black sheep girl
Alicia's first question/topic: Talk about a memory from before you were ten. (And where, exactly, did you grow up?)
You know, I feel like I do a lot of talking about memories from before I was ten. At least, more than most do. Some people's personal blogs or journals or whatever seem carefully constructed to give the impression that their author more or less sprang into existence from someone's forehead like Minerva, as an adult with a fully developed, consistent personality and worldview.
Anyway, I more or less grew up in Central Pennsylvania; I've lived in the same room in the same house since I was six. But before that, my family moved almost annually, and so I was born in Nashville, Tennessee (which I don't remember), and spent at least ten months each in Madison, Wisconsin; Marburg, Germany; a suburb of Madison, pretty different from where I'd been before, and Davidson, North Carolina. If I'm telling a childhood story set in one of those places, it means it took place when I was very young.
One thing I remember is being seven and having to go to the psychologist and at one point she asked me to draw a picture of myself with my best friend. This was mainly meant to be a test of my fine motor skills (which were awful), but I fixated on the "best friend" part. I thought she was testing to see whether I had any friends, and that if I admitted that I didn't-- or that I didn't have any who weren't my own age, non-imaginary, human, and not blood relatives-- she would think or know that something was wrong with me. I was ashamed and scared, and I think I ended up making up a bunch of random shit, trying to sound like I had awesome friends, actually, and other people Totally Did Like Me, honest. I don't know, I did things like this a lot-- I suppose I still do, to a much lesser extent. I'd talk about book characters as though they were kids in my class and hope the person I was trying to trick hadn't read the same books I had.
(Before you go feeling too sorry for me, understand that I was really a little rat. I wasn't a social outcast because kids are cruel and can't tolerate special shiny giftedness or quirkiness or something; I was a social outcast because I was wild, stubborn, angry, tearful, hyperactive-- and trust me, there's a difference between normal childhood antsyness or energetic temperament and genuine hyperactivity-- I frequently tried to run away from home and school, I talked about wanting to kill myself, I got jealous and was incredibly mean towards very nice, pretty, smart little girls purely out of spite that I couldn't be them or at least friends with them. I'd spit in their food, pull their long hair or try to mess it up with sticky things so it'd have to be cut off. I would yell and kick at anyone who tried to bully, tease, or trick me, which meant that I didn't get beat up or directly mocked much, but it sure didn't endear me to anyone. I wrecked my sister's dolls and toys-- you know Sid, the kid in the first Toy Story who makes clumsily spliced-together Frankentoys, like a hairless baby doll head with a bunch of huge legs coming out of the neck that look like they came from a mechanical spider? That's what I did. One doll I liked a lot, and I chewed both her rubber feet off. It felt good to bite things.)
(At a few points, I did have real human friends my own age, but they usually didn't stay friends with me for more than a couple of months.)
Another thing is that I liked to play Natural Disaster with my Barbies. There'd be a tornado (simulated by my ceiling fan) or a flood-slash-tsunami (simulated by the bathtub), and everyone would panic, and one of them would die heroically while bringing the others to safety. Then all the rest of the Barbies would bravely venture back into the rubble to recover the body of their friend, once the storm was over, and one of them would be a really good make-up artist and reconstructive surgeon who'd fix up her mangled face and broken limbs and crushed ribs, so that when they all had a big, weepy, terribly sad and dramatic funeral for her it could be open casket and she would look even more beautiful than she did when she was alive.
Occasionally, I'd rework the story so that the dead doll wasn't dead, just in a coma, and another doll brought her back to consciousness by telling her stories and refusing to leave her side even though the doctors had said that it was A Hopeless Case.
...Sorry. You were probably expecting something a bit less Wednesday Addams. (Or were you?) I would probably remember less macabre things if I were in a better mood, and I don't know why I'm not in a better mood today. It's like an anvil made of negative emotions just landed on my back and knocked the wind out of me and I woke up so happy and I don't understand what happened.