Rain Soaked Silk: The Passenger

Everything is Gray, Part I: Everything Felt Wrong

This is an essay from my memoir Everything is Gray. If you'd like to start at the beginning, you can find the first post here. This is Essay #4 in Part #1: Everything Felt Wrong.

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This is about extracurriculars, which is a boring word for the exhausting lifelong project of trying to be yourself when everyone around you needs you to be something else.

Highschool me, trying to be a model.

Rain Soaked Silk

The Passenger

My older brother played baseball. As far as I could tell this was his only interest other than being a very popular social butterfly. He played through high school and a little in college. Our closest cousins also played baseball, they even ended up playing major league ball. Minus a brief karate and even more brief street hockey phase thanks to The Karate Kid and The Mighty Ducks baseball was the main focus in our family. First, little league but then the travel ball that took up almost every weekend of our summer vacations and took the place of any other kind of vacation. My brother also struggled behaviorally. On top of my dad’s personal love of baseball I know now that the focus on this sport was important for a lot of really good reasons. It helped bond them since my dad had adopted my brother and his own father was out of the picture. These are beautiful reasons to play a sport and let it engulf you. I am a little jealous, in fact, that my brother had this one thing for at least 15 years straight with complete and total focus, passion, and nonstop support from the whole family.

So, of course, I played softball. I always tried my best and luckily for me I was naturally gifted athletically, but really, I just wanted to enjoy the game with my friends. If we lost a game I did not carry it around or beat myself up. As I got older and softball got less fun I enjoyed it less and less and also didn’t really have much in common with the girls. I felt uncomfortable at the sleepovers and never clicked with the group. I was good at it but didn’t crave doing it. However, gymnastics and dance were fun. I wasn’t as naturally talented at these but I genuinely enjoyed them. One year my family told me that I couldn’t do both things so I chose gymnastics, I wanted to do the one that made me happiest. I also wanted to get better at it. Who knew that would make my dad so angry and disappointed. He yelled about me quitting something that I was so good at, and stormed off. In most of these instances I don’t remember my mom talking to me about it or reassuring me that I was making the right choice. I remember a shrug and the word, “Well…” That was the first time I got that sort of reaction to choosing what felt right for me, but it wouldn’t be the last.

It was also when I learned the difference between receiving enthusiastic support and begrudging support.

With softball, I had my parents enthusiastic support. After all, that was something they knew how to support. The only reason my dad wasn’t also my coach was because he was TOO passionate (poor umpires). But things that were “artsy” weren’t sports. There was no competition. My dad and brother would say that or ask when I was going to do a dance competition because if I didn’t, well, what was the point? Why do something if there were no winners? I felt that, I felt the burden of having to drive me to and from this thing that was pointless and there was a heavy guilt that came with that understanding. Even though I watched every dance movie over and over and cried during the end dance scene and had so much fun doing it, that lesson that it was pointless unless I won competitions (which I knew I wouldn’t) was stronger.

So I went back to softball. I think my dad had talked to the coach of the high school girls team and told him I was good and encouraged me to try out for the summer travel ball team (a real sport, a real high school team). He practiced with me and drove me to the tryouts. He was involved. So the summer after 8th grade I made the team. At first, it felt amazing. Since I wasn’t as good at dance or gymnastics I rarely got that feeling of being good enough to be chosen. My parents were happy and fully into it. My dad came to every practice. It was the worst summer of my life. I did not know these girls, or rather, I was not friends with them, we ran in different circles. I was in a chipped black nail polish, Blink 182, Good Charlotte, theater kid phase which these ladies, clearly, were not. These girls liked fake nails (square cut, french tips), fake tanning, french braids and generally being too cool for anything at all. I still didn’t even shave my legs regularly, hell I don’t do that now. They also had bonds. They’d been friends and played together for years and I was an outsider.. I didn’t know that me being on the team and immediately taking an infield spot away from one of the other girls was a punishable offense but oh it was. There were never kind words, no getting to know you, they hated me from the start and the commitment to not speaking to me at all that eventually turned into cruelty was honestly astounding. When we traveled I sat in hotel rooms alone while they hung out together in a different hotel room. I still had my books. Once I overheard them joking about jumping in a hotel pool in their uniforms even though the coaches told us not to but I eagerly agreed to it. We held hands and I felt like maybe this would be the moment, the test. We all ran to the edge of the pool where they all stopped together and pushed me in at the last minute, alone. I came out of the water with a full smile on my face only to look up and see them all staring down at me. The worst part was they weren’t even laughing. They were just looking down at me with a smirk that eyes that said, “What did you think would happen?” I did voice my struggles to my family. My dad told me to ignore it and show them how good I was. As if actually being a good softball team mattered to these girls. My brother told me to punch them in the stomach. Sigh. I would take the anger when I quit. It wasn’t worth this humiliation. Bring on high school.

I focus on this story because extracurricular activities for kids are often taken way too seriously but for the wrong reasons. So many kids start a sport because they have fun playing it and the adults around them take that as a signal to make it their whole lives. The sport, not the experience. Not the joy it brings. It becomes on more thing to excel at. Not the camaraderie or the team spirit and definitely not simply because it’s something that they enjoy doing. I think that’s the biggest long term detriment to this approach. If I do anything now ‘just for fun’ I feel guilty and like I’m wasting time. I am lazy. I need to justify it somehow. Laying on a couch reading in the middle of the day? Almost impossible unless I’m actually on vacation. I have to convince myself that sitting here writing this is worth my time.

I am still proud of this work.

I only tried to do something I loved one more time after that. A lot of my friends from middle school joined the high school marching band. Through them I was introduced to color guard. The dancers who spin and throw the flags, rifles and sabres during the marching band’s show. It turns out that color guard is really just, wait for it, hyper-athletic dancing! YES. This was a journey I was going to take my parents on whether they liked it or not (they did not). It was awesome, I was good at it, I loved dancing again, I made friends, I had a community, I eventually met my first love and some other lifelong weirdos. So why didn’t that last either? Even though we won state championships 2 times after which my dad actually showed a dvd of us to his family and bragged about me? Because getting to that point took WORK. Lots and lots of work. I had to convince everyone that this was a real sport and that it was difficult and competitive. We worked so hard. Band camp was 2 weeks, guard camp was 3. That’s 8 hours a day for three weeks of my summer vacation of real physical training. We’re talking a South Carolina summer by the way. Temperatures in the mid-90’s with 100% humidity. Rain or shine we worked (and if you’ve never had to toss a rain soaked silk flag on a 6 foot metal pole with precision and accuracy while keeping your toes pointed in a summer thunderstorm you have no idea). But band is expensive, I can’t imagine it is that much more expensive than other sports honestly but I went to a Friday Night Lights kind of high school so most of the funding went to football. The football team also liked to kick us off one of their 3 practice fields whenever they felt they needed it more. So my parents were (understandably) really unhappy about the costs and the constant requests for fundraising. Three seasons was the longest I did anything which is a testament to how much I enjoyed color guard. But after a while the exhaustion of all the convincing took its toll. I couldn’t keep hearing the complaints or feel like what I was doing was a burden so I quit. That eventual bragging moment from my dad is still a high point for me but it took the first 2 seasons and a state championship to get there. They probably would have gotten more supportive and involved if I had stuck with it but that part of it was too much for me. I was jealous of my friends whose parents and siblings were at every event and did all the fundraising and wore Summerville Band merch. It is taxing for a kid to constantly feel the need to explain and justify themselves. But everything about me seemed to require just that. My interests, my clothes, my music, my friends, everything required an explanation for why I enjoyed doing it rather than choosing something else. So I quit. I quit and got through high school with my only goal being to leave and start over somewhere completely new.

One day while I was at the orthodontist I mentioned that I wanted to go to New York to study fashion and my orthodontist said that his daughter went to a school called FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology. And that ladies and gentleman was the extent of that decision making process. I told my parents and they were, in a word, stoked.

I’m not entirely sure what made fashion school different for them. Maybe because it sounded so very cool and like I would make a lot of money. Maybe because The Devil Wears Prada had come out and I have never met someone who didn’t love that movie. It sounded glamourous. I think I have always known that I didn’t want to actually be in fashion. I just knew I needed to get to New York City . Then I would figure everything else out. It grew from there. I didn’t need extracurriculars anymore after that. We started planning. Took a trip to NYC to tour the school.

The city hit me hard, like what I imagine heroin feeling like the first time you do it.

It filled up all of the empty spaces. Now I had something to look forward to and I could get through the rest of high school and the one year of college I would do locally. It was a weird and exciting couple of years. I worked, I studied, I had a best friend and a boyfriend, who had also been in marching band. He told me he had seen me from the start and watched me during practices. Very Rory and Dean. He was also an extremely talented guitar player (yes, yes, your red flag radar is correct).

I look back at all of this and I wonder how and if things would have been different if I just kept doing things because I loved them. Would I still have felt the need to escape? Would I have let my love of reading and writing and general creativity shape the college that I chose rather than the immediate positive response from others? Or was this it? Would this be the happy scene in the movie where they roll the credits as I jet off to the big city to a new adventure?

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There’s only one essay left in part 1! Not the Credits is coming May 8th. Come back next Friday for my other newsletter, Mess and Magic — a little lightness about the present day. Thanks so much for reading.

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🎵 This issue's song: The Passenger — Iggy Pop

I’ve always felt like the passenger. Constantly being carried along by other people’s expectations until I finally decided to let go and ride.