On my first day of school, my parents walked me to the front doors. I was shocked when they told me I wasn’t just there to play with my friend. They took pictures of me in my pale yellow dress with baby-blue and pink roses on it. As expected, I was shy and quiet, but underneath that exterior, my personality packed a punch. My sense of humor was a mix of my wry mother, my goofy father, and my sarcastic babysitter. Oh, and the George Lopez show, which I would watch anytime there was an unattended television late at night.
If I was nervous, I don’t remember it. I remember watching a classmate come into the doors, bawling her eyes out, and thinking ‘good thing I didn’t do that’. (She later became one of my best friends). But, I do remember loving to learn, having that community, and especially receiving any form of academic validation.
I loved grammar and storytelling and I remember writing a children’s book with two of my childhood besties and thinking it was going to be published. I was the editor - ironic given my lackadaisical attitude for typos now. The story was based on my dog Jack and his adventures, which were all entirely true, by the way. Like, eating gum and having a beard made out of it for a week, eating the filet mignon we made for my mom’s birthday, or eating a chocolate chip muffin I had saved for myself. (Got to give him props, the man loved to eat.) Due to creative differences, my friends wanted to work on the book during recess and I wanted to swing, the book deal came to a heated, unfulfilling end. We smiled and played at recess the next day. How simple.
That’s the thing, as a child I never needed to know who I was, I just was. I got in fights with the boys when they tried to be misogynistic, I got in arguments with my friends when I caught a sniff of unfairness, but I never once talked back to a teacher. I sat next to the rowdier members of the class and cast them jaded glances whenever they talked out of turn. The one boy I had a crush on never knew, but I always pretended I was in the middle of a romantic comedy for the thrill of it anyway. I wrote terribly crafted novels about a world where it’s always Halloween (halloweentown rip-off much!). Whenever my teacher let me share, I would get up in front of the class and animatedly explain the world-building elements and draw on the whiteboard with blue markers.
I was incredibly extrinsically motivated. I set my sights on the Surprise Box, a treasure chest full of prizes for exemplary behavior. For two weeks straight, I memorized a very-long word, whose meaning I never knew, and would spell it for my first grade teacher, Ms. Kren. The final word I recited was “Superman,” the simplest one of them all, and that was when she let me get my prize. I suspect she just wanted me to leave her alone. Sometimes, I would forge my reading minutes because I was hyper-competitive and one girl in the class was always going toe-to-toe with me. One week I wrote that I read for 16,000 minutes. Suffice to say, that math was corrected by my teacher, and I never lied about my reading minutes again.
As a kid, it was never expected to be anything other than myself, so I never needed to try nearly as hard. Now that I’m 23, every day is strenuous and every interaction is overthought. I think Brat Summer skipped over me and landed me in Phoebe Bridgers Purgatory. I was on the subway platform, listening to ‘Graceland Too,' when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, expecting to be almost slapped again, (a story for another time). Instead, it was something great. I was my friend! Just out in the wild, the two of us meeting in the middle on our commute home from work. On her way out the doors at her subway stop, she kissed me on the forehead.
Last week, on my first day of work, two of my best friends walked me to the doors. I was shocked when they told me that I had to keep going there every morning, not just to play pretend. They took pictures of me in my professional attire, navy blue pants and red ballet flats that gave me horrible blisters. As expected, I was shy and quiet, until I took a deep breath. Who I am now, well, that’s a mixture of everyone I know and love and loved. And George Lopez.
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