a family that was at least middle-income, and joined things like Ski Club and German Club. The poindexters were the smart kids, the ones who knew they were smart, and that being smart made them kind of uncool, and didn’t care.
The dorks were the leftovers—not cool enough for the rocks, not athletic enough for the jocks, not confident enough for the poindexters. Some of them were just average, normal kids who went about the business of school, hung with their friends, and were unaffected by the social aspects of labels. I was not one of those people. I was affected by the labels. I was smart, unattractive, wore thick glasses, had bright red hair, and dressed poorly.
Even though my brothers and friends were not dorks, I remained one in their midst. One would think that the blanket of dorkiness would have lifted merely by associating with them, but no such luck. My brothers simply moved in different circles. And what happened with my friends was kind of a grandfather-clause effect; we became friends early on, before the social rules were set up and enforced. Then, when we got older and it became clear that I was going to be a dork, my friends, who were clearly going to be jocks, kept me, anyway. I loved them for that.
Also, because of this cross-clique inclusion phenomenon, I was able to move freely between the other dorks and the jocks. I was infinitely more comfortable among the dorks, for sure. The only pressure with them was for grades, and I could compete with that. The jocks were more like my dangling carrot; everything about them was just out of my reach, but I kept right on trying. I was a plucky little dork.
I was also very bright, averaging in at least the high nineties pretty much every semester. English was my strong suit, and in ninth grade I was allowed to jump into junior and senior English classes while still receiving credit for ninth grade English. Through it all, I managed to spend an exorbitant amount of time obsessing about the jocks and their little preppy monogrammed purses and how I might earn enough money to buy one and whether I would finally be cool or simply a dork with a nice purse.
I was a perpetual wannabe. I wanted to be cool enough for my brothers to respect me and want to hang with me. I wanted to be a good athlete so the other kids would respect me and want to hang with me. I wanted to be beautiful so the other girls would respect me and want to hang with me. I needed desperately to be included, and it was, in retrospect, probably that very desperation that ensured it would never happen.
So I was on the fringe, and I couldn’t understand why my brothers were not. We all came from the same family, the same family situation, and yet they didn’t seem to struggle with the issues that consumed me on a daily basis. They were popular, athletic, musical, smart, and confident. They had friends and hobbies and lives. It really seemed quite unfair. Of course, they didn’t have OCD, so it was never a level playing field.
I took refuge in the bar down the street on weekend nights, hanging out with older kids so my age wouldn’t be as easily questioned. Being drunk made me feel invincible; it numbed the shame that burned in my gut, soothed the exposed nerve that was my emotional state. Alcohol was like a smooth, silky shawl around the shards of self-doubt that threatened to deflate me at every turn.
I was pretty sure right off the bat that I had a drinking problem, though. They say that if you even question whether you might be an alcoholic, then you probably are one; social drinkers don’t usually feel the need to ask.
DURING MY SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, MY BRAIN TOOK A TURN FOR THE WORSE.
After leapfrogging past everyone but the seven people ranked ahead of me in just about every subject for the past ten years, I became stupid. I don’t know how, although I’m inclined to believe the nightly drinking factored in. All I know for sure is that by the end of the first semester of my senior year, I was failing calculus and physics. Apparently, the alcohol went directly to the side of my brain that handles logic.
My eighteenth birthday, the day I turned legal, was in January of my senior year of high school. I spent the evening at one of the bars where I’d been drinking the past couple of years. As people bought me drink after drink to celebrate my big birthday, the bartender pretended not to notice that he’d been serving a minor all that time, and continuously served me White Russians, which tasted like vanilla milkshakes with a little kick. It was the little kick that got to me, and by midnight I was hammered.
What I remember goes something like this: I was too drunk to walk home, and my friends were too loaded to drive me home, so someone decided I should leave with a guy who, along with his twin brother, had quite the reputation as a ladies’ man. The next thing I remember is being pushed up against the passenger door of his car with my pants down. Even though he was pushed against me, he was having some trouble, er, “performing,” and finally he got pissed off and gave up.
I woke up in my own bed with a much clearer understanding of what it must feel like to be hit by a truck. My head was spinning and pounding, my body ached, and my privates were private no more. I hurt. And I was scared and angry and ashamed.
At about noon, I made my way downstairs where my mother was having coffee with a neighbor. They both agreed I looked horrible, and I went back to bed. When the neighbor left, I found my mother again.
“Mom,” I said, forcing the words out of my mouth, “Can you tell the next day if you’ve had sex?”
I thought my mom should’ve been more alarmed with the question than she was, but she wasn’t. “Yes, sometimes you can be sore for a day or two.” Like this was a conversation we had all the time: mother and daughter chatting about sexual exploits. Except that we never had those chats.
As the day progressed, she must have realized that something wasn’t right because she put me in the car and took me to see her gynecologist. It was my first time at such a doctor, an older male who made me very uncomfortable with his demeanor. After hearing my story, rather than examine me, he chose to lecture me instead. My mom and I sat in chairs facing his desk, both of us mortified as he extolled the dangers of excessive drinking and then sent us on our way.
I told my older brother about it, and he and his friends were all revved up to kick “the ladies’ man’s” ass—until I realized, seeing the twins in the bar the next week, that I didn’t know which one it was who had tried to have sex with me. After a few drinks one night, I singled out the twin I thought was guilty and I yelled, “You could’ve gotten me pregnant!” He looked at me for a second, and then just walked away. I was dismissed.
My brother and his friends lost their passion for justice when they realized they would never know who hurt me, and I lost mine when I realized that it happened because I was drunk. I told myself the assault was my fault; I was to blame. The shame of this would have been unbearable had I not been so practiced in the art of avoidance.
After my birthday, the idea of going to school—walking the hallways, dragging through classes, talking to friends or to teachers—became unbearable. I couldn’t concentrate, and most days I could barely get out of bed. Since English was the only subject of which we were required to take four years in order to graduate, and I had four of them due to the extra ninth-grade credit, it got worked out with the school that I would graduate mid-year. No one would have to know about my mental breakdown. I could retain my class ranking because I wouldn’t officially fail anything, and I could have some time before college to decide whether I wanted to live. This worked out well for everyone, I think.