Tag: coming of age

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Under the Square Light – Day 42

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Prompt: The First Time I Became Aware of My Body

I was young, maybe three years old. Dates blur as much as addresses when life moves from base to base, so I cannot swear to the age. We had just moved again. New walls with new sounds. New shadows stretching across a room that did not yet belong. I woke in the middle of the night needing to take a leak. I do not remember the urgency itself, only the pattern; as a child, every trip to the bathroom felt like an emergency because children wait until the last possible moment.

I remember standing on cold, ugly linoleum and flipping the light switch on. The bathroom filled with that sudden brightness from the generic square fixture that lived in every room of base housing…wide, practical, square glass that never changed unlike the people in the house. I saw only the top of my head at first. Then I adjusted, lifted myself higher on the step stool, and there I was. A body. A somebody?

I talked to myself. Not in full sentences, just sounds and small words. I moved my mouth and my arms and watched them both follow my instructions. I turned sideways. I leaned closer to the mirror from the step stool. I remember feeling both surprised and completely certain at the same time. That was me. I could talk. I could move. I could do things. The awareness had nothing to do with my looks. It was about my agency. I was something inside this shape I was seeing in the mirror that obeyed me.  It felt like discovering a toy I had always owned but had never played with until now.

Years later, a different type of body awareness arrived, and it was nothing like that first quiet moment in the mirror. The awareness did not come from me. It came from others. From glances that lingered too long. From jokes that sounded like laughter but felt like measurement. My body became something public before I understood it privately. I learned what I looked like through other people’s reactions long before I learned what I felt like inside my own skin.

At three, the mirror gave me independence with possibility. It was movement and voice in a body that could carry whatever story I wanted to tell. Later, the world handed me a different mirror. One that reduced me to my weight and size. One that suggested my body was something to manage, something to correct, something to explain. Both moments were awakenings.

What I know now, years later, is that neither version was the whole truth. The child in the bathroom mirror was right. The body was never a problem to solve. It was a place to live. A place to feel safe enough to grow, even when growth looked messy or uncomfortable or misunderstood.

Sometimes I think back to that kid standing in the bathroom, talking to himself like he had discovered a secret language. He did not yet know about weight or judgment or how easily a body becomes a story other people try to write for you. He only knew that he was there, awake inside his own reflection, testing what it meant to exist.

And maybe that is the first real awareness. Not the shape of the body, but the quiet recognition that someone is living inside it, watching, learning, waiting to decide which stories belong and which ones can be set down.

The mirror did not give me answers that night. It only gave me a beginning. And beginnings, I am learning, are often small, incandescent, and easy to miss until years later when the light finally makes sense.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Left at the Base Gate – Day 41

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Prompt – What friendship meant then versus now.

Friendship for a Gen X military brat was never abstract. It was immediate, physical, and temporary. It lived on a base for a season. It was whoever arrived where I landed and stayed until the orders changed things. Closeness did not require history because the history was already baked into the coming and going. It required only shared space and a shared understanding that the now mattered.

Moves arrived without negotiation. One day there were no boxes, and the next day there were boxes. No one framed it as loss. It was logistics. Adults talked about duty and opportunity while kids learned how to say goodbye without ceremony. Grief did not get named or recognized, so it learned how to hide. It was hella efficient.

That efficiency shaped all parts of life including friendship. I learned how to read people and rooms quickly. I learned which parts of myself to lead with and which parts to keep packed. I learned how to belong without attaching too deeply because attachment always came with a cost that would be collected later. Leaving did not mean the friendship was not real. It only meant it had run its course.

There was a raw honesty in those friendships. There was no time for slow reveals or performative closeness. We went deep because the clock was already ticking. Loyalty was not measured in years. It was measured in moments by who stood next to me right then, and who kept my secrets when it mattered.

Years later, Japan reinforced that lesson in a quieter way. Friendship there came with an expiration date written directly into the contract. One year, sometimes two. The system itself discouraged permanence, as if rotation could prevent attachment from taking root. It felt almost sacred, like impermanence was a value worth protecting. I understood the rule. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, friendship was full and immediate. We did life together knowing it would end. There was no pretending otherwise. That honesty made the closeness sharper. We shared meals, mistakes, and small triumphs without the illusion of forever. When the goodbyes came, they were clean, even when they hurt like hell. The ending did not erase what had been real. Then time moved on, and the rules of friendship shifted again.

Adult friendship now is persistent and networked. It lives in texts, threads, and long digital echoes. Distance no longer explains disappearance. Silence gets interpreted. Absence becomes personal. Continuity is expected, even when life makes that continuity hard.

For someone raised where friendship ended cleanly at the base gate, this can feel disorienting. The instinct to give space can read as withdrawal. The habit of packing light can look like detachment. What once kept me steady can now feel out of step. And yet, something endures.

That upbringing left behind a particular strength. The ability to go deep without guarantees. The capacity to choose people deliberately rather than by convenience. A sensitivity to character, to kindness, to how someone treats power and vulnerability. There are fewer friendships now, perhaps, but the ones that remain carry real weight.

There is also a fluency in difference. I learned how to translate myself across places, cultures, and expectations. I learned that belonging is not automatic, but it is possible. That skill does not disappear. It matures. What can look like guardedness is often discernment. What can look like distance is often respect for the truth that closeness should be intentional. Friendship was never something I assumed would last forever. It was something I honored while it was true.

And maybe that is the quiet gift. Knowing that connection does not require permanence to be real. Knowing that love can be fierce and temporary and still shape a life. Knowing that when I choose to stay now, it is not because I have to. It is because I mean it.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Civilian Rules – Day 40

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Prompt: A time a friend betrayed you

As a child, I was raised inside a system that offered basic training on how to exist with people that have an expiration date. Military bases were full of kids like me, changing addresses like refugees with pink slips. We learned how to attach quickly and detach cleanly. Friendships were intense, immediate, and understood to be temporary. When orders came, and they always came, we did not fight the ending. We practiced kindness in the present and disappearance in the future. It was not cruelty. It was survival. We handled each other gently because most of us already knew what heavy felt like at home.

I was hurt by friends during those years, but the hurt was diffused and governed by an agreed-upon set of rules. It belonged to circumstance more than intention. No one was really betraying anyone. We were all obeying the same unwritten code. Stay light, do not burden each other, and leave cleanly. This code failed me the first year my family became civilian.

Lawton, Oklahoma broke something open that I did not yet have language or experience for. My father could not find work. My mother worked in another state. Home still felt temporary, but without the structure that once explained why everything was temporary. At MacArthur High School, the rules I knew did not apply. Belonging was transactional and visibility was dangerous.

I was bullied for opting out of football, for choosing books and observation instead of collision. That alone would have been survivable. What I was not prepared for was betrayal disguised as friendship.

Tracy was my first real civilian friend. She listened. She asked questions. She made space for the softer parts of me that had never needed armor before. I trusted her because trust had always been safe inside temporary worlds. I told her my fears. I told her my uncertainties. I told her where I felt small.

She took those truths and passed them along to the very people I spoke about. She did not confront me. She did not warn me. She turned my vulnerability into currency. When the laughter came back to me secondhand, something inside me collapsed. This was not the clean ending I had been trained for. This was exposure. This was humiliation. This was betrayal with witnesses.

For a long time, I believed the lesson was that openness was a mistake. I learned how to seal myself. I learned how to withhold. Betrayal does not only break trust in another person. It fractures trust in the self who chose to believe. I was not only angry at Tracy. I was ashamed of my own hope.

It took years to understand that what happened in Lawton was not proof that I was naïve or weak. It was proof that I had crossed from a world governed by impermanence into one governed by performance. The hope arrived later, quietly. I did not lose my capacity to trust. I learned how to place it with care. I still believe in connection. I just no longer hand it over to civilians.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Decimal Down in Front – Day 39

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Prompt – A time you betrayed or hurt a friend.

I went off to Oklahoma Christian University in the fall of 1992. At the time, I did not yet know how to name what I was running from, only that leaving felt necessary, even to a shitstorm like OC. My first year unraveled quickly. I drank too much, stayed numb on purpose, and called that suspension “figuring things out.” When the year ended, my GPA arrived like a small, undeniable truth…a decimal lead the way, as if even the numbers were hesitant to claim me other than the zero.

So, I went home for the summer and worked at Pepsi, driving a forklift.  They were long days that left my body tired and my thoughts loose. My house felt quieter than I remembered, as though something had already begun to close. I did not linger there. Most nights, I met old high school friends after work. We went to Applebee’s because no one questioned our age. We drank and talked and tried to decide who we were becoming by comparing ourselves to who we had already been.

Steve appeared in those quiet spaces at my house, a friend from before I had figured out how to be me. Back when I still rode the bus to school! Steve had learning disabilities and parents who seemed permanently absent in all the ways that count. He was kind, earnest, and always a little behind the moment, though never behind in heart. When he asked what I was doing, I told him about college in Oklahoma, about going back in the fall, and about my plans to figure things out.

Later that summer, he told me he had applied to Oklahoma Christian University and had been accepted. He said it with a kind of hopeful certainty, as though being near to my opportunity might offer him a door of his own. I remember feeling surprised, then unsettled, then quietly embarrassed by that reaction. I told myself a story about standards and readiness and merit, though what I was really protecting was distance.

When fall came, we were on the same campus. Steve arrived unprepared for the weight of it. The rules, the expectations, the rituals of belief that asked for performance more than understanding. Chapel, bible classes, the careful obedience that hung in the air all about. I recognized his confusion because it mirrored my own when I first arrived. I understood his shock because I had already absorbed it once. And still, I stepped back.

I told myself I was busy. I told myself he needed to figure things out on his own. I told myself I was trying to survive. All of those things were partly true. None of them were generous. I spoke to him when we crossed paths. I was kind enough to avoid guilt. But I did not offer help. I did not walk beside him. I did not lend him language when he had none.

The truth is simpler and hell of a lot more harsh. Steve reminded me of who I had been. Staying close to him felt like risking my fragile reinvention. So I chose distance. I chose silence. I chose myself. That is how I betrayed him. Not with cruelty, but with absence.

March 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

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Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

One Street Over – Day 33

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Prompt – How did the friendship start?

For those who want the beginning context for today’s prompt, the first post about Jeremy can be found here.

My first real best friend was Jeremy. He was a Texan through and through, transplanted abruptly to Alaska. The shock showed on him, as this was his first military PCS ever. I arrived from California, where my family left March Air Force Base because of an incident I have only ever heard in fragments. The whole truth never mattered as we would have eventually left anyway. I had just finished second grade and knew almost nothing except that something had ended and something else had begun without my consent.

The drive up the ALCAN highway was relentless. When my family finally reached Elmendorf Air Force Base, there was no housing assignment waiting for us. We were placed in temporary living quarters for far too long. After weeks on the road with my family, traveling a half-paved road a thousand miles long in a U-Haul, the TLQ did not feel like home. The place felt heavy in ways I had never experienced before. And it got weird.

Colors in the TLQ would thin and deepen without warning, where color should have remained constant. Corners stayed cool while the center of rooms held warmth. The hallway carried a faint blue cast that no one else seemed to notice. Temperature changes brought memories with them. Grief lingered as anger did too. There were people there as well, not figures meant to frighten, but impressions. More like presences. I did not see them with my eyes alone. I felt them with my body. That kind of noticing is exhausting, especially for a child. I needed someone to help me carry it.

Jeremy showed up.

Beginnings and endings rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as coincidence or as a kid who happens to live one street over. At the time, it felt like luck. Looking back, it is clear that something essential was taking shape, something the universe wanted me to notice.

He had never moved before. Not once. His entire life had existed in one state until it did not. He was burdened with the newness of goodbyes and hellos. I was practiced in leaving. Somehow that made us fit, as we each had something to carry for the other.

That friendship did not begin because we were alike or because we chose one another with intention. It began because two children were standing inside unfamiliar spaces, each holding more than was reasonable for their age. Something in him recognized something in me, and the recognition was mutual.

I understand now that this is often how early friendships form. Not around joy, but around need. Around the quiet relief of not being alone with what is not yet understood. Long before we know how to tell our stories, we sense who might be able to hear them. That was the beginning. Not a single moment, but a shared breath, an inhale and exhale taken together, a small and steady proof that even in unfamiliar places, connection finds a way to form.

March 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

The Accounting of the Siblings – Day 30 & 31

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Prompt (2) – Being chosen. Being ignored.

Home of the Highlanders, MacArthur High School was the clearest definition of an oxymoron I had encountered up to that point in my life. Highlanders in the Great Plains with a motto of “People First, Excellence Always” in a transient town better known for pawn shops and titty bars…Jesus Almighty! The contradiction was not subtle in the least.

When I arrived, I was immediately chosen. I was chosen not for anything I had done or earned, but for the size of my body. I am certain the coach believed he was offering affirmation, maybe even opportunity. He likely told himself a story about coaching me up and bringing discipline that would later open doors. What he actually did was place around my neck a weight that lasted the entire year, and much longer if I am honest. His choice was not about me. It was a projection of how I could be useful to him and his team. Utility masquerading as care has a particular heaviness to it. It presses down slowly on a proud chest and insists on gratitude while doing so.

I would have preferred to be ignored rather than bullied for an entire year for refusing his offer. That refusal marked me. It made me a problem instead of a resource in that space. Being ignored, however, also carries its own kind of damage. It teaches a collective disappearance as a survival strategy. It rewards silence and compliance and requires no accounting.

Being chosen and being ignored feel like opposites on paper, but they share the same origin story. They are siblings of a parental unit with an “idea of parental compassion is just, you know, wacko!” Both being ignored or chosen single a person out. Both carry judgment. Both demand something without ever asking who someone is.

In school, I was chosen in ways I never requested, and I was ignored in ways I did not deserve. From lessons I learned at home, I tried to stay small and as invisible as possible, yet chosen for a task I was not prepared to bear. Staying small felt safer than being evaluated. Invisibility felt preferable to becoming a symbol or a cautionary tale. I wanted neither attention nor erasure. That tension followed me for years. Over time, that same tension gave me eyes to see it later. It taught me how to notice patterns and to recognize when power was pretending to be neutral. It also pushed me to try to name what I was seeing, first quietly, then more openly, even when doing so came at a cost.

The cult classic movie The Breakfast Club offers one of the clearest examples of these siblings with a shared back story that I know. It is a film I used in class for years as an educator, not because it is perfect, but because it is honest about hierarchy and the siblings. John Bender, labeled the “criminal,” delivers a line to the “princess,” Claire, that sounds cheeky but is filled with lived experience. He says, “You could not ignore me if you tried, sweets.” It lands as swagger, but the truth inside it is heavy. John Bender knows exactly where he stands. The popular kids can pretend he does not matter, but they cannot erase him from the room. He takes up space in that place because disappearing has already been assigned to him elsewhere.

Bender is not chosen. He is tolerated by those who are there. He is watched. He is remembered only as a problem. The popular kids do not forget him because he is insignificant. Forgetting him allows them to keep their version of themselves intact. Remembering him would require reckoning. I recognized that math immediately! I learned early how to make myself unignorable without ever being chosen. There is a difference. Being seen is not the same as being held. Being loud is not the same as being safe. Like Bender, I understood that if I did not exert some control over my visibility, someone else would decide whether I vanished or became a spectacle.

Bender’s anger is never random. It is precise. It is armor. It is a refusal to disappear quietly for people who benefit from not having to see him. Later in the movie, he says what has been true all along. “What do you care what I think, anyway? I do not even count. I could disappear forever and it would not make any difference. I may as well not even exist at this school.” That is not defiance. It is once again accounting. He understands the math of the place better than anyone else in the room.

Claire believes she counts so much that her absence would register as a crisis. However, John’s absence would register as relief. He is visible enough to be punished and invisible enough to be disposable. That is the difference he names when he turns on her. It is not cruelty. It is clarity. He is not asking to be liked. He is asking to be recognized as existing and to be seen as worthy.

That scene stayed with me because I could relate to each of the siblings leaving the same residue.

What I learned much later is that choosing myself had to come before anyone else did. Not loudly. Not as performance. Not as rebuttal. Just steadily and quietly. Choosing myself meant staying present without auditioning. It meant letting some rooms misunderstand me, letting some people leave, and sometimes me leaving the room. It meant trusting that I was worthy. There is a particular peace that comes with no longer arguing with the ledger. I no longer need to prove that I count. I do not need to disappear to survive or accept a role that requires self-erasure to belong. That choice does not erase the past, but it does loosen the siblings grip on me. The brothers can continue their work elsewhere. I have already chosen a different inheritance.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Negative Space? – Day 29

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Prompt – Refusing to Fit In

In an earlier post, I wrote about wanting to belong rather than fit in. That distinction took time to learn. In junior high, fitting in would have been enough. I would have accepted it without hesitation. I would have traded pieces of myself to fit in. At that age, fitting in felt like survival, and survival always felt like success.

By high school, something shifted. After years of practice and a near-perfected “fuck off all the way to the summit of fuck off mountain” routine, isolation no longer felt like punishment. It felt like control. What once registered as exclusion began to register as choice. The same distance that had hurt me earlier now protected me. The difference was not the space itself, but who claimed it.

After the absolute horror of my tenth-grade year in Lawton, Oklahoma, I arrived in Nashua, New Hampshire with no interest in entering the social hierarchy of high school. Lawton had taught me that visibility often came with a price tag I could not pay.

Coming from Oklahoma to New England carried its own gentle violences. More than once, I was asked if I lived in a teepee or wore a feathered headdress. Each question was delivered as entitled humor, which made refusing to answer them even more satisfying. I guess, I was supposed to absorb the insult and provide comic relief in return. Fuck off!

So I withdrew. I did not explain myself. I did not correct anyone. I did not soften the moment for their benefit. I simply refused to participate in the shenanigans at all…until Ms. Peregrine taught me to channel my rage.

Ms. Peregrine’s art class gave me a sanctioned place to not fit in. It was a room that did not require compliance. Rage had somewhere to go. Antisocial behavior was both subject and medium. Silence was not interpreted as failure but as process.

That room held others like me, though we would not have named it that way at the time. Tom, Carol, Zach, and Keith all refused the social hierarchy differently than me. None of us were trying to be alike in our rage. That was the point. Our work shared no aesthetic beyond defiance. The refusal showed up in charcoal, paint, warped proportions, and negative space. What we had in common was not style but stance.

Art allowed me to say things I never had in words. It did not demand neat conclusions or a unified thread that ran through the entire piece. It allowed contradiction. It allowed ugliness. It allowed intensity without apology. For the first time, not fitting in did not feel like absence. It felt like presence, contained and visible. This was the beginning of belonging.

Looking back, I can see the quiet irony. What I thought was withdrawal was actually alignment. Refusal was not the end of connection. It was the beginning of something more honest. Art did not make me belong, but it gave me a place to stand without erasing myself. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes that is everything.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory/Uncategorized

Husky Jean Calculus- Day 28

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Prompt – Trying to fit in.

Growing up, we never had enough money for the things everyone wanted. Back-to-school shopping was always tense because school supplies and clothes were expensive, and the margin was thin on a good month. My older siblings were teenagers, which meant shoes and clothes mattered in the unspoken social calculus of school. My mother, meanwhile, was running a different set of numbers, the kind tied to groceries, bills to be paid, and the quiet reality of coming up short and it all being her fault.

One afternoon in a store, my mother’s shoulders were tight as her attention was divided between price tags and possibility. She was doing the math in her head, calculations that did not resolve cleanly. I noticed, as I always noticed because I was old enough to see but I was far too young to understand what it actually was I was seeing.

So I erased myself. I said I would take whatever was cheapest. If it meant the not-cool clothes, that was fine or the cheaper Rose Art crayons, so be it. I said it lightly, as if it cost nothing, but I knew those words gave my mother a moment to breathe as I gasped for air. It was not that I wanted my siblings to have the best as I became a martyr, rather, I wanted peace in the house. Peace meant freedom from tension, freedom from eggshells. So I chose less and I told my eleven-year-old self that this is what being good looked like.

As I got older, I wanted to fit in everywhere. I wanted to fit in at home, at school, and inside my own skin. I wanted all of it without understanding that wanting everything at once comes with a cost. Somewhere along the way, I became exhausted, as my energy was limited. Survival required efficiency and a lot of energy.

I stopped caring about fitting in at school. Or at least I learned how to perform not caring about fitting in at school. This was not bravery. It was conservation. I redirected what little I had toward staying upright, toward “reading the room”, and toward becoming agreeable and invisible in equal measure. Endurance became my defining trait. I mistook it for identity and called it a personality.

The truth arrived later, quietly, the way truth tends to. I wanted to fit in, but what I really wanted was to belong. Belonging did not ask for performance. It did not require erasure to keep others comfortable. It allowed me to stay. I never had that in my first family.

Fitting in changes a person to earn acceptance. Belonging offers acceptance without negotiation. Fitting in hides real opinions. Belonging makes room for honesty with care. Fitting in depletes. Belonging restores. Fitting in is about how things appear. Belonging is about how things hold throughout the years.

I did not know any of this then. I only knew how to choose peace over cool, quiet over attention, and survival over style. The meaning of those choices took years to surface. Looking back now I see my erasure was not tenderness…it was twisted. But now, I finally belong and there is finally room for me to remain.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Square Pizza & Neutral Ground – Day 27

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Prompt – Lunchroom politics

Through the fifth grade, the lunchroom was neutral ground. It required only a basic understanding of a single-file line, eighty-five cents, and the know-how to choose wisely from the menu. The homemade square pizza made by Carol the Lunch Lady reigned supreme, folding in half but never breaking thanks to a level of grease that functioned as both flavor and structural support. The sloppy joe, held together by far more ketchup than beef, tested gravity and came in a respectable second, especially when paired with tater tots that counted as a vegetable because everyone agreed to pretend they were potatoes. Then there was the taco, which had never heard Spanish and knew no spice at all. Finished off with a carton of chocolate milk and the meal was complete. That was it. No strategy was required, nor was any understanding of complex human hierarchical structures necessary. The menu told everything that needed to be known.

Sixth grade changed the terms. The lunchroom acquired borders much like invisible fences that everyone pretended not to see while obeying their “Posted” notices perfectly. Rules appeared, not published ones, but learned ones. Seats were no longer neutral. Placement mattered, and choice was often an illusion, as belonging did the choosing long before anyone sat down. Jocks clustered loud and confident, already rehearsing for futures that assumed space. Band kids gathered with instrument cases leaned against their legs like shields. Nerds formed tight constellations around shared intelligence and inside jokes. Religious kids bowed their heads before eating, not so much for God as for each other. Floaters drifted from table to table, fluent in small talk and practiced exits. Loners learned how to sit with a book and make it look intentional.

The food did not change. The square pizza never left. What changed was the audience and, with it, the purpose. Lunch became a daily referendum on who was permitted to be seen together and who was better off unseen. Seats mattered. Laughter mattered more, because laughter signaled togetherness and safety. Silence could be read as arrogance or fear, depending on who was watching and what they needed it to mean that day. Some seats had to be earned, while others came with unspoken warnings to stay away. The politics were efficient and selectively cruel, enforced mostly through looks, although words were occasionally deployed when looks failed.

The lunchroom became my first real lesson in social cartography, a place that taught where power sat and where safety might be found if one looked closely enough. What I did not understand then was that everyone else was learning the same lesson at the same time, each of us convinced of being the only one studying the map so desperately. The tables felt permanent, the labels felt fixed, and the consequences felt endless.

Looking back now, the comedy of it all lands harder than the fear ever did. Grease-soaked pizza and ketchup-heavy sloppy joes were never really the point. The lunchroom was a training ground, rehearsing adult versions of conference rooms, waiting rooms, and dinner tables where the same invisible fences still exist. The difference is that, with time, the map becomes easier to read, and the borders begin to look less international and more domestic. That realization does not erase the lesson, but it does soften it, allowing the memory to sit where it belongs, alongside the chocolate milk and the understanding that belonging was always more fragile, and more negotiable, than it first appeared.

March 2026
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