Confessions of a Grown Child

 

 

ALLOW ME TO SHOUT FOR A COUPLE MINUTES

My reality, since I can remember, has been defined by one of very few assumptions: I'm pretty fucking lame. And not in that cool Matrix, cute girl next door, please-tell-me-I'm-not kind of way.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time trying to surround myself with people who were higher up on the cool spectrum. Seven year old me would hang around the cool kids' houses and watch them do things that I thought were so much better than the things I could do. Twelve year old me would make constant eye contact with the cool kids at school, hoping they would acknowledge me (an act I can confidently declare now, as creepy). Seventeen year old me would daydream about what it would be like to have the school jock hold my books and walk me to fourth period. I've done it all with my lenses and cerebral unit. Watching kids play video games I didn't own, making mental notes of what type of lunches I should be having based on what others were eating and pretending like I knew what a boner was so that I wouldn't have to have the joke explained to me.

As I got older, I became pretty good at covering up my uncool bits, but after 28 years of life, I'm finally realizing what an enormous amount of time and energy I've wasted. It's annoying, confusing, and most importantly tiring. Every time I get suckered into doing someone elses' favorite thing, I am automatically deployed back to my childhood where I rather be eating broccoli and watching Ducktales than eating a corn dog and fake-laughing along with a conversation that doesn't even belong to me.

It's taken me longer than I would've wanted to not only learn, but realize and believe that we are all secretly eye-ing one another, trying to pick up on tips, avoid awkward encounters, evaluate ourselves based on what our lenses interpret from others, nod along to avoid confrontation and/or drop tiny clues in our interactions that scream "accept me, I'm trying, validate me!" It basically can be boiled down to picking and harvesting traits of others that we want for ourselves, ignoring the traits they see and yearn for in us.

So what did I do in my adult days leading up to this day? I transformed my looks by acquiring the right size chest, investing in facial paint to enhance the eyes, lips and cheeks, and most importantly surrounded myself with taller, prettier, less spazzy, better versed individuals than myself.

These amazing people know the right pronunciation of the popular bands and fashion designers of the moment, they are full of interesting and intelligent things to add to a conversation about the most uninteresting topics, they're caught up on HBO shows that I don't have on my cable plan, they look flawlessly tailored in their appearance when outside in public, and even when they aren't photo shoot ready, they aren't all self-conscious and wacky about it. They are what I like to call self-assured, smart, successful people who make life look effortless and fun, nearly all the time. They are what the term "perfect" was fitted around, but the more I hang around for the chronicles of "The Cool," I realize an important and overlooked concept: the mere fact of being awesome at something (or lots of things) doesn't mean you're not also a total lunatic-ual spaz at other things/times. Once the night is over, the drive in the fancy car to the fancy apartment in the fancy city with the fancy clothes comes to an end, everyone is just relived to be home where they can let out a fart.

So really, it doesn't matter if we lounge around our house in a ungodly expensive (and cruel) mink coat or a pair of old shorts from K-mart with a hole on the lower left seam because we all have moments where we feel inferior, lame or socially absurd. What matters most is that we reach out and hug these awkward, painful, sweat inducing moments when they arise as opposed to retreating into an ugly cave of loneliness. Because really it doesn't matter if you are up to date on the latest twitter trending topic or just rocking out to some generic top 40s hit from the 80s. Doing whatever you think a better human is supposed to be doing in the moment of life you have doesn't make you a loser, it makes you, YOU. And I can nearly guarantee that you are:

A. human
B. relatable and
C. entitled to your desires.

I'm just sorry that it has taken me 28 years to realize that saying subject A is cool, but subject B is lame is like saying purple is amazing, so yellow must be shit - it makes no sense. There's an endless amount of room for all of us to exist and be normal and weird and cool and lame, all at the same time on the same planet.

TL;DR: I guess I'm not so fucking lame after all.