“This has been your hardest year.”

–”Something to Do With My Hands” by Her Space Holiday. It has been, I think. Not that the depressed-kid years weren’t hard. But this year has just been so packed. I have grown so much, and I’m not sure I recognize the person I’ve become, or that she recognizes the person I used to be.

This time last year, I did not know I was gay. This time last year, I had long, messy, triangular hair. This time last year I was frightened by a monologue about cutting. This time last year the only thing that fazed me academically was factoring trinomials. This time last year I had three best friends and we would freeze our asses off and embarrass our hearts out at lunch together. This time last year I hated A.G. This time last year Buck’s Rock was heaven, and summer was not something I’d ever want to spend at home. This time last year I think I was still wearing red nail polish every day, and constantly repainting it. This time last year I was still going through withdrawal from Arsenic and Old Lace. This time last year my walls and ceiling were very much barer, and the collection of sharp things on my windowsill did not exist. Our house was smaller and our backyard larger, our dog younger. My sister couldn’t drive. Every friend I had was my age, or far far away. I had a crapload of bracelets on my right wrist and an occasional sketchbook-journal. I had music in purple pen on my arms. I listened to Rent, Spring Awakening, the Beatles. I thought I liked C.K. I thought my only dream was to act. I had not even the remotest idea what love felt like.

I don’t know who that girl is anymore. The girl I am now is fourteen. Her favorite writers and musicians are all gay, just like she is. Her ceiling is covered in indie song lyrics and her walls are covered in art she made and postcards signed “I love you and miss you, Leah.” Her floor is covered in a rug, scarves, boots, rolls of colored duct tape, skinny jeans. She has a razorblade and scissors on her windowsill, sometimes other things too. She has scars on her left thigh and one thin red line on her right ankle. She has notebooks full of words, an iPod and CDs full of strange beautiful music, and lots of unworn necklaces. She has short hair dyed a reddish color underneath and a yellow hair tie on an otherwise bare right wrist. She has a little peeling turquoise nail polish on her left thumb nail, but no others. Her best friends are one and two years older than her and don’t like each other very much. She is getting 60s in math and physics and doesn’t mind it. CTY was heaven, and Buck’s Rock was earthly, even hellish. Next summer is a blurry mystery of CTY, the beach, volunteering, walking, bicycling, writing, and more options that will no doubt appear. This girl can ride the train alone and has people to see in New York and Philadelphia. She has friends in every grade at her school and can’t have an uninterrupted conversation in the hall. She’s going to be in a play directed by her sister who is also sort of her friend.

She is certain she has been in love, one out of the two times she said so, and she knows she has been loved, even when she didn’t love back. She knows that life is more complicated than friendship and girlfriendship, that not all relationships can be defined. She is acutely aware that she is growing up and even though she sometimes hates it she is learning to accept.

It frightens me how different I am. Last year, I- I can’t even compare some situations. And yet I look at stuff I wrote back then and it isn’t so different from anything I write now. “I wonder if I am a constant…” So many things say I am not but that index card I found says I am, that no matter how much I don’t remember it, sometime last year I felt and wrote and thought in a way I can identify with now. I think perhaps the seed of me, my core and essence, is the same, but it’s growing. I am growing up and my heart and mind and soul and horizons and styles and tastes are all growing too, expanding. My seed is stretching roots and branches, dreaming of reaching the center of the earth and the top of the sky. I am still me, the same girl, but so much better. I am sanded down but somehow roughened up, if only because the inside of me is rough and what this year rubbed off was a smoothness I was trained into, a shell the world put on me. I am me and I was me. They are not the same but they are the same. I am myself, even more so than I used to be. I have uncovered me, discovered me, or begun to. I am constant in an ever-changing way but you’ve got to look close to see more than just one or the other.

Curiouser and curiouser and too curious.

I do a lot of things “you don’t” do on my quest for knowledge. I want to know as many things as possible so I can draw good conclusions. I hate coming to false conclusions from made-up evidence. I need conclusions because life requires that I make choices based on my opinions. Opinions are simply conclusions one forms, of feelings and evidence. I am an evidence person and the evidence has got to be TRUE so I don’t feel like a phony. What kind of hypocrite would I be, sitting enthroned upon my notebook, examining the world, but only seeing things one skewed, imaginary way? That would be terrible. So I am curious. I pry and snoop and infiltrate and commit various other sins and crimes and act like Pandora. Every bit of information I learn is another malicious demon released from the box, another thing making me suspicious of people, or mean to someone, or unreasonably anything to anyone. I want to know too much, and I spend too much time thinking about it all.
I am too emotional and it is unacceptable. I become that way when those around me seem ignorant, cold, cruel, dull, useless. I can go from laughter to tears with one frustrating comment, from relaxed in my seat to pressing a crushed Playbill against my face, hiding in it. This is no one’s fault. My mother is a trigger and she thinks she is a gun. Or perhaps she just thinks I am terrible, spoiled rotten and aiming to hurt her. My father thinks I don’t care about him because my actions spoil his happiness. My sister thinks she is underappreciated. Meanwhile, I cry, and hide in my hair. They see it as hostility. They don’t understand that this is restraint. I was trying to help and they rejected it and told me I was messing things up so I cried. They told me to stop fussing so I hid. They told me to get myself together so I spoke no trembling words, breathed quietly, wiped away tears, and tried not to affect them anymore. This was wrong too. I do not understand why. I was not hurting anyone, yet my sister is allowed to whine. I was trying to obey, yet she is allowed to ignore every word. I ask “Why?” and they tell me it is in the attitude. “She is not hostile.” I am not trying to hurt you! I was trying to help you and now I am trying to show you that I am hurt! Once they let me be quiet and drink tea behind my hair, peace returned. Our happiness returned.
We never fix anything, just ignore it. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” – this is not our rule. Our rule is “if it’s still working, most of the time, tolerably well, don’t fix it.” Thus every family outing sets itself up for ruin and I can’t stop it. They don’t cooperate because they don’t see. I can’t make anybody see anything. I wish I could go blind so I wouldn’t want to anymore.

growing up and feeling it.

I used to never understand people like Zoe Trope, with all her attractions and friends and more-than and the subtle differences between relationships. I’m realizing now that middle school felt difficult but wasn’t, because there were scripts and defined roles. It was easy, but also as painful as it seemed. Life in upper school seems so much more free-form and you have to make everything from scratch, all you know is what you really think and how you honestly feel and what you want and what you don’t. Figuring out what to do about that is entirely your own personal business. That’s complex and confusing but I like it because all these nuances make me feel powerful. I can navigate these seas which easily become stormy, and I emerge only scratched, bruised, maybe bleeding, but alive, so alive.

I have the power to sail this ship of me any way, anywhere, I want. And I may have had that before, I suppose, but I didn’t realize it. Middle school is not conducive to realizing things like that. They like to give you structure, characters to play and lines to say. And it works, but when you are ready to get out, you are ready to get out. I was ready to get out several months before I could and that’s why spring felt like hell. But life is climbing ever higher, up and down but from Mars (as Mr. Stephens would say) it looks like a line with a positive slope. Somehow I can be in pain, alone, anxious, exhausted, and still enjoying every minute of it because it feels so much more real and I feel so much more human.

let’s see how long this stays a secret, or what it becomes.

I want public but not. Is that allowed? I wonder how long it will take me to show this to someone, or whether anyone will ever find it by themselves. Really all I want is a place to put the parts of my journal I think are good to read, things I wrote not entirely for me. Or maybe when I get really really intense about anything and the words hidden in the paper pages of my notebook are no longer enough. In theory this is hardly more than that, but I don’t know. I’m aimless tonight, and I wonder if this will end like my myspace experiment…never updated, never checked, one more unloved chunk of t3h intrawebz.

We shall see.