A Real Renegade.

I started this blog based off of the movie, "Charlie Bartlett," because I was obsessed with the rebellion portrayed in it.  It was 2012, I was fifteen and I wanted so badly to be anywhere but in the in between of teenager-ness.  Not quite an adult, not quite a child. This was my rebellion, my chance to give an anonymous account of how screwed up and out of place I felt.  Here's my renegade account.
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Our lives are really not our own, and we decorate them, much like the way I did my bedroom.  I was in seventh grade, and my mom had expressly told me not to do it.  "Well, fuck her," I thought, newly aware of the word fuck and what it meant.  I sneered and promised not to, and then I stole her magazines and tacked up an obscene amount of stupid and meaningless photos on my walls.  I put up pictures of hot boys because that's what I thought twelve year olds did.  I cut out trendy things and pictures of makeup because wasn't I supposed to like makeup and wear trendy things? I tacked random odd knickknacks up, the bow from a present, a badly-constructed paper airplane, in a desperate attempt to signify that this was, indeed, mine.  I wrote random places I wanted to go down on paper and tacked them up, places I'd never even heard of, because anywhere had got to be better than middle school.

I decorated my body in the same way.  I wore makeup, even though my mom told me not to and even though nobody could tell because I was so afraid of irrevocably changing myself, but so convinced that I needed to change.  I spent hours obsessing over what I would wear, what my hips looked like, what new things I could get my mother to buy, how many new pimples were popping up on my face and what I was going to say to the cool girl the next day at school.

I was fat.  Well, I wasn't fat, but I developed faster than a lot of the girls in my class.  I had hips, I had curves and every weekend when I would stuff myself into a spandex suit and hurl myself down a snow-covered hill, I knew I looked different from everyone else out there; the no-hips, no curves no god-damn boobs crew.  I launched myself into whatever I could think of to forget this-- homework, the internet, newly discovered on the computer I bought myself because I was convinced I needed it to succeed, skiing, makeup, clothes, making my holy terror of a sister feel as miserable as I was. I went away to a school with a hundred people, with only four in my class, and I would spend every day making a checklist of what Katie did that was better than me, how Megan had gotten a boy to kiss her, trying to catch the last rays of sun of the day so my hair would go back to it's former tow-headedness so that I could have Kara's blonde hair.

I supposed my middle school experience is not as out-of place as I thought it was.  It's rare to like yourself or your world when everything is changing and betraying you.  I had always had nervous tendencies but they amplified ten-fold by the time I hit puberty and then everything worried me.  I cried at nothing, I cried at everything and I wrote down rules of what I was and wasn't allowed to do on pink index cards that had tiny daisies on them.  I guess this worked moderately well, or I guess ignoring the absolute, all out, terror I felt, until around the end of tenth grade.

And then April happened, and then the spring came and everything went off the rails and I spiraled.  I became acutely aware of my own sexuality and I embraced it in the way no one ever should; as a way of forgetting everything else that was going on.  I would fool around with whatever boy I could get my hands on just to prove I could do it, just to prove I was okay, and then I'd go home and cry.  If my mom cleaned my room I would scream and cry uncontrollably.  If my sister looked at me I would yell and get physical.  Everything my dad and brother did filled me with an inordinate amount of anger.  I hated everyone and everything within walking distance, and even beyond.
I went to therapy for the first time, and took a deep breath.  I convinced myself that I'd walked right to the edge of the abyss, but that I'd never do it again.  That I was so, so fine and everything in my life was perfect and I'd spend long hours arranging and re-arranging anything I could get my hands on.

My sexuality has always had a huge, but largely unrecognized part in my life.  I went to a high school with a hundred of the same, white, mostly upper class, middle of the road republicans and I didn't realize there was anything else out there.  The first episode of skins I watched had two girls kissing and this fascinated me.  I watched, re-watched and re-watched this then I watched all of the Skins episodes I could get my hands on.  I switched to the American version and imagine my delight when I found another main character who kissed girls and, was, herself, a girl.  I convinced myself it was just curiosity and would spend long hours watching and re-watching moments of closeness between female TV characters.  It wasn't sexual then, it was a fascination with the female emotional state. I dismissed it, just plainly as curiosity and pushed it to the back of my mind because like so much else in my life, it had no significant meaning.

The middle of Eleventh grade came, I gained ten pounds and hated myself even more, even though my braces were finally off and my pimples were going away and I'd finally found a way to style my unruly, curly, Jewish hair.  I got a little better at skiing and it felt like victory was mine-- I finally meant something to someone.  And an infinitesimal amount of people were actually paying attention to me, but they felt like millions.  My wit and sarcasm were finally coming through and I was a bitch, but a bitch who loved it. And then I injured myself in about ten different ways, as I am so want to do, and it felt like I was right back where I started.

And then, twelfth grade came and my brother left for college.  But he more than left, he jetted off to another 'frigen country.  And college came down on me, full force.  I was convinced this was my year for skiing, the last year I'd be able to do it so intensely, so I threw myself into it.  And I hated it.  I got a concussion, one week before my ED college application was due, when someone dropped a weight on me in the pool.  January came and I got into the college of my dreams.  Everything was supposed to be fine.  I would go to the hill in the morning, leave in the blue Forrester which was considerable less nicer than many of the SUV's which populated the mountain's parking lot, and go home as early as possible.  I would make myself lunch and eat it in the total darkness of my brother's room, with whatever Netflix show I was watching that week.  I couldn't bring myself to go back to school most days and would constantly feign illness.  I was tired of being me.  

And so I started antidepressants because I was clearly depressed.  I slowly got better, started skiing less, hurt my knee and decided I was done with skiing altogether, and was fending off lesbian jokes left and right because of the all-girls college.  I couldn't wait to graduate, to leave all these people who I hated far behind.  I made it to graduation and I made it through that summer, complete with all the weirdest feelings I've ever experienced and until the moment my parents said goodbye to me for real, standing outside of Comstock at four o'clock in the afternoon, it felt like I was running a marathon of existing.

Thrust into this new environment, I realized what I had been too naive to see, that this 'curiosity' was not just a curiosity, and I was fooling myself by not giving it the proper attention it deserved.  I was gay.  I was really, really gay.  And it wasn't an emotional or painful thing to realize.  It just was.  I could finally, finally relax.  I fell in love, I fell out of love and back in again and as painful as all these experiences have felt over the past year or so, I was finally myself.  I was so confident in who I was that no matter what I did, I would do it comforted by the fact that I was no longer rebelling against who I thought I should be.

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I was a renegade.  I probably still am. I was a depressed, anxiety-riddled, secretly gay, body-hating, ski-racing, privileged white feminist renegade.  And I was so fed up with shutting up that I started this blog to detail my inadequacies, how fucked up I thought I was.  So, here I am, four and a half odd years later.  And I'm still trying to make my life my own, still decorating my bedroom without consent.

But I have become who I was so afraid of becoming.  I kiss girls, I eat cake and pizza without abandon, and I go for long walks most afternoons before I do pilates.  I love without abandon and I would do anything for my friends.  I don't do surface level interactions but I can finesse the hell out of a room.  I want everything, and I want nothing and sometimes I'm given to fits of anxiety and temper tantrums. I've realized my privilege and I am trying to make up for it; I've realized sexism and am trying to rebel against it.  Sometimes I dress in all black, I have face piercings and tattoos and sometimes I get drunk and sometimes I get high and I love Vermont.  I am ridiculously close with my mother and my brother and I am most certainly a cat person.  

My self-realization has been the greatest favor I have ever done myself; greater than therapy or antidepressants, greater than realizing that I wasn't okay, greater than realizing it was okay to be happy, okay to be love.  All we can do is make these lives that are not our own, ours.  It's all I know how to do.  I guess we can only operate on what we know.

And that's okay, too. 

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"Be brave. Take risks.  Nothing can substitute experience."