awkward on the outside

[ironymaiden]

livingdeadpan wanted to hear about my awkward adolescence. (this is part one. part two, for kijjohnson comes later.)

i'm 5'9" tall. (well, according to my last doctor visit, i'm a 1/4 or more taller than that.) this is not a particularly remarkable adult size, but i was 5'5" or 5'6" at twelve. the average twelve-year-old at the time, male or female, was 5'1". so i started out bigger than an average adult female in the US, and kept going.

(i suspect that many of my peers in school might have been taller if they had better diets. the current rate of 25% free/reduced lunch for my old school district is, i'm pretty sure, lower than it was when i was there. or at least it seemed like the more prosperous the school district, the taller the girls' basketball team was on average.)

everyone thought i was older than i actually was. this meant no cheap movie admissions for me, lots of murmuring from the crowd when i played in an age-grouped piano competition, and confusion about my lack of coordination. it also meant that there was a long period when no teen boy (everyone involved being fragile and embarrassed anyway) would slow dance with me, due to the towering over. (you would think that the adult-sized breasts in the face would help, but you would be wrong.)

i started out being a little girl who couldn't dress like a little girl because they didn't make clothes that big. and then i became the teenaged girl who couldn't dress like other teenagers because of long arms and long legs. (i had other conformity issues that i'll hit in the second "awkward adolescence" post.)

the big thing at my school was "tight-rolling" jeans. essentially, one bought pants that were too long and a little wide, and then cuffed them to peg them in at the ankles. this was done with all pants. i had not yet discovered the magic of men's jeans (and my mother would NEVER have bought them for me) so i had a problem. my pants barely covered my ankles if i was lucky. i could be the kid without the cuffs, or i could be the kid with the cuffs at mid-calf. this was a no-win situation. i didn't find a source of "long" women's pants until i after graduated. i carefully matched my socks to my shirts. i wore a lot of skirts. i tried to develop my own style and was generally thwarted by the people holding the purse strings. i pined.

i couldn't find long-sleeved shirts that covered my wrists, either. the solution to this was pushing up my sleeves, which is a habit i still can't quite break.

because i was always growing, i never really knew where my limbs ended. my sports-related hand-eye coordination was terrible. it was impossible to do things like run and kick a ball at the same time. i wasn't good at throwing things either. people always looked at me and thought i should play basketball, but i never did manage to dribble. (i also was prone to tripping over my own feet during the endless back and forth.)

the acne started when i was eleven. first it was my nose, and then it was all of my face, plus my chest and back. it never went away, and no amount of OTC medication, face washing, diet, prayer, or makeup could do a thing about it. (i didn't get treatment for it until i was in college and paying for the dermatologist myself. the dude pretty much looked at me once and started writing prescriptions. also, growing out of it is a lie.)

i had buck teeth, and then i had braces and a retainer. at least i never had to wear headgear.

i lived in a very conservative rural area, at the height of big hair. i always had a good haircut, but it was short. (i really need to get a scanner and put together some old photos.) my mother, bless her heart, had kept it short from the time i was born because she didn't want to take care of it. there was a mullet period sometime in elementary school (it was the 80s, and i've always been a bit butch) but for the most part i was conditioned to think that long hair was wrong for my hair/a terrible chore and so it was generally no longer than the middle of my ears. my hair fit no definition of attractiveness for kids in my school, although many adults thought it was great. (adults were less enthused about the period when i shaved the back of my head. amusingly enough, i had no idea that my hair when grown out would be wavy and very friendly to curling irons. i had big hair for a play in college, and the sorority girls who styled it for me sighed over how easy it was.)

at the time, i wanted to cloak myself in outward conformity and reject everything it represented at the same time. i thought i was really unattractive. everything in my environment told me so, and i got to the point where i was broadcasting "get away from me" in every way i could. i also couldn't see what was so attractive about the people who were getting beneficial attention. i'm pretty sure that i was blind to the passes that *were* being made. looking at the pictures now, i avoided the most embarrassing excesses of fashion at the time, and i was slim and strong and golden from hours of swimming and chores on the farm. i was kind of stunning once the braces came off, and i had absolutely no idea.