The girl I have been – 303

I’m still trying to get around to that second round of regrets. Well, I guess I did get somewhere with the saving money thing. The way I thought it would go down is that after exploring the question of whether or not I was a nerd, I would go back to that long ago post where maybe becoming a sports manager was not such a good idea.

I did think about it after writing that, like what I should have done differently. That’s not to say that I wish I had never been a manager. It’s not the only thing that I did, and there were some good times, but when I think about different paths, and their deficiencies, then maybe it will give me clues for things I should do in the present. I explore the past because the past created the present. Maybe I could correct things in the present without looking at the past, but I like understanding things fully.

So, what was my arc? Well, when I started grade school, I was mainly doing imagination games at recess. We would play Star Wars or Buck Rogers, and other movie-based things. In third or fourth grade I created Graveyard Airlines. I know it was then, because Jennie was my co-pilot, and she did not move out here until third grade. I was the captain, of course, and Joshua and Jonathan were our crew. Actually, we were pretty liberated now that I think about it. There never seemed to be any gender conflicts. Other people would join us sometimes as passengers, but we were the basic four. We played on the tire trees, and due to the unwise choices of the wacky pilot (me), we would end up in scary situations like meteor showers or landing on lava fields. It was fun while it lasted, but after a while we had done everything, and needed to move on.

When Jennie and I were outside of school, we would play Dungeons and Dragons. There were no dice or maps—we just had characters and they did things. Jennie’s sister Sarah played too.

I know I went through a jump-roping phase, but as I got older, I started playing basketball almost every recess. We had one class (meaning year) play another. So it was sixth graders playing fifth graders, or what have you. To lessen the advantage of being older, we were wildly outnumbered. So maybe you would have four sixth-graders and ten fifth-graders. Usually it was just Billy, Jason, Sean, and I, but sometimes David or Derek would come in. I was the only girl (I had been for Star Wars and Buck Rogers too). If sometimes the extra guys made the teams too equal in number, they would send me over to the younger kids. I suppose in some ways this was a compliment, but it still felt kind of bad, and then I would get irritated and try and score a lot.

I also did after-school sports all the time, and loved it. I was not one of the better athletes, and I was usually chosen towards the end, but not usually dead last, and I don’t think it was as much anguish as some people seem to remember. Maybe we were not the meanest kids. I also rode my bike everywhere. I did not consider myself athletic, because some people were so much better, and because I could not run distance or do the flexed-arm hang. I was above average on all of the other presidential fitness tests, but I only really thought about those two. I had no perspective.

When we did a full-on musical, Fiddler on the Roof, I did that too. I tried out for Hodel, but ended up as a villager. I did have a solo line in “Anatevka”. Actually, it was the opening line. I was not impressed enough with myself. I was the one who sang “A little bit of this.”

I never joined a sports club, not only because I did not think of myself as a good athlete, but also because it would have taken money. Also, through TAG I was always getting notices about Saturday Academy classes and Olympics of the Mind and things like that, but I never did those either.

So, once I got to junior high, the natural fit was drama. It did not cost any additional money, or require any athletic ability, and for reasons that I am not sure I understand, most of the smart kids did drama. There was no longer after-school sports, or recess. There was still gym, but every Friday was running laps, and it just kept getting less and less fun. (I was still riding my bike a lot though). Anyway, I took drama class and I did drama club after school.

I did sort of have this thing going on where I wanted to try and learn and know everything. One nice thing about the electives open to seventh graders was that there were two exploration ones. The Fine Arts exploration had one quarter each of foreign language, language arts, drama, and music, I think. In Applied Arts exploration, there was one quarter each of home economics, art and drafting, plastics and leather shop, and wood and metal shop. I was really horrible with wood, plastics, metal, and leather, but I still got to try a lot of different things. Junior high was where I started getting into foreign language, and it should have consolidated my drama aspirations, but it didn’t.

Recent events have caused me to feel somewhat better about the incident, and I may write about that later. For now, I think I did not realize how much it affected me. Tracing my weight gain, I think it started there. Initially I thought that was puberty, but technically I started that two years earlier. My sense of humor changed then, where I first remember cracking mean jokes at that age. Maybe when I got fed up with drama, that was a factor.

I do know the terms of my getting fed up, and that was something along the lines of “realizing” that I was never going to get any good parts, because they were always musicals and I couldn’t sing, and I wasn’t pretty and that was going to hurt me too.

This was not completely fair. Yes, there was always one big musical, but they did smaller non-musical things too, and lots of different people got interesting roles. Also, you can do a lot with small roles, and giving the whole thing up because you can’t be the star is really obnoxious and immature. I just know that I was dissatisfied with my life and wanted change. So I quit drama class and started beginning guitar, and quit drama club and joined yearbook staff.

Yearbook staff was fun, and I did learn some new things, like how to develop film. For beginning guitar, I was the guitarist in the band, so I figured I should learn.

Anyway, this is the background for the person that I was when I started high school, and picked my path through there. I did try a drama class again, and that is worth exploring. There is also more exploration to do in terms of athletics, academics, and music, and yes we will probably get into dating again. Obviously what’s important is what I do now, but I know the seeds of what I should do can be found in then.