This is, for all I can tell, a memoir excerpt. Happy reading!
As a child, I kept asking God to fix me. Change me. Make me pretty, not just smart. Make me clever and quick with my tongue, instead of overwhelmed and hot-faced when someone picked with me. How many times I wished to wake up different, on the other side of “amen.” Church folks kept saying he was a healer, so where was my healing from the afflictions that made me? I faced life awkward and pimply, sensitive skinned and deeply anxious about every little thing. I seemed to never change from the day before, the week before, the year before. If He was guaranteed to make a way for everyone in else, which way was I going to go?
“What’s wrong with you? You’re so weird.” Was it my grandmother who said that, or a schoolmate? The source of that disgust stopped mattering after a certain point; it all ran together in a cacophony, pouring over my body from the moment I got out of bed each day. I didn’t understand what made me such a misfit for every situation. It didn’t matter if I was in school, at church, or even at a restaurant. I could never seem to settle in and get the hang of being a “regular” person. I never felt like I fit in anywhere. Not even around family. I wanted to fix, fix, fix, fix my problematic existence. The source of my unnameable strangeness, it had to go away. I thought I had to go away. A different person needed to embody this name and skin, if they were every gonna be worth bragging on or knowing. Book-smart wasn’t enough, catatonic-when-humiliated was useless, and clumsily disembodied was an embarrassment. Lessons in situational awareness came from humiliation long before they did gentle experiential learning. I was the wrong kind of girl, wrong kind of Black, insufficiently everything.
I was misunderstood whether I spoke or not. My quietness was often received as being stuck up, accusations of snobbiness thrown at me like darts. A mousy, nervous “no, I don’t think I’m better than anybody” only served as confirmation bias. If I didn’t speak, I was wrong. If I opened up, I was weird. Nobody knew I was talented because I didn’t want to risk the derision or other reactions to my weird self. Some girl in third grade called me a lesbian because I didn’t have shame in those weird doorless bathroom stalls. I didn’t really know what it meant even when she explained; I was so literal. “Of course I like girls, I am a girl,” I thought to myself. I didn’t understand her point. She said I stared a lot. I looked at people when I spoke to them, like my family taught me. I thought I was being polite and showing respect. That needed to change. I thought watching my classmates was the way to learn about them.
I stared, probably, because I was trying to figure out what their bodies could do so different from mine. I was trying to transform myself by studying them; rebirth through osmosis. Could I be graceful or dainty? Good at double dutch? Capable of fighting? A good singer? Not fat? I would gladly give up straight As on spelling tests for hair that grew like normal hair. I wanted hair my mom knew how to take care of. It felt important to experience intergenerational hairstyling, even though my grandmother never knew how to handle my mom’s texture, either. I had a perm at age 6 … it’s not my mom’s fault that she had a kid with tight coiling, fine strands . As an adult, I now know my hair only differs from hers in that way. She didn’t know. I can’t say I knew, either. I coveted the Black girl experience of a mom who used bright colored barrettes and “ballies” to sculpt her baby’s hair into shiny indicators of care and closeness. I yearned for my mom to love me in that way, thinking it would give me what I felt missing deep down. I thought it would fix me. Heal me. Make me likable and normal, the way the other girls were. I felt rejected by her lack of knowledge and skill. I surmised that my hair must be the fault of my absent father; his genetics invited me to have hair like my maternal uncles, my grandfather. I had hair like the men closest to me. Another failure of my girlhood.
For junior high, I went to a different school each year. I was awkward and new, couldn’t reinvent myself to be cool. I just couldn’t break the tradition of talking too much, too loud, making associations that made perfect sense before they tumbled from my lisping mouth. “Your mouth is gonna get you in trouble,” my peers warned, because my observations were so specific and sometimes mean. I thought I was playing the dozens like they were; I thought I was bussin’, per the early 1990s parlance in Philly’s Black social spaces. I wanted to be liked and included so much that I adopted speech and language that didn’t even appeal to me. I was desperate for acceptance by the time I’d graduated eighth grade.
In high school, I struggled to such an extent that my weirdness had to take a backseat. Being one of 10 Black students in an elite private school environment was one thing; being a scholarship admission in the time of OJ Simpson’s not guilty verdict was quite another. I didn’t even have time to be egregiously weird to my Black friends. There were too few of us to be anything but united. The Black girls’ lunch table was as close to sanctuary as I’d possibly get.
Without even trying, I changed during my 1.5 years of college. I probably should have been in therapy instead, but it was 1998 and that just was not in my realm of possibility. I thought external sources of validation would teach me who I was. Much to my shame at 18, I didn’t know how to tell the truth about myself. I created conflict with my roommate, who I now wish I’d cursed out when I had the chance. I exaggerated about how scared I was about her constant drinking. I wasn’t scared of her. I was mildly envious of her bravado, how she’d been fucking grown men before we’d even graduated high school. I couldn’t understand how a white girl from Maine had nearly thirty-year-old Black men all up in her face.
As an adult, I now know she was conquest to them, and they were rebellious experimentation to her. She wasn’t a good person. I knew that, but nobody would believe me. So I played up the socially unacceptable ways she interacted with Blackness and Black people. She called me weird. But her parents pulled her out for ending up on academic probation. I could have had that room to myself spring semester. I wish I could have advised myself. I wish I knew that I was allowed to say no, and that it was a complete sentence. I had never known that. I would never know that, until I was decades older and years more bruised.
My first college party was in the residence halls, separated by gender. The girls’ side had men stripping for us. The boys’ side had women dancing for them. I remember my homegirl deciding to go because she wanted to see some dick in person. If I had to guess, she was as much of a virgin as I was. Her excitement far exceeded mine. I was just curious, still very shy around large groups of people I didn’t know. There was a gigantic trash can full of some kind of “punch” that tasted like acetone and crappy juice. It burned my nose, tongue, and lips. No amount of ice cubes made it drinkable. The windows in the suite were foggy, the space too crowded. If there was a good song playing over those speakers, I certainly don’t remember it. The bass was so thick it shook my hoop earrings and gave me a headache that lasted until the next day. The dancer was forgettable in a way I now find comical. He was just sweaty guy who seemed to have too much gel in his hair. Nothing appealed to me about a sinewy, man in unlaced Timbs and a bikini brief. The bulge wasn’t impressive; his dance moves were generic gyrations unworthy of note. The backflips, the reluctant spectacle making of a birthday girl at the encouragement of her homegirls, the baby oil and sweat. I wasn’t even buzzed. The adventure had called me; I found myself wishing I’d sent it to voicemail. By the time the lights came up, I had a headache and swore I’d never drink again. It was a waste of $20. I could have paid my long distance phone bill with it.
College changed me. Something in my mind broke and never quite came back together. I pulled myself out of academic probation that second semester of freshman year, only to flunk fully out the following fall. I remember telling my mom how tired I was, how I needed a break. She said, “I’m tired, too,” and reminded me I only had to make it to winter break. Winter break might as well have been in 2065. I didn’t have a slog to December in me. I didn’t have the focus or whatever to make my grades look good enough to conceal my struggles and anguish. I was unwell, and had been for a long time. I did not have the language to tell the truth about myself. I knew how to distance myself from the dark heaviness, and sound like I’d eventually get through it. I did not get through it. I didn’t know how to explain to my mom that I failed because I didn’t want to succeed. I did not want to be a college student nestled in the NYC suburbs where I did not feel safe. What I felt, all the time, was an incandescent shame that blinded me from my own self. I was lost, deeply, in socially acceptable dysfunction; my home life was profoundly fucked up. I was not necessarily safe in school environments, either. I had been pretending for years that I had the home life that could support me the way I needed. I was always hungry, always short on something. One day it’d be money for a school activity, another time it’d be privacy at home. I never got enough of what I needed in a house with too many people and not enough healing. I was broken, and though I had nowhere to go but a less-occupied home, I was certain I couldn’t keep up undergraduate studies. It wasn’t for lack of smarts. It was my exhaustion with life.