Stuff I Found In My Closet, Part I

Barely made any progress on Mission: Clean Out Your Childhood Closet 2007. It's going to take me forever to go through all that stuff. I can't seem to look at more than a few things at a time before I'm rolling around on the floor with tears in my eyes because HOLY, I WAS SUCH A LOSER. My mother yelled at me from the hallway to stop making fun of my younger self, that's just who I was. But how can you not cackle like a hyena when you find stuff like this?


OHHHHH BABY!!!! YEAH! It's my 9th grade English Portfolio, with a "RENT" collage for the cover. The lyrics to "Take Me Or Leave Me" are weaved throughout the portfolio, acting as the theme I guess you could say. (I got an A+, BTW). Inside, there are many deep pieces of writing. They include a story about the first time I saw "RENT" and poems about drowning myself. You heard me. I know that I've shared with all of you how MUSICAL THEATRE CRAZY I was in my younger years but I'm not sure that I've ever expressed the darker side of my literary background.

I used to write a lot. A lot a lot and all the time. And I think, as much as the stuff makes me cringe now, that I wasn't half bad. I won a lot of poetry contests and writing contests and while it was because I was a pretty good writer, it was moreso because I was very bizarre. Bizarre and very dark. I won second place in the 4th grade speech contest for a speech on how our bodies react when we are afraid, the animal instincts that come out when we are terrified of the dark or plane rides or death. It was titled "Things That Go Bump In The Night".

The first place winner? She wrote a speech about taking a walking tour of Washington DC.

I was such a happy kid and I have no idea why I was interested in such bleak subject matter. I know that the interest grew deeper and deeper as I got older. Around the time I turned 12, I became OBSESSED with the Holocaust. Why? I have no idea but I read every book I could find on the subject. My 8th grade social studies teacher would later feed into this obsession since I had to write a paper on the subject for her class. She wanted to make sure I had specific, correct information about the atrocities committed during the second World War so she lent me some books. She wanted to be sure that I wasn't reading "fluffy, dumbed-down accounts". Her books were on a variety of topics but I remember one specifically that centered on the medical experiments of Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz.

I still don't know how I feel about my social studies teacher lending me descriptive horrific literature on the Holocaust. While I think a 13 year old is old enough to process the morbidity of such information, it definitely gave me nightmares. Maybe that was because I think it was the first time I realized just how grotesque a topic it was and how much it scared me. Like, they made lamps out of skin? SERIOUSLY? LAMPS OUT OF SKIN!? I'm in 8th grade! WHAT DOES THAT MEAN!?!? But it definitely allowed me to write a more accurate paper and not write things like, "the Nazis were mean and that made Jewish people sad". Which, I mean, is true, but not, as we say, the whole story.

Compounded with my fascination of the Gestapo, I spent junior high reading every single Stephen King novel in the school library. I don't know how you feel about that but I don't think this helped the situation. The two interests together gave me a very vivid, disturbing imagination which translated over into my writing assignments. It made teachers question my cheery disposition and zest for learning. In fact, in 6th grade, I wrote a horrifyingly macabre poem about suicide and later that day, my mother got a phonecall from the school principal, making sure everything was "okay at home". My mother assured him that I was not at all suicidal, just intelligent and probably bored.

Some of the poems I've written are pretty disturbing when you realize they were written by an 11 year old. And I can't stop laughing about them because I was such a happy child and that's the essence of all of this. Those dark, brooding poems were not representative of who I was, they were just a way to express and explore a part of me that I didn't know existed.

And while maybe I'm mocking the little girl I used to be, underneath the amazement and disbelief at how incredibly WEIRD she was, I feel so happy knowing that she was ALLOWED to be who she was, that she lived and thrived in a creative environment and that her imagination was given permission to run. I'm sure my parents weren't thrilled that I was going around writing poems about setting myself on fire while listening to the cast album of "Annie" on my walkman. But I was never told to stop writing or stop reading those books or stop freaking the hell out of my teachers. At the end of the day, my mother hung up the phone with the principal, talked to me to make sure I was alright, and then took the suicide poem and taped it up on the refrigerator for anyone to see, proof that no matter what I did, she was proud of me.