Can I Sit With You?

Friday, October 19, 2007

Can I Sit With You?
Obviously, we have all felt the pain of being ostracized on the schoolyard at one time or another.
My friend JournalistJess's friends are working on this project, Can I Sit With You?, compiling a book of stories of people who have "schoolyard" experiences and selling it to benefit a local PTA.
Check it out here. Submit stories.
We were at this wedding last Saturday night, and it was like a mish-mosh of all the people I have ever known, from every schoolyard I have ever played on. There's something so lovely, and so liberating, and so oppressive about events like that to me.
I was getting ready, in the bathroom of the house that I mostly grew up in, setting my hair in hotrollers to facilitate putting it up in a french twist (the dress I was wearing looked better with my hair up), and my heart started beating faster and faster. I looked at myself in the mirror -- the same mirror in which I had stared at myself hundreds of thousands of times -- but for the first time I was looking at myself with a different pair of eyes.
It was a little ridiculous, really, the whole thing -- going back to something we had all left behind. But the moment of heart-racingness was the acknowledgement of the first time that I was ready to step beyond the muck of the past and step into the muck of the future. I was, that night, a woman with tall hair, and expensive shoes, and an expensive dress, and who didn't look much like she did when she was growing up. But for the first time, I was ready to embrace the schoolyard me; and embrace all the other parts of me; and put together all the pieces, and make one complete whole.
I don't know what comes next for me. But I realized, as I chatted on Saturday with all the people who used to wound me on the playground, that I am not afraid of the past anymore.