Freshmen shouldn’t drink chocolate milk, and other things people forgot to tell me
This newsletter is the third and final essay in a series of pieces about my freshman-year journal. You can read the first essay here, and the second essay here.
Monday November 6, 2006, 8:46pm, My bedroom
“Even though I don’t like Mike or anything, whenever I look into his eyes when we’re talking, I squeeze my toes together in my shoes and am kinda nervous!”
-14-year-old me making sure my journal knows that I definitely, most certainly, very much do not have a thing for Mike
I was expecting the essay about my freshman-year journal to be a funny one. I was ready to write the portrait of a greasy middle-parted creature who spent all her pocket money on prescription strength deodorant and whiled away her afternoons wondering if her hands were too slippery to hold.
But I’ve written enough essays I should know by now they never turn out the way you think they will.
I just didn’t expect to be jealous.
As I sit here typing on a Saturday morning that is planned out down to the last calorie (I will be doing yoga soon) after a Friday night spent working, I’m jealous of the space I had to write about something that isn’t worth writing about.
But it’s not just that.
As I read, there was a self-assurance on the pages that shouldn’t have been there, considering how much I didn’t know and what a stranger my body was.
There was a stream of tiny braveries where it would have been easier to stay quiet or be mean.
After all, that’s what high school was for, right?
October 3: My name came over the locker room loud speaker and I got called to Mrs. Varvel’s office. I was shitting bricks as I trudged past piles of dirty gym gear and up the steps.
Mrs. Varvel gave me a card with a handful of candy and thanked me for being nice to one of the other students during PE, a larger girl who didn’t really have any friends.
She told me I was a good person, and that good things happened to good people.
November 1: It was a particularly dull period of Skills for Success and I was engaged in a Skittle war with Aldo who sat diagonally across from me.
I hadn’t taken into consideration my hand-eye coordination, or lack thereof, and as I threw my Skittle it ricocheted off the wall and spun directly into Mr. Byars’ left temple.
If I took a vote of freshman year teachers, Mr. Byars would easily take home teacher you’d least want to hit in the temple with a Skittle.
His forehead vein bulged as he yelled, “We’re not going to lunch until I find out who did it!!!”
Then he spotted Aldo’s bag of Skittles.
It didn’t help that while everyone was Mr. Byars’ least favorite student, Aldo was particularly least favorite.
“I didn't do it,” was all Aldo repeated again and again. The entire class riveted, Skills for Success had just become a lot more interesting.
“It was me,” I mumbled heroically in a very unexpected plot twist.
I could feel every gaze in the room wondering who I was and if they’d ever seen me before.
I explained that I hadn’t been aiming for Mr. Byars, I’d been trying to hit Aldo, but I was just really bad at throwing.
I wasn’t sure if Mr. Byars couldn't remember my name to punish me, or if he was secretly pleased I’d been trying to hit Aldo, but I somehow didn’t get detention.
Reading back the pages, I can see patterns of perfectionism and people pleasing, and it’s embarrassingly obvious that I haven’t actually changed all that much (this is also just called “being socialized as a woman,” but that’s a different essay).
However, in the same way that I’m still that person, there’s a gentle pride in realizing that I’m still the girl from the Skittle incident too, and the one from the locker room. The girl who doesn’t shy away from tiny braveries.
In my adult head, I’d blended 14 years old together with 15 and 16 in one generalized swoosh of A cups. The age was a wayman's land where nothing much happened, all of which was documented thoroughly.
However I’d forgotten that in order to get to 31, I had to wake up every single morning and put clothes on (clothes that were ruthlessly detailed in my journal), and step out into the world.
I forgot that there was an actual person inside of 14 who spent her whole day thinking thoughts and having feelings (so many feelings).
And while she’s an easy target to poke fun at, she had something 31-year-old me doesn’t.
She had the space to sit on her bed after school and listen to the radio and drink chocolate milk (the good kind, with Ovaltine) and write in her journal and wonder what it’s like to have a boyfriend.
She had hours to spend imagining kissing, without realizing it’s not a yes or no question and that it depends greatly on who you’re kissing and how you feel about them.
While I no longer wonder about having a boyfriend, or kissing. I am curious what it’s like to watch the afternoon turn into evening outside my window, and to drink chocolate milk without thinking anything beyond how good it tastes. To write trivial sentences that at the time feel very not trivial.
She managed to make it through high school with a kindness I don’t know I could muster up today.
It tickles me that she held out hope to meet her soulmate around every corner.
I no longer have this expectation. I don’t know when I lost it, but am now only suspicious about anything that’s waiting for me around a corner.
Since reading back my journal I’ve started waking up from nightmares about not remembering which class I have after third period, or trying to cram in the last few chapters of Oedipus Rex before an exam.
Walking down the street I’ll see a high-school-aged guy and think, “Dorky, pale, no acne, 14-year-old me would have been in love with him.”
I was on an SEO training call the other day and we were told to think of topics we could be experts in- our niche. The session was full of strategy, all about learning to drive traffic and rank on Google.
“If I had to choose an expertise,” one woman said. “Mine would be wonder.”
“She wouldn’t survive a day in public school,” I thought.
This wouldn’t be my typical knee-jerk reaction, but I’d spent the morning reading memories of extended eye contact with the guy from fifth period who vaguely resembled Zac Efron, and were we destined to be together?
I appreciated her response. It’s something my 14-year-old self would say, and it was sweet to hear that there were people out there who still held on to wonder.
Like some sort of quiet revolution, the journal has rubbed off in other ways too.
I've found myself committing tiny braveries.
Little ones, so small it's easy to be fooled into thinking they don't matter, but my 14-year-old self taught me to know better.
I've been lingering more as well, and drinking chocolate milk. Once I even ordered two (!!) desserts in the same day.
I’ve started carrying my journal around with me, and writing in it even when it wasn’t practical (it’s never practical to write in your journal).
And as I write, I find myself detailing every word that is said, every wave of emotion, every accessory I’m wearing, because it all seems so important. Because it all is so important.
And it feels like it will always be this important.