This means in the last week, I have read 12.5% of the number of books I read in the entirety of one year.
Things that make my brain squirm.
My two new years resolutions are to read more, and to be visible.
I want to be seen. I want to be noticed. Hold my head up and put myself out there and display my work and stop being so very very self conscious.
I remember when I was fourteen. It was my first year living in the U.S. after Canada. The school was very different from what i was used to and the cafeteria terrified me. In Canada everybody ate their lunch at their desk in the portables we had class in, or outside, when the weather was nice.
In this new school, there was this really terrifying set up called a Cafeteria. I had never seen one before, and I thought it was set up like a giant theatre, where everybody sitting down was watching all the people in line to buy their food. My Dad told me that when you're a teenager you think everybody's looking at you, but they're actually so worried about being looked at themselves, they couldn't be watching me.
Still, I was relieved I always brought a bag lunch, and I would never have to be up there in line being looked at.
It was the scariest part of my day, any time I had to walk up in front of the class and write on a board, or give a report, or even just find a table in the cafeteria to sit at and not get bothered.
I was a weirdo. I found a table of girls like me, who hid in the back and didn't want to be seen. They were the only people who asked me questions about where I'd lived and why my accent was different, who were interested in the answers and not just how strange and alien I seemed.
In high school, we were the girls at the table that got food thrown at it. I stopped eating in the cafeteria after a while and stayed by the lockers just outside the big room. I sat on the floor and ate my lunch with one or two close friends.
One day in a humanities class run by a teacher who thought his methods were the very fanciest, we were each given a sheet of paper with the names of everyone else in the class on it. The teacher told us to write down exactly what we thought, truly thought, about each person, and then hand the papers back. We did, and the next day he handed us all back a sheet of paper with what everyone else had written about ourselves. It was entirely anonymous, so we could be as mean or revealing as we wanted.
I recall that out of twenty or so responses, maybe thirteen of the lines written about me said, "she seems nice, but I don't know her."
Mission accomplished.
I set out to right some wrongs when I went to college.
I vowed to do very scary things.
I picked the scariest thing I could think of: improv.
Standing in front of a huge room of people with nothing to save you but your mind and a lack of stage fright.
Shockingly. I wasn't bad at it.
I had so much fun, I buried myself in it, and I used it as an excuse to hide my writing. Why expose myself in other ways, when I was doing it so thoroughly already?
After I graduated, I fled. I dropped off the map. I didn't send anyone forwarding addresses. I never reached out. I lost good friends. I squandered opportunities and connections in an effort to vanish again, to fall off the radar and disappear from everyone's sight again.
A few of you refused to let that happen. Thank you.
Now it is 2011.
I am going to turn twenty nine this year, and it will be ten years since I stepped on an improv stage for the first time, and fifteen since I shivered in that cafeteria.
I have written. I have written. I have written.
And I have been terrified to ever let anyone see.
It is time to be visible.
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