Because Sometimes You Just Need to Say Things

I don’t look like the other girls on campus, even when I do myself up like them. Even when I blowdry my hair and put on eye makeup and my trendiest top (which, admittedly is probably an Angry Birds t-shirt) I still can’t capture what they have. I don’t look like them, I don’t walk like them, I don’t talk like them. Sometimes I feel like I live in a different world.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, except that it brings back memories, memories of the time when I tried to shut myself off from everything good that the world had to offer because I was too afraid of the bad that comes along with it. Sometimes I think I’ve almost forgotten about it, and then I’ll see or hear something that reminds me of those days and the pain is still there, as fresh as if it was happening today. The one thing I never, ever want to do again is shut myself off from the world.

But how do I become part of this world if I don’t play by its rules. That’s how it all started. I started exploring the world I had tried to shut out, and oh, what a beautiful place it was. How could I hate a world that gave me American Eagle jeans, Katy Perry songs, Apple products, and Diet Coke? But it also gave me something else. It gave me a message: be perfect.

So I tried. I tried to be every kind of perfect I could think of. I tried to have the perfect body, perfect clothes, perfect hair. I tried to keep my apartment perfectly clean and get perfect grades. I tried to be the perfect singer, the perfect writer. And I failed miserably at every single attempt. But I had to keep trying. I had to be perfect so I could fit perfectly in to the world.

And didn’t just have to be perfect, but when my friends’ lives started to fall apart, I had to be happy, too. Somebody had to be, after all. We had to have an antidote to the gloom and doom that seemed to permeate every get-together. It was easy at first. Keeping it together when everyone else is in crisis is actually one thing I’m really good at. And it made me feel like I was finally achieving something. I was finally perfect and happy…and exhausted…and alone…

But what could I do? I would walk through fire before I would turn away from my friends when they need me, and what they need is a happy face. If that’s all I can give them, then I will put on my happy face from now until the end of eternity, no matter how much it hurts inside because my friends have been there for me in ways they don’t even understand.

Sometimes it feels like a lie, though. It feels like we’re all lying to each other. Why can’t we tell the truth, say how much we miss the fun we used to have, the way we used to know and understand each other. Maybe no one else feels that way. But I do. I’m tired of walking on egg shells. I miss the truth, the depth, that we used to have. I miss having people who actually wanted an honest answer when they asked, “How are you?”

And then I realized that I’m not sure anything is real anymore. I’m not sure I remember how to tell the difference between the things that really are a part of me and the things I pretend are a part of me because it’s a prerequisite for the perfect, shining world I want so badly to belong to. The thing is, I’m pretty sure most things are the latter, with one exception. Bet you can’t guess what it is.

I should have realized the minute I walked into rehearsal, forty-five minutes late, and with all the grace and discreetness of a herd of elephants, that I had stepped into a completely different world. It never ceases to amaze me how choir seems to have some sort of magical force-field surrounding it, protecting it from the unspoken rules that dictate every minute of the rest of my life. There is not one other place on the planet that I could make such an idiot of myself and not think a thing of it. It’s the only time I feel real. Even after everything that’s happened this summer, that hasn’t changed. And so I ask myself the same question I’ve been asking for years: how do I convince myself to be that person, the person I am at choir, all the time?

Cripes if I know. I had it almost, sort of figured out once. But that was four years ago. Things are different now. But somehow I have to figure it out again, because this isn’t working. I wish I knew how. How do I sort out what’s fake from what’s real? How do I convince myself that that music-spilling, riser-stomping, stopping-in-the-middle-of-a-song-to-ask-her-friend-what’s-funny girl is good enough, just the way she is, to leave the choir room and go out into the big, beautiful world, whether they like it or not?

I wish I knew. But I know that in that moment, as I gathered up my scattered music and scurried noisily up the risers to my spot in the back row I felt more like myself than I have in a long time. That has to mean something.