on being the ugly duckling

Sorry, haven't felt like I had anything worth saying.

Nice to see that I have 168 blog views, just people visiting to see what else there is to me.

I can't share this on facebook, because I'm not friends with others who know what this is like. But for those of you who want to get to know me, I saw this today and it made me cry, so maybe it's a good place to start

I've told many of you about my social life growing up. About being the painfully shy girl, being the one with the coke bottle lens glasses. Being target practice for the spitball firing squad. Being the scared animal in a pen that spectators rattle the bars of and make loud noises and faces to bother.

I grew up in Arkansas. I don't remember very much about the town I was born in and we moved to a town in northwest Arkansas when I was 3. As a toddler, you don't really form any deep meaningful friendships or even spend that much time playing with other children. Who else would you know besides the kids of your mother's friends?

The elementary school I went to was nice enough, as I recall. It was a small school in a small town. The building was probably from the 80s, although The built a new cafeteria and had finished a new K-3rd wing right before I started 1st grade there. I had been enrolled in a private school for kindergarten, at a Methodist church as I recall.

I loved my first grade teacher. She's still there to this day (according to the faculty listing) but they don't have any email addresses listed for the teachers even in 2013. I had several kids in my class that I became friends with. I had a crush on Jacob. Taylor was nice, there was spacey Stacie (as my mother called her) and Jenna was just the sweetest little girl you could ever hope to know. Jenna actually lived a street down from me, but even as a child I was shy, and I have never mastered the art of "hanging out".

I don't remember when I met Rachel. She was in the grade above me and she was my best friend until I moved to Texas the summer after 4th grade. We spent the night at each other's houses regularly, and I don't remember what we did in the afternoons when we'd play. I'm just going to assume all my "hanging out" how-to data in my brain has been replaced with muscle memory associated with complex attack keyboard-combos in video games ;)

I'm still friends with Rachel. She's not married, but she's in a long term relationship with a man who is, I think, around 8 years older than her. She's some kind of a receptionist at a physician's office and she has a son with the guy she's been with. The kid is a few years old now. Her facebook posts about him are becoming more frequent now that he's more interesting than a little blob of bones and skin and organs in a diaper and can actually communicate and become his own person now. I frequently find myself comparing myself to her. She's doesn't have a Bachelor's degree, but she has a family.

When my family moved to Texas, I of course had to say goodbye to Rachel. Her family was coincidentally moving to Indianapolis that same summer. I tried to make a point to call her at least once a year, but what is a Jr High girl going to talk to a former best friend about? Jr. High girls talk about boys and stuff (I guess, I didn't have friends then so I wouldn't know) and living so far apart, we of course didn't know any of the same people. So her going on about Bobby So-and-so or me going on about Philip (the boy I wanted to hold hands with in 6th grade) was irrelevant to the other party.

I don't know what the Jr High scene would have been like had my family stayed in Arkansas (and for the record, we are not of Arkansan descent, my mother is from Alabama and my father is Japanese. I'm not a product of Ozark inbreeding) In Texas, I was to start 5th grade. Even by 5th grade, the students were already heavily segregated into "the popular kids" and ... those that weren't. I remember on the first day of class, I, having no concept of "popularity", saw a group of girls at recess and recognized one from my class. I literally asked her if she would like to be friends with me. She kind of laughed and said ok, but I never really felt included. Turns out she was one of the popular girls, which in 5th grade society in Texas, meant you played softball. So all these girls knew each other from playing softball.

I've never been much of an athlete. I sweat a LOT, I have issues regulating my body temperature (possibly causing the excess sweating, who knows?) and I just have never cared for feeling exhausted. There is no reward for me in running a mile. I have no sense of accomplishment afterwards. I had no desire whatsoever to play softball with these girls. Further, by 5th grade, these girls had been playing softball for several years. While they were certainly not Olympic level athletes, they had better hand eye coordination and overall skill than I did and no one would have been interested in putting me on the team to catch up. The coaches wanted the girls to win, not for the girls to better themselves. Suburban tiger moms and all that.

Since I didn't mesh well with the athletic popular girls (basically mini cheer leaders. Tanned skin from being out in the sun all summer, hair always pulled in a perfect ponytail on top of the head with a perfect ribbon, blonde streaks in their hair if they weren't already blonde) I tried to find company elsewhere. I disliked feeling like I was forced into accepting that I couldn't be part of the cool kids. At the time I didn't see myself as one of those kids that always gets picked for teams last, but I was, and I resented being relegated to their ranks and picking friends from among them. In hindsight, I should have gratefully accepted friendship where I could find it.

Overall, 5th and 6th grade weren't so bad. We had recess and P.E. in 5th grade, and just P.E. in 6th grade. But in Jr High, we began to have the choice of team sports. And most of the popular girls participated in whatever sport was currently in season. It seemed like they were good at everything. I tried soccer for a little while. I had running, I have no idea what made me think I would like soccer. I dropped the class before we even got around to doing any actual practice with balls and whatnot. We were just made to run laps around the building in 100+ degree weather. When we got to the far side of the building, where I knew the coach couldn't see me, I would just limp or walk. I didn't care that the coach might notice my laps were completed very slowly.

I dropped soccer and got into the swimming class. It wasn't pool floaties and learning to blow bubbles. Everyone there already knew how to swim. It was like swim team, but without any actual competition. Just learning how to do the different strokes correctly, and doing laps for the duration of the class. Man, waiting for my dad to pick me up outside in the winter with my hair wet was brutal! I have always loved swimming. I love being in water. Ocean, bath tub, shower, pool, river, rain, whatever! One of my very favorite things is to get like 4 pool noodles, two behind my back under my arms and two under my knees and just float in a pool motionless. I can't even feel my body, I just close my eyes and it's all gone. Weightless, no sensation anywhere.

High school was were I really started to get picked on. To their credit, the popular girls generally ignored me, which was good. I didn't have to worry about the brutality of teenage girls. I was friends with a few of the kinder popular girls. I don't think it was because they pitied me, I just think they happened to be friendlier people that just happened to also have fallen in with the popular crowd because of their propensity for athletics. But even though I was friends with them they never invited me to anything. Birthdays, sleepovers, poking around at the mall.

The boys were really what got to me. The popular boys mercilessly mocked me. They threw things at me, they called me names, they made faces at me in the hallway. In retrospect, the faces they made at me just looked fucking stupid, but because I knew they were somehow making fun of me in doing that, it still hurt at the time, no matter how stupid they looked. Also this picture to the right is just something I pulled from google as an example of what sort of a stupid face I might see walking from class to class, not anyone I know.

Even back in 5the grade, students were passing notes and holding hands and being chaperoned to see PG-13 moves on Friday nights. The only notes I got were wadded up pieces of trash. The message there was pretty clear. My mom told me the boys were mean to me because they liked me, and because I wasn't a little tan-on-a-bottle bleach blond manicured softball starlet. She tried to make me feel better, told me I was exotic, that I didn't look like the other girls and the boys didn't know how to interact with me because I didn't look like a little southern belle. I didn't (and still don't) understand my asian phenotype made me a target for such behavior. My mom is one of 9 kids, she has 5 sisters. Every one of them told me I look like an asian Audrey Hepburn and that I should be a fashion model when I grew up. It's impossible to reconcile "you should be a model" with a general disinterest if not outright loathing of your as a female from the male student body.

In my freshman year of high school, this boy moved to our town from Houston with his mom. I've still got a crush on this boy to this day and in some ways I hope he reads this. but I'm also terrified of this possibility. He'll probably just think I'm a nutter butter. I won't post a picture of him out of respect for his privacy. He was going through some family issues when he came to town. He seemed very dark and brooding. I had recently begun to embrace sort of a "if you guys are going to be jerks, then i might as well have fun" mentality and was transitioning into a bit of a goth phase, so this beautiful pensive angsty young man really appealed to me.

Freshman year he was too wrapped up in his own family problems to give a damn about anyone else, but by sophomore year he started to come around and be more social. He is a wonderfully gifted artist, and quickly became the art department's golden boy. Being something of an artist too, I always sought to try to impress him. I knew I would never be as skilled as him, but I as grasping at straws. He made a few friends, but for some reason never seemed interested in being friends with me. I had this sort of terrified awe of him. I wanted so much for him to like me. I guess the best thing I can compare it to is seeing some exotic endangered animal in the wild. You want so much to see it closer, find out more about this rare creature, but you're terrified that if you approach it, it will get spooked and the encounter will be over. That's how I felt about this guy. I was so scared to even try to talk to him. Being very shy to begin with, and having low self esteem due to the ridicule from the rest of the male student population didn't help at all.

I did finally get up the stones to ask him to go see one of the Lord of the Rings films in theatres with me, but he was just embarking in a new relationship with some girl at the time (I didn't know it when I asked him to the movies). Initially he said yes, but called me later to say he didn't think it was a good idea to go, even as friends. And that's how I got my ears pierced. I was so distressed that my mom suggested that we go to Claire's and get my ears pierced, because it would help me take my mind off it and having some cute earrings would make me feel more feminine and attractive.

As I continued to be either ignored or openly mocked by all the boys, my self esteem continued to plummet. My family has a genetic disposition for depression, and mine began to come to a head. My father is a psychiatrist, and it only added fuel to the fire in my head that my parents didn't seem to notice that I was upset. Maybe they just thought it was a phase. I began cutting on myself. I have never made any serious attempts at suicide. I'm not even sure cutting is the right word. Was more abrasions than anything else. I was too chicken shit to actually do serious harm. I bled, but I think my cat has scratched me worse than anything I ever did to myself. Eventually my parents noticed and locked all the knives up. They took my razor, so I couldn't shave my legs or armpits. That made me feel super feminine :( I took to carving into my legs with a metal nail file.

Looking back, I'm not sure what broke me out of that sort of behavior. I'm still depressed. It's not something that goes away, but it's been a very long time since I did anything to physically harm myself. Maybe one day I realized it was pointless because I had no intention of really doing anything serious and it didn't really make me feel any better anyway.

During my high school years, I developed some very very bad social skills. I was desperate for the attention of my male classmates (one in particular) but being girly didn't seem to work (that ship had sailed) so I decided to try being kind of...slutty. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 16, and I didn't go around making out with every boy I could get my hands on, but I behaved in a very unladylike way. I would get very close to male friends. Sometimes I would put my hands into their pants pockets and play with them. Sometimes I would nibble and suck on their earlobes. In the lunchroom. Totally inappropriate for a girl that age. Or any age, really. The few victims of this knew I wasn't ever going to put out so they begrudgingly endured it.

I lost my virginity to a pedophile. I won't go into that now since this is getting long enough.

My artist crush confessed to me a few months ago that he had stolen a few glances down my shirt now and then. I wish I had known that then. Would have helped my self esteem issues tremendously. I just felt undesired by all boys everywhere. He also reminded me that he had asked me to participate in a threesome with his then-girlfriend, which for some reason I had completely forgotten about. At the time I said no because I was "dating" the pedophile and if I was nothing else good then, I was monogamous and loyal, even to someone who didn't deserve it.

I'll ramble about other things soon. Possibly the pedophile, possibly the relationship I have with my long-term crush.

Crush. Its funny how the same word for the feeling of
  disappointment can be used for the feeling of attraction.