How I became a freak. Or. Thanks, Dad.

I’m going to take you back in time to 1996. I am genuinely sorry - as I’m sure you’d prefer to go back to Paris is the 1920’s and NOT a time where you might possibly hear The Macarena. 

SO. Here we are: 1996. 

I’m 12, and I’m the chubby girl in my class, sitting near the back of the room alone. I’m staring out of the window at pigeons unsuccessfully mating in the rain. I have a desperate look in my eyes that blatantly translates to me being battered by huge and relentless waves of boredom. I, rather dramatically, am convinced that I’m dying – that my soul is actually dehydrating with every squeak of chalk on the chalkboard.

Yes, that is I.

I look down at the empty pages of the exercise book in front of me and sigh. I pick up my pen; I pause, and think. I then slowly and carefully draw a picture of a MASSIVE bottom. It takes up two pages and is… anally detailed.  A satisfied grin forms on my face. I pause to admire my work, but it seems incomplete somehow, and then it hits me. I draw a fart cloud billowing out of the bottom. Naturally. 

Then, without hesitation…

I stand up on my chair. 

I hold up my drawing.

I say, bursting with enthusiasm - “LOOK, EVERYONE!”

Everyone slowly turns around to look - and the classroom erupts in a mixture of laughter, snorts and gasps of disbelief – my teacher drops her chalk and stands there, speechless. For once.

And the thing is: in my little 12 year old head, I thought that I was actually helping everyone somehow. I wasn’t trying to be naughty, or disruptive.

I was genuinely just trying to lift the mood.

End 1996

This is but one of the many weird and undeniably ME SHAPED incidences of my childhood. I could go on and I could tell you worse. But I feel this particular story has bottled the essence of my childhood: a tearful and frustrated boredom towards authority and structures, and the need to do silly things by way of protest, topped with an almost compulsive need to laugh. 

My parents were called into the principal’s office the next day, and there was talk of keeping me ‘back’ a year. There were other excuses too: I wasn’t progressing at the same speed as other children, I was bad at maths, I was easily distracted and I drew pictures of bottoms farting. Fair enough, really. It seemed the adult world was pitted against me and I didn’t measure up.  But, in my 12 year old eyes… the adult world didn’t really measure up to me, either. It was boring. The tragedy is it’s the adult world’s measuring sticks that hold the authority, and they have the final say. 

So, I was kept back a year in an attempt to hammer me further into submission. It didn’t help, obviously. They would have been better off hammering the ocean into solidity.  In fact, I became worse. I did TERRIBLY at school. I wanted to do well, I really did. I wanted to fit in, I wanted scratch n sniff stickers and WELL DONE’S scribbled into my exercise books.  But no matter how hard I tried - I simply couldn’t feign interest. I wasn’t stupid – it’s just that my brain was incredibly picky about what it took in and found fascinating, and was also brilliantly effective in completely blocking out my teachers near constant barrage of useless and joylessly delivered facts. 

SO - How the bleeding fudge did I get like that?

I grew up in a house whose very walls were sweating with hot testosterone. I had four older brothers who, as far as I could tell, lived almost exclusively to punch each other and call each other GAYBO, or GAYLORD, or many other creative variations on the word GAY. And there I was, a GIRL – thrown in amongst them like a helpless and fluffy hacky sack that would eventually be kicked into rough tomboyishness or wither away and die.

My brothers didn’t understand what exactly the fuck I was. They would poke and prod me like I was a strange, gasping and sensitive beast who washed up on the shore of their BOYS ONLY Island. When I wasn’t being completely and utterly ignored by them - I became their plaything. 

My brothers once told me that you pronounced “I reckon” as “erection”.

They told me, WHEN I WAS 6, that ‘lesbian’ was a socially acceptable way of calling someone ‘silly’.

They told me sticking up my middle finger was a nice way of greeting our new neighbours.

My Dad had decided a few years before the Ass Incident of 1996 to introduce me to literature. He probably got sick of the pitiful sight of me playing with flowers in the backyard alone. Anyway - it was love at first line. So, there I was: a little girl already prone to solitary and fanciful meandering - now with an added love of poetry that kept her restless and lovelorn soul awake all night and into the wee hours of the morning.

That still happens now. 

I looked strange too. I wore the collective and outgrown shedding of my four older brothers wardrobes. This included their second hand underwear. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I also took to cutting my own hair, much to the absolute horror of my Mum. In our house there was a constant lack of money, there was no pink, no glitter, and no delusions of being a princess - There was only perpetual WRESTLING and Disney escapism. There was make do and there was my own imagination. There were pencils and hiding with a book. So, I hid and thought, a lot. 

I should probably mention that, despite how much I read – at 12 my vocabulary was entirely based on British comedies the various characters of Rick Mayall. I said Snot Face and quoted The Young Ones excessively. I still do.

So - how does all of this make me draw bottoms in class? 

I’m not exactly sure, and I’m sorry for this. I’m afraid I’ve been rambling again. I never did learn how to effectively communicate an idea into essay form.  All I can think is that the elements above were like some kind of perfectly temperate petri dish in which joyfully sprouted many alien and abnormal characteristics. 

The only thing I AM sure of is that - 13 years later – I’m becoming kind of grateful that the little 12 year old me didn’t really give in to the expectations thrust upon her by the adult world. She was just instinctively determined to be herself, even if it was a lonely and compass-less path fraught with criticism, self-doubt and misunderstanding. I’m proud of her, and I wish I could go back in time and hug her and tell her that, yes, ok - she may turn out decidedly career-less and float from one boring job to the next, but she will be fine, and she will go on amazing adventures. ALSO - She will lose the puppy fat, and Custard Creams are NOT the answer. 

The world has measured me many times since The Ass Day and deemed me, almost every time, unfit to serve its purposes. The good news is I don’t actually care. The only thing that matters to me is my own measuring stick, and how I think I’m progressing - and I wouldn’t trade it for all the acceptance and back pats in the world. 

So, thanks dad.