Entry 3.1
Was going through the junk in my room the other day looking for decent things to bring along with Spence and found these.
I was so stressed from the trig test the week before that I really scratched my face up, and that was the least of my problems! I feel kinda bad looking at her, it was a really miserable day. I had to wear a really tight push up bra and it was really humid so my hair got all puffy, and that’s just what being sixteen looked like.
Sometimes I look at her and feel like I’ve just grown a bunch of wood around her. I’ve said this before but when I see old stuff like this I wonder why I had to make sense of so much on my own. And then I catch myself because everyone had to make sense of it on their own and that’s the real miserable part of growing up, where you’re so busy figuring it out your own way at the same time that everyone else is also figuring it out, and you find out that however you’d been suffering wasn’t really all that special. Actually because everyone had to go through it, it’s basically the least special thing in the world. But then you get bitter about your own specialness, and the uniqueness of whatever it was you’d really gone through. Sometimes if I think about this at night while I’m drawing comics or whatever, I think like “but wouldn’t it have been nice to have figured it out as someone else?”[i]Then the thing happens where what you’re wishing for just becomes the kind of person that you are. So if you spend your whole life wanting something, please make it something cool. I wish my life had happened to someone that wasn’t a spaz. A lot of people when I talk about this on the forums say things like they felt they couldn’t measure up to a lot of their peers, like they grew up to be less of a man and less of a woman.[ii]Of course they would say things like this, they’re forum-users. You have to be pretty lonely to be getting a substantial part of validation from people who’ll never see you or hear your voice or observe your quirks. Y’know it hurts a lot more when people do have that option and don’t really care about you anyways. I didn’t really feel like this. I know you felt a little unmanly because you were sick and small-shouldered, at least you look it in this picture, and I always figured the ‘someone else’ you wanted to be was one that was bigger, and more dignified and happier but an ungracious kind of smarmy happiness, ie someone that was happy he was happier than you. Wanting it that badly, I thought, made you angry, and it really showed when you’d make a real effort to restrain yourself, and a weird vein would strain in your temple, even as a kid, looking like a little glimpse of a dog pulling at his leash tied down to a post on a well-curated lawn on a sweltering hot day.
Anyways, I never really felt like that was something I really had a say in, because you’d become an adult man or an adult woman whether you liked it or not. I thought that whole thing was kind of silly. I felt like I was poisoned. When I look at that little girl, I wonder if she knew she was sick and rotten and poisoned. That crucial time of “figuring things out” is the time when you learn that you are a diseased creature. You’ll grow out of the acne, you’ll take care of your hair, you’ll dress better later. You might even learn to talk to other human beings. Most of all though, you will learn things the hard way because you will always be a diseased creature. And everyone can see that you’re sick and how you’re sick except you.
I guess I can say this now. I picked yours up when it fell out of your locker. You were in a real mood because of the Wonderwall incident.[iii]I know you were really embarrassed but I still think it was really cute. Totally not worth denting the locker for, dude! When you come back for Christmas, I’ll give it to you.