Twenty-Four Working on Thirteen

There is a girl who lives in my head. She can’t ever seem to nail down a good hair cut, but that’s probably because the odds are stacked against her in the form of greasy bangs. She has braces, but they haven’t been on long enough to have made much progress in combating a huge overbite and defining her previously non-existent chin. She has acne, but that’s nothing new—she’s had it for a few years, certainly before the rest of her peers. Her immediate family is populated by intelligent, funny, charming people who all have straight teeth and, at the bare minimum, seven years on her; she has been the odd man out in a family of pairs since day one. She is extremely fond of a blue, furry bucket hat and using big words that her oldest sister teaches her sometimes. She can’t articulate it yet, but deep down she probably knows that she is most grating and annoying when she is most desperate to be seen and liked.

Meet me, at age thirteen.

I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.

In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.

People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.

The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.

I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.

It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.

So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:

There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.