When Will They Find Out

Recently, I've been doing a bit of mentorship - helping middle schoolers prepare for high school, making sure kids don't kill each other during dodgeball, stuff like that.

I see myself in a lot of the kids, the ones that hang back from the crowd, the ones that spend lunch hour drawing or reading instead of playing with their friends. These kids come in all shapes and sizes, you wouldn't be able to find them in a photo. And yet, there's a common trait: every action that they take, every decision they make, every time these kids move, they are asking themselves two questions:

Who am I?

When will they find out?

I've asked these questions a lot myself.

What does it mean if I don't want to have a husband? When will they find out that I only said yes when he asked me on a date so that people wouldn't think I'm frigid? What does it mean when I think about kissing a girl before I fall asleep at night, and when will they find out that it's the only thing that will calm my nerves and put me to bed?

The thing about being separate from the crowd is that it's lonely.

It's lonelier still to be separate from yourself, to not have access to a vital part of who you are.

In fourth grade, I was asked to write about my future - what my job would be, if I would have any pets, if I would be married. I could answer the first two questions just fine, but the last one left me stumped. At eight years old the idea of marrying a man sent a chill down my arms and made me want to vomit. What was the other option, though? Be alone? I knew this wasn't what I wanted either, but at least it was better than settling down with a guy.

What did I really want? I wanted to get married to the girl I had been daydreaming about during car rides for a year. She was a doctor and a beautiful one at that. A bright smile, a perfect tan, a little on the short side so that I could lean down and kiss her. She would do the dishes and I would make the food. At night she would come home exhausted in light blue scrubs and we would cuddle together with our favourite books.

I decided to leave the marriage section blank, but when I showed it to my classmates they told me that I should say I was married, or at least engaged. Who doesn't want to be married by thirty? Who doesn't want to be in love?

In response to their complaints, I added two sentences about a live-in boyfriend.

See, I didn't think that the future I wanted was an option. The things expected of me because I would someday be a woman filled me with dread. But what did this mean? And what would happen if I explained it to my classmates?

What would happen if they found out that I was so Different?

I thank God that I've grown out of that mindset. I thank God that I've had enough mentors, other people who were unabashedly themselves, that I've been able to see that the future I want does exist (and maybe she's not a doctor with a perfect tan, but she's going to be an engineer, we cuddle up with our textbooks when she comes back from class, and when she promised, after a week of dating, that one day we would be married the idea filled me with nothing but joy.)

Now, when I see these kids, the ones that stand out, I make sure to be as true to myself as possible - to show them that there's nothing wrong with being diffrent, nothing wrong with blazing your own path, and nothing wrong with telling people who judge you to shove it.