It's an unfortunate situation, really.

When I was 11, I moved.

It was October. I was the new girl in a new town and a new school, starting in the middle of the year. I don't remember any of this bothering me. In fact, I have fond memories of that sixth grade year. I was smart and blond and sweet. The teacher liked me and I made friends. I didn't realize that my secondhand clothes were frowned upon and no one had the guts to tell me. Ignorance was bliss. I played lots of kickball and even formed a little club of little girls. We created a name for ourselves using the first letter of each of our first names - very creative. We even had membership cards and, I believe, a newsletter.

Things were pretty good.

The next year, we moved from our cozy, poorly-performing elementary school to a much bigger junior high, full of older kids that had gone to other schools. Boys became very important, all of a sudden. This created a strangely competitive environment that made other things important, too, that hadn't been before. Clothes, alcohol, cursing, weekends at rollerskating rinks, you know, all of the things that make a 13 year-old feel cool.

As a somewhat pudgy middle child of a Christian family with 5 children, this created problems for me. I could not buy they clothes that everyone else had, and even if I could have, they wouldn't have looked the same on me. I wasn't allowed to date or go to the rollerskating rink. I didn't know how to talk that way or interact with boys that way.

And everyone knew it. I didn't get invited to parties. I didn't get asked on dates, or whatever the 13 year-old equivalent of a date is. Someone (now a dear friend of mine) on the bus asked me once, quite menacingly, if the book I had in my lap was a Bible. I think it was actually The Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Teen, which, in retrospect, should have been more embarrassing.

To make things worse, I had been put in a special group of "smart kid" classes and so I rarely saw most of the kids who were my friends at the other school and whose approval I desperately wanted.

I was miserable.

So miserable, in fact, that when the year ended I opted to go a boarding school, rather than return to that school for a second year. I couldn't handle the rejection and the inferiority any more. It was more like indifference, but we middle children are very sensitive to these things.

Funny thing about taking an average kid from a city public school and putting them in a fundamentalist Christian boarding school in rural New Hampshire - she turns into a cool kid.

In a world where all of the students sign a "no dancing," "no movies" contract, and where the entire 8th grade class is less than 10 people, it takes very little to impress, so impress is what I did. And, as that handful of more-sheltered-than-me kids began to love and respect me, I began to love and respect myself.

At Thanksgiving, my mom came and got me for good, mostly because the people at that school were a bit nutso - someone told me that if my older brother was accepted to Yale, he would certainly begin to worship Satan.

I returned to the public school with a confident and carefree spirit that changed everything. I didn't care any more if those same kids liked me, which, for some reason, made them like me. I had a lot of fun that year.



It's an unfortunate situation, really.

We all can't get shipped off to a nutso boarding school whenever we're struggling with low self-esteem. I just got lucky that one time.

This post was written as a part of a blogging game. The players are The Creative Collective and the topic is Change. See what the others are saying.

I'm up to my eyeballs.

An identity crisis. That's an interesting concept.

I'm beginning to think that it's the people who believe they know exactly who they are that are really in a crisis. Like those people who believe they know everything about God (what an idea!) from how the earth came to be to how these things called "the fall" and "reconciliation" work. Those people make me nervous. I don't mean to otherize. What I mean to say is that I believe there's something healthy about thinking about one's belief system as a lens through which to see the world, rather than real answers to questions that we just can't know. It's like building a skyscraper with a bit of give, so that when an earthquake strikes, it doesn't crumble like my gingerbread houses always do.

But this is mostly besides the point. I'd just like to apply this same principal to knowing oneself. It seems to me that as long as my life is not static, I'll never stop getting to know myself. And even if I experience something and then experience it again five years later, I'll be a different person who responds differently. To be honest, it's exhausting, but I suppose it's better that finding myself and my life boring.

This all comes to mind as I've been working on this self-employment project over the past several months. It's forced me to develop skills that I never wanted to develop before because it would have required leaving my comfort zone. Risking rejection, risking failure, speaking with confidence to skeptical people, sales, relying on others, asking for things - these are all things that I avoided before, but now, I've been slowly wading into a pool of them. At this point, I'm up to my eyeballs, but I'm learning to swim, so that's good.


This post was written, very tardily, as a part of a blogging game. The players are The Creative Collective and the topic is Identity Crisis. See what the others are saying.

It matters.

I've been learning something pretty amazing lately:

Being kind to a person can change their life.

I've found myself in the midst of a community of extraordinary people, all with different backgrounds, different goals, different priorities, different most things, really. It's neat.

I've also found myself, rather surprisingly, with a lot to offer: a rather over-sized couch, a dining room table, an ear, and a mouth that is capable of saying "It's okay to be you. We can try to be better together."

I didn't realized that these things were so valuable, but as it turns out, they are. And I've been increasingly grateful to have them. And as more people enter in, they find what they have to offer and they give it and I am grateful. I think you can see where this is going. It seems like real, organic community happens when everyone becomes aware of, grateful for, and excited to give of what they have to give.

No one is perfect. I trust you. It's not about being right. What do you need?

We should say these things to one another more.

I was talking with someone about this - this community that I'm invested in - and I realized that this is, in part, what I'm trying to do right now with Mercury Studio, but on an occupational level. I want to give people a place where they can do their work in a community that is supportive and positive. 

It matters.

I guess when something is important to you, it moves you in every part of life.

This post was written, very tardily, as a part of a blogging game. The players are The Creative Collective and the topic is What Moves Me. See what the others are saying.