Tag: identity

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.

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

The Grammar of Noticing – Day 23

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Prompt – A teacher who noticed something in you.

Non solum oculis.

I took Latin in high school after taking French in junior high with an evil little man who had a bad comb-over, worse teeth, and no patience for ignorant little children messing up his language. I was absolutely not going to continue with French. So I switched to Latin. Latin was a dead language, at least on paper, but it turned out to be the most alive class I had ever taken.

What I learned in that room had very little to do with memorizing declensions and everything to do with how ideas are made. Mr. Duffy taught me that thinking is not a silent, private act that happens first and then gets dressed in words. Thinking is social before it is individual. Ideas are formed through interaction, through dialogue, and only later do those shared ways of thinking move inward, where they begin to feel private and personal. Language was not an afterthought. It was the place where thinking happened.

Mr. Duffy taught that language is not a box that holds ideas. Language allows ideas to form, collide, revise, and grow. Words do not simply name thoughts. They shape them. The structure of language influences what can be noticed, compared, questioned, and remembered. He showed us that expanding language, even by adding a so-called dead one, expands cognition. I did not have an academic understanding of all this then, but I understood it intuitively. He was right.

Because of Mr. Duffy, I became interested in languages and in what becomes possible when more than one linguistic system lives in the same mind. I learned that knowing more languages does not simply add vocabulary. It adds ways of organizing experience. Each language carries its own metaphors, its own logic, its own relationships between time, action, and responsibility. The more languages a person has access to, the more tools they have for connecting ideas, negotiating meaning, and making sense of the world with depth instead of speed.

Mr. Duffy noticed this curiosity about language in me before I did. He shared his thinking about language and life without making it feel like something that needed to be swallowed whole. He taught us Horace, the Roman poet made known by a new generation because of Dead Poets Society, and he used that film to draw us in and teach. He understood that attention is earned, not demanded.

Recently, I found my old senior year book, and inside it he had written that he would always remember me for my honesty and my sense of humor. That line landed harder than it probably should have. He did not praise intelligence or achievement. He named qualities that suggested presence, risk, and a willingness to say what was true even when it was inconvenient.

Looking back now, I understand that what he really noticed was not an aptitude for Latin. He noticed a hunger for connection and a comfort with language as a living thing. He saw the possibility of a life built around words, meaning, and noticing, and he named it out loud. That naming mattered. There are moments when a teacher does not give you something new, but instead reflects something back to you that you had not yet trusted. Sometimes being seen is not about praise. Sometimes it is about recognition arriving early enough to change the shape of a life.

Thank you, Mr. Duffy.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Fine, and Other Lies We Learned – Day 14

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Prompt – What was a secret your family carried?

Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Skid Row, Meat Loaf, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Barry Manilow gave me heart and gave me a language I could own. Their songs taught me how to feel without apology and how to sit with emotion long before I had the words, the permission, or the safety to do so. Music became my private tutor. However, that education came at a cost.

At fifty-one, my ears feel at least twenty years older than the rest of me because concerts were never simply live shows. They were full-body immersion experiences built from stacked speakers, vibrating floors, and sound loud enough to register as belonging, even for the most awkward of us packed into the crowd. Like most people my age, I never protected my hearing because it never occurred to me that I was borrowing against something future me would need to navigate ordinary life.

Now conversations require intention and precision. If someone does not speak clearly, with attention to tone, volume, and rhythm, the words scatter before they reach me, and I find myself asking for repetition or filling the silence with a reflexive huh. I miss parts of sentences and occasionally whole meanings, and whispers are simply not accessible to me anymore. Still, I carry no regret because losing the ability to hear whispers forced me to notice something I had been living with all along.

Whispers had always been part of my life, long before the music ever stole them from me. Whispers and mumbled speech were the true secret my family carried, not one dramatic confession or a single locked drawer hiding a headline-worthy truth, but something far quieter and far more durable. The secret was cumulative, made of a thousand small omissions, a thousand almosts, and a thousand things that were never named but were felt every single day.

The secret lived in the spaces between words. It lived in dinners where everyone ate but no one spoke about what hurt. It lived in rules enforced without explanation and affection that arrived sideways through duty. It lived in silence that passed for peace and order that pretended to be safety. Nothing was hidden exactly. Everything was simply unattended.

Each person in my family carried their own version of the unspoken. Grief without language. Anger without permission. Fear disguised as discipline. We learned to move around one another carefully, like furniture in a dark room, memorizing where not to step. Over time, caution became habit, and habit hardened into our culture.

Those secrets were never malicious, at least not at first. They were inherited. They were learned through the belief that survival mattered more than honesty, that stability mattered more than intimacy, and that asking for help meant failure. The secrets survived because they felt normal, because they never announced themselves, and because they whispered. That was the most dangerous part. No one ever learned how to hear them.

No one named the absence. No one said that something essential was missing. We were fed, housed, dressed, and moved efficiently from place to place. On paper, we were fine. The secret hid inside that word until fine became the highest achievement and the finish line. I grew up believing that families simply endured one another, that love was proven by staying rather than speaking, that conflict was something to avoid rather than move through, and that feelings were personal inconveniences best handled alone. I did not know these were beliefs. I thought they were facts.

When the secret finally revealed itself, it did not arrive as scandal, but as grief. Grief for what none of us were taught. Grief for the conversations that never happened. Grief for the care that wanted to exist but never learned how to speak. Our secret was grief.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 1 - Origins: Early Glimmers

On the Edge of After – Day 11

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Prompt – A time you wanted to be younger again.

The piano opened first with a simple and steady melody, like someone knocking softly on a door they were not sure was the correct one. It felt hesitant and determined at the same time, as if grief and hope agreed to share the same bench and the same keys. The singer did not arrive with rockstar swagger, but like a sinner entering a confessional. His voice carried a tremor that lived just behind the note, a thin crack that told the truth long before the lyrics did. There was a pleading quality there. Not begging. Just longing for a different outcome than the one that already felt written.

The drums slid in, not loud, not dramatic, simply present like a heartbeat that remembered it had work to do. The song continued to build without rushing. Each layer came in carefully, the guitar weaving around the piano like hands trying to help without making things worse. Nothing in the mix tried to show off. Everything served the ache.

How to Save a Life played on the radio on my way out of Japan as Holly drove me toward the airport in April of 2007. The world felt both too big and too small at the same time. With my bags packed and goodbyes said too quickly, it felt like a chapter was closing without the dignity of a final paragraph. I did not know then how much that song would follow me, like a ghost that refused to leave the room.

There was a part of me that wanted to be younger in that moment. Younger and untouched back in 1999. Younger and unaware back in 1999. I wanted the version of life where choices did not echo so loudly, where leaving did not feel like breaking something inside my own chest. That quiet piano line carried the weight of questions I did not have the courage to ask. What could have been different? What should have been done or not done? What part of myself was I leaving behind without realizing it? What I was carrying with me “home”?

The song did not offer comfort. It did not fix anything. It simply sat beside me, naming the ache I could not yet name. As the chorus rose, I realized that some moments mark a before and an after. In that moment, I wanted to be younger. I wanted to be back in 1999 when I arrived in Japan, when mistakes felt smaller and outcomes did not carry so much weight. I wanted to be less worn out by the world and more untouched by loss. It was not nostalgia. It was grief disguised as wishing.

When the chorus lifted, it felt like someone replaying a conversation in their mind, hoping that if the words repeated long enough, the past might loosen its grip. The music did not save anything. It stayed and witnessed the silence between notes to speak the parts that hurt the most. By the end, the repetition became prayer and punishment at once. If only. If only. If only. The piano never stopped. It kept moving forward, even when the voice sounded like it might not. That was the tender cruelty. Time kept going. The song kept going. The loss remained.

And still, something else lived there too. A quiet thread of hope, not loud, not heroic, not cinematic. Just the steady recognition that I was still here. That the ache did not erase the love of Japan and my time there had indeed been real. That leaving did not cancel the life that had been lived. Inside that ache, a stubborn spark refused to vanish. It was not redemption and not resolution. It was the fragile belief that naming the truth, even when it hurt, could keep me from turning numb.

Maybe growing older does not steal everything. Maybe it gives language to feelings that once lived unnamed in the dark, and maybe that language makes the weight lighter to carry. Not gone. Not fixed. Simply held with more honesty and a little more gentleness.

Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

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