Like most teenagers at one point or another, there was something alluring to me about suicide. You look around you and start to wonder how much of what comforts you is genuine or permanent. At the same time, there are a lot of expectations and unknowns that can look like a tidal wave barreling toward you. And if you know you can’t swim, there’s something reassuring about knowing that you can end the nightmare scenario on your own terms in ways that seem much more pleasant than drowning in front of spectators. You might even think you’d be doing those spectators a favor if it is made clear, however gently, year after year of your development, that there is something regrettably just not right about you.
I feel as if I’ve talked about this a lot whether that be in Context, Initiation, or The Plot. I tended to have a pretty rigid idea about what life looks like that I clung onto long past when I went off track and to some extent, even now, worry about if I’m left in an extended state of inactivity to manufacture problems for myself. When I was fifteen, a month or so after we wrapped our high school production of The Sound of Music, I lied to my mother because at that moment my teenage brain really wanted her to approve of me and did so in a rare act of extreme self-betrayal.
“It’s been in my plans all along,” I said. “When I’m sixteen. I’m gonna, you know, bust out.”
“You mean blossom?”
“Yeah. That’s what you do when you’re sixteen. Figure out how to walk in heels. Get real clothes. Go to prom. Dance around a gazebo with a Nazi…” Her eyes lit up like I wasn’t still currently dressed like a twelve-year-old boy, like she hadn’t spent the past five minutes lecturing me, and like I didn’t just make a Sound of Music reference that went over her head.
“I know none of the boys in your brother class are like TVXQ,” she said referring to the K-pop boyband that I did quite enthusiastically support. Being a fan of them had the added bonus of me seeming more like I was on the right track and, through an online forum, I formed friendships with girls all over the world. “But your grandmother really likes Terrance from church.” I never intended on having a prom date but I didn’t want to ruin the moment.
It obviously had the intended effect. Maybe too much. She’s brought up that conversation so many times over the years (including only a few weeks ago) followed by the sentiment of, “What happened to the plan? What happened to you? Was it something I did?”
(It’s catchy, right? BTS could never. T-V-X-Q. Put some respect on their name! And don’t ask me what they’re singing about. I have no idea.)
Even as a teenager, it never occurred to me to think of myself as too fat or too skinny. Too tall or too short. Too light or too dark. I have always viewed myself largely through a baseline of functionality that inevitably fluctuates with time and age or other circumstances. My ability to move, to lift, to grip, to see, to hear, to smell. My body is a tool to interact with the world around me and I feel best about it when all systems are green, properly calibrated, and all around good to go. It’s probably why I never formed a drinking habit. Or a coffee habit. I needed to be in control at all times.
I was a few months into being sixteen when I went down on the lacrosse field and immediately got caked in mud. It was pouring rain but there was no lightning in the area so the game was allowed to continue. My coach was screaming at me to get up seeing as I was the last line of defense and in all my years of playing, I always popped right back up even if I was literally concussed. But this time, I’d torn both the main ligaments that held my knee together. My brain was still going. I honestly didn’t even feel much of the pain at first. However I suppose my subconscious did because my body had ground to a halt and wasn’t going to let me go anywhere without being carried. The whistle blew to pause the game.
As I wrote in Context:
While I wasn’t overflowing with self-confidence back then, the one thing I knew for certain was that I was a very good lacrosse player and that there were very few in the league who could ever outrun me.
In a way, it felt sort of like divine intervention for my little lie that had snowballed into a big expectation. Changing your whole look is the last thing on anyone’s mind when you can’t walk or carry your own tray in the school cafeteria or take a shower the way you used to. And while everyone around me had a certain idea in their head when it came to the blossoming of a young woman, landing face in the mud kickstarted a type of blossoming that I would later learn to appreciate even if it did abruptly thwart the peak of my athleticism.
(My motivational TVXQ song of choice for my surgery and physical therapy adventure that I do sort of understand because it’s in Japanese and I know a fair amount of Japanese. I learned the dance moves of the upper body first for many K-pop songs and gradually incorporated the lower body as I recovered. I’d eventually join a K-pop dance club for a little while.)
The good thing is that I tended to be very driven individual which meant I threw myself at life obstacles and curveballs with, at minimum, all the force of the tidal waves that threatened me in my nightmares. It’s during my eighteen months off the field that I dedicated more of my time to songwriting and music composition. It’s when I gained a real sense of conviction in regard to what I wanted my career path to be even though it went against previously established expectations. Suicide became a lot less alluring and instead, I worried about not having enough time in my life to do all I wanted to do and I’m pleased to report I still feel the same way. The possibilities seem endless.
I posed for pictures with my friend Molly on the front steps of her house the night of prom. My mother didn’t completely miss out on her fantasies though. She did pick out my dress and my hair looked like Medusa. With my knee brace on, I grumpily sported what are apparently called “kitten heels” that sunk into the ground of the school courtyard. It would be my first and last night in a pair of shoes that didn’t keep my heel level with my toes.
“Maybe this is why we need dates. A guy with proper shoes to keep us from being sucked into the ground,” Molly said before abandoning her much higher heels to her own mother’s dismay and walking barefoot across the grass. We sat together at the otherwise empty dinner tables feasting on what was left of the freakishly good mac and cheese as everyone else danced the night away. We ended the night back at her place in sweatpants while eating ice cream and watching Monty Python.
Almost fifteen years later, my street’s block party lucks out with spectacular weather. I know my parents are watching me retell bizarre tales from any one of my adventures. I like to make people laugh. I like to tell it so that they feel they were right there with me when it happened for that particular success or that particular failure. The conversation shifts to other topics and I feel as though I’m following and participating with ease. Most of these people have known me since I was very young and sometimes when my parents unleash me to “go be charming” someone makes a comment about how it’s like I’m a completely different person. It had been several years since I’d last been home for a block party.
“She was always interesting,” my neighbor says who always likes to have the latest scoop on everything. “Just quiet.”
Most of the time, I no longer think of myself as stunted or defective or wrong. I just think I grew into a good ode to my younger self who, for a little while, was terrified of what existing in the world might have to mean. I think about her often, the girl in the mud, and I am determined to never let her down.
So to all the others I say, “Who are you calling a late bloomer?”