Claiming My Voice: From the darkness, the light emerges.

I was on a drive today and listening to my David Bowie station, and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on. I was catapulted back to middle school!

I don’t know when it started but at some point I remember KNOWING I was different. I was too tall, my hair was too red, I was too good at school, and everyone else knew how to be in the world and I didn’t.

In my Junior High, there were days you could pay a dollar and dedicate a song to someone and during lunch they’d play it and there was a sort-of DJ that would talk a bit and play the songs. One day one of the cool girls had dedicated “Bohemian Rhapsody” to another gal. I remember so clearly the DJ saying “This song is going out to <gal X> from <gal Y>!” and my first thought was ‘That’s odd…normally girls don’t dedicated songs to other gals” (A: I had only dedicated songs to the one boy I liked and B: lesbians weren’t really out back then) so it was not with any judgement that I thought it was odd that a girl dedicated a song to another girl…I just thought it was different…but I digress. “Bohemian Rhapsody “started and I listened and was fascinated. I had not heard anything like it and I loved it. But I also was left feeling like an outsider…again. How did these people know about this cool music? I was not aware of music like this. I had a couple of Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd albums my brother had gifted me when he moved away but that was the extent of my musical knowledge. No…wait…I had an Olivia Newton John tape and one of Shawn Cassidy. I had known about them because they were main stream enough to be on TV.

I wanted so desperately to be like them. They seemed to know how and where to buy the neatest clothes (while my gramma…bless her heart…made mine or we bought them at K-Mart). They knew about wonderful music. They traveled in packs while I generally only had one or two friends. They seemed like they were always laughing. I wanted to feel confident in my own skin. I wanted to have hosts of friends. I wanted to be happy and I just wasn’t. And they were.

No matter what I did, I could feel like one of them. I tried to find clothes that looked like theirs but when I looked in the mirror, I always felt not-quite-right. I started smoking and one of the cool girls saw me and gave me the nod and that made me feel like I was getting there, but that was short lived since I couldn’t walk around smoking so they all could see me. I told one gal about how I didn’t know where to find good music and she turned me on to FM radio…I shit you not…I didn’t even know that was a thing before then. She also let me borrow a couple Black Sabbath albums. I still love them (and now I’m off to amazon to download them ;). Again…I digress…

So here I am at 12 or 13 trying desperately trying to feel as cool as they seem and failing at every turn. At some point in 8th grade I went to a dance. It was not the first dance I had attended. I wanted to dance. I wanted to have a boy like me and I wanted to sway with him to the music. What always happened was the classic middle school dance thing of the girls sitting on one side of the gym and the boys at the other…Except the cools kids. They danced and we outsiders watched in awe and admiration and envy. At this particular dance I went into the bathroom and while I was in the stall, some of the cool girls came in and were talking about “doing drugs.” I can’t tell you what kind of drugs, I just knew they were talking about doing those things that made them feel good and they weren’t supposed to be doing them. Being pretty naïve, you couldn’t have paid me to tell you what drugs where outside of weed and PCP (and I only knew those because we watched a movie about them in school). I knew there were others but I didn’t know what they were, but these girls were doing them. And suddenly I KNEW what I had to do. I needed to “do drugs” and then they would like me.

I went home and looked through our medicine cabinet to see what drugs I could do. I found a giant bottle of something that said to take it daily. My silly little girl mind decided that since one only needed to take this once a day (where the others were a few times a day) that this drug must be really potent and if I was going to do this, I was going to DO THIS! I grabbed this bottle and hid it in my room. The next school day, I took this bottle to school and convinced my friend to “do drugs” with me. We both took one each and waited. We didn’t know what “feeling high” was supposed to feel like but we were excited to see. Nothing happened.

Lunch was over and we were in the girls locker room talking about if we were going to try more and see if more made us “high.” Just then, one of the cool girls came in and asked what we had. I had arrived! The coolest of the cool girls was talking to me! I told her I didn’t know what these pills where but that we were trying them. Without blinking she asked for some. I was so happy to be able to supply this gal with my bounty. So I poured a bunch in her hand (oh, I guess I should tell you there were like a hundred pills in this bottle – that should be telling about what kind of pills these might have been). She went over to the sink and started taking them all. I tried to tell her to only take one or two since we didn’t know what they were, but she just kept popping in more and downing them with water from the sink. We all got changed for PE and went into the gym. The image is still etched in my mind. We were all sitting on the gym floor while the teacher was talking and I was watching my new friend when suddenly she flopped over and started flailing around like a fish on land. She was frothing at the mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. They called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. She survived. I still live with that guilt.

Within days, everyone found out I was the one who had given the most popular girl in school those “drugs.” And they all hated me. If I had felt outside before, I was now even farther out. And I deserved it. The only person who didn’t treat me like shit after that was her. She used to tell people she had made that choice and not to blame me, but no one listened.

I didn’t go to school much after that. At 17, I got my GED so I could go to college. Sure, I’m smart and that is what I told people…that high school bored me and I just wanted to start college but really I needed to be somewhere people didn’t know what I’d done: Somewhere maybe I didn’t feel like a weirdo.

At every job I’ve ever had and even in college, I have found the cool kids right off and I look at them and want to be one of them. I have changed the way I talk and the way I dress to try to fit in and no matter what, I never quite pull it off. I know I am not one of them (and as my life choices got worse, not only was I not one of them, we all knew I was less than them).

I’d like to tell you that today I have so much self esteem that I don’t care about them. That would be a lie. I want to be cool. I want people to look at me and think ‘Wow, I love her style! I wish I were more like her’ or ‘Gosh, I hope she’ll be my friend’ but not so much that I will change who I am and I no longer harm others in my pursuit of coolness.

I will never be one of them. But I am one of the ones like me. We have dark pasts. We don’t always say the right thing. We are regularly looked at sideways for saying something odd. Our clothes don’t always match…or they match so much it’s a bit nutty. Some of us have no hair and some of us have giant hair. We cuss too much and have tattoos and pray to a loving god none the less. We don’t really fit in mainstream society (and if you see us there and think we fit just fine, please know we are faking our asses off).

Joshua Radin has a song called “Belong.” I love Josh and at one of his concerts he talked about how he wrote this song because he was talking to someone and they were agreeing that they both never felt like they belonged. They came to the conclusion that even when we don’t belong with “them,” we belong with the ones that don’t belong. I am one of them.