Member-only story
You’re Never Too Old To Fly Your Freak Flag
On Aging and Authenticity
When I was seven, I wanted to be a writer. I would spend hours — days, even — at the old family IBM Selectric, writing numerous stories about horses and heroines. They usually featured girls my age who did extraordinary things, and they all had one thing in common: a hard time fitting inside the box. They were different, and nine times out of ten, the other kids didn’t understand them. They made fun of them, or they ostracized them. But by the end of the story, the girls had usually achieved some remarkable thing by themselves. And they’d done it to the amazement and disbelief of their peers. They had affected some sort of change, bucked the system, or performed “the impossible.”
“That’ll be me!” I would tell seven-year-old myself.
By the time I hit seventh grade, I was definitely hanging around outside of the box. My clothes were lame, and my hair was never right, and I was a stick insect without any hint of the figure that the popular girls seemed to have returned to school with that September. And hello? You needed that visible bra strap if you were going to sit on the top rung of Pauline Johnson Elementary’s social ladder. Boobage was (and probably still is) a pre-requisite.
