Junior high sucked.
The middle school I went to was nasty. It was in a notoriously bad area of town, there were rats crawling around, there were more portables than classrooms, but all of those things were entirely tolerable. The worst part about middle school? Middle schoolers.
I went to an arts school, so there was incredible diversity on that campus, but I was in the least diverse of all the "majors" — dance. The dance department at my school was split into three levels. I had been dancing all my life and was thus in the level with all the other girls who had been doing the same. We all looked the same … ten pounds underweight, hair in a tight bun, oversized calf muscles, and tiny waists covered by sweat stained leotards. We were the best of the best dancers at that school, and (unfortunately) we knew it.
Perhaps everyone can say this of their middle school experience, but I was the odd one out. I was the weird girl with the lazy eye(s) who read HTML books instead of Seventeen magazines during the mandatory half-hour reading period each morning. It easily could have appeared that I thought I was better than everyone, but in reality I was incredibly insecure. I wanted so badly to be accepted by this group of girls who seemed to love each other so easily, but it never happened for me.
I remember once during a performance with the Boca Pops I collided with one of the other girls in the dark. She bit my eye. I literally had a black eye with this girl's teeth marks an hour after the show. It hurt. We both kept dancing but after we got off stage, everyone crowded around her and helped attend to her sore teeth while I sat alone and cried out of my black eye.
Oh, but there's more…
After two years of feeling like an outsider in my own peer group, I had to choose which high school to attend. It wasn't a difficult choice. If I was to stay at the High School of The Arts I had to want a career in dance, and want it bad. There was no other reason to continue feeling like an outsider.
I chose to go back to Wellington. No more arts school. Just high school.
A few days after my last day of middle school, I got an anonymous e-mail from someone who said she was a girl in my middle school dance class. It was several paragraphs long, going on about how much all the girls hated me and were glad to hear that I was leaving. Her last sentence was, "you are the dirt at the bottom of my shoe." I found out who the e-mail was from a little while later. Turned out to be a girl I had done a duet with when I was seven years old.
I was not a saint. But nobody deserves that.
In my fourteen-year-old mind, my whole peer group hated me. I had a chance to start over in high school. So when I got there I started looking for friends who were nothing like the girls who had made me feel so bad about myself the previous two years. The girls were beautiful, gossipy, lazy in school, and all members of one tight-knit clique.
Without meaning to, I wound up with friends in high school who were the opposite … intelligent, quirky people who were members of many different social groups. They were predominately male. They were into things like computers and video games and playing guitar. I would hang out with them for hours, watching movies with car chases and explosions and casino heists and undercover agents.
And just like many women will pick up mannerisms from their girlfriends, I may have picked up certain interests and characteristics from my guy friends. I am aggressive, opinionated, stubborn, independent, fierce and analytical. I tell crude jokes and wear knee-length shorts. I am built like a door yet I refuse to wear a push-up bra.
My interest in computers also came from male influence (surprise, surprise). One of my best friends in middle school was actually a teacher, Dennis Yuzenas, whom I still consider to be a good friend today. I blame him for my ridiculous passion for computers. A few of my high school friends continued to fuel that interest over the next four years. And here I am today, a Java programmer working on modeling and simulation software. A budding computer scientist. Who woulda thunk it?
It's earned me nicknames like The Uterus from the guys in my CS classes who adore the fact that I am both a woman and a programmer. But ironically, while I earn nicknames that speak to my unique femininity, I become more "masculine" the more I am immersed in that environment.
Like any sane person, I long to fit in with my peer group. It's not a longing to be one of the guys; it's a longing to be one of the group. And when that group is predominately male, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.
So that's where I am starting on this journey. After years of denying whatever it is that makes me a woman, I long to discover my unique feminine identity without losing what makes me me. Because I believe that even when you strip away all of my environment, I am still aggressive, opinionated, stubborn, independent, fierce and analytical. But I am so much more.
