At sixteen, I did not feel pretty.
I am told, and photographic evidence apparently supports this, that I was. But the sixteen-year-old running my internal operations had not received that memo, and would not have believed it anyway. She had other concerns. Mainly: why is everyone so comfortable just… talking?
Because here was my situation. Put me in a play rehearsal, and I was fully alive. Put me in a game with rules and a goal, and I was your most engaged participant. Put me in a circle of girls just chatting about nothing in particular, and I became a woman at a bus stop waiting for a bus that was not coming.
I did not have the words for it then. Now I know: I have never been fuelled by chitchat. I am fuelled by doing things together. At sixteen, this simply felt like being defective in one very specific and socially inconvenient way.
I was at an all-girls school, so let me address the question before you ask it: no, there were no boyfriends. No crushes worth reporting. This was partly geography, boys were simply not in supply, and partly the family operating system you read about yesterday. In our house, the syllabus was hard work, and romance was not on the syllabus.
I was not exactly heartbroken about this. There were plays to rehearse.
Now, about friends.
I had few. And I want to say something about them that I have never said quite this way before: every friend I had at sixteen was someone who worked to be my friend.
Because I can tell you honestly, I never tried to befriend anyone. Not out of arrogance. It simply never occurred to me as a thing one does, walking up to a person and initiating a friendship, like some kind of extrovert. The friends I had were girls who saw the quiet one in the corner and decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that she was worth the effort.
They chose me. Every single one of them.
Two of them, Barbara and Elizabeth, are still my friends today, over three decades later. It helped that we all ended up at the same university 😁. But I want the record to show: those are the friendships I would have fought to keep anyway. When someone chooses you at sixteen, when you were not even auditioning, you keep them.
Here is what else was quietly happening at sixteen, underneath the awkwardness.
I was working out something that would take many people until their forties to figure out: that being different was fine. Actually fine. Not “fine after I fix myself,” just fine.
Mind you, this was not a serene, enlightened process. It was a tug of war. On one end: the very human desire to fit in, to be liked, to have the group approve. On the other: a stubborn little voice that refused to be controlled by “the group” and its opinions.
The tug of war was real. But the stubborn voice was winning, even then.
I would eventually grow up to fully believe what a certain TV theme song had been telling me all along: that everybody’s got a special kind of story, and everybody’s got a way to shine. But that is a post for another day.
At sixteen, I was just a quiet girl with a few excellent friends, no boyfriend, an aversion to small talk, and a growing suspicion that she did not need to be like everyone else.
The suspicion turned out to be correct.
Come back tomorrow for Day 43: the day my father threw Skeeter Davis out of a moving car. Yes, really.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
