brat but it's me at age 13
i may perceive myself as a brat but everyone else just thinks i'm a badass
For someone who hates being perceived, I am fascinated by how other people see me. Maybe it’s because I love myself, maybe it’s because I hate myself, but a greedy part of my brain always wants to know what other people think of me. I’m not really fishing for compliments, but rather I want unbiased, indirect opinions about myself from outsiders. If we’ve just met, if you don’t have context for who I am, if you’re just seeing me for the first time, how do you witness me? Will you tell me the truth about who I am rather than placate me as a friend? Will you bear witness to my demons or am I good at hiding them? Can you see how uncomfortable and unconfident I am or is all that anxiety buried six feet under?
Part of my fascination with perception is because the older we get, the fewer people know all of who we are. My parents and my brother knew all of me from the beginning, and they know a lot about me now, but they missed parts in the middle and they don’t get to see as much of current me as some of my friends who live in town with me now. My best friend growing up is still a close friend of mine, but we live in different states and don’t keep in touch as much as we used to. Friends move, friends leave, friends change, and a lot of friends now weren’t around when I was a kid or when I was a teenager. We only ever borrow people and they borrow us, so who really knows every piece of who we are? How do people perceive you if they don’t have all the backstory or all the context?
Often this means we have the ability to shapeshift. If we didn’t like who we were as a teenager, we can move and reinvent ourselves in our twenties. If we change too much in our twenties and grow into someone we don’t like, we can spend our thirties rebuilding our sense of self and appreciating our past in new ways. We can mold ourselves and mask ourselves and hide our past selves away so that the new people we meet never have to see us at our lowest. We can play pretend and make believe that we weren’t damaged when we were young, that we didn’t hurt people along the way. Age is a strange form of rebirth as we work on killing our younger selves.
The younger self that I have spent the most time burying is thirteen-year-old me. Almost all of my self-hatred and low self-esteem stems from that version of me, outdated software that should have been updated and deleted a long time ago. Every few years I feel like I’ve finally moved on from her, buried her fears and anxieties and found peace, and then she returns in full force to remind me that I cannot change the past and that she’s still there inside me, lost and afraid.
Most of the people who meet me or know me now have never met thirteen year old me. Honestly, I don’t know who most of my current friends were at that age, and we’re all happy about that. (If you’ve watched Inside Out 2 then you may have some idea of why that is…) One of the things about late-twenties and your Saturn return is that you spend a lot of time ruminating on your childhood and learning how to love that inner child, and I was under the impression that I had mostly worked through that…but the truth is, the inner child who’s stuck around most is the inner child who I am most resentful of, the one that I’ve always had the hardest time loving.
Which brings me back to being perceived. Or rather, how that part of me is and was perceived by me.
The problem with being thirteen was that I still had the confidence and spunk of being a kid but I was also struggling intensely with the knowledge that being a kid was uncool. Or rather, as with Inside Out 2, when you’re a teenager everything is uncool. Having passion was uncool. Being different was uncool. Standing out was uncool. If you did anything unique, you were judged or isolated or made fun of, and so the only way to feel even somewhat comfortable at school was to assimilate with the crowd, pretend like you knew what was going on, and act like nothing phased you. Inside Out 2 spends a lot of time going on about Anxiety, but I always felt more Ennui than anything else.
Except, that’s not quite true.
It’s so frustrating being an adult because you look back on your childhood and teenage years, and you cannot figure out who is the real you. In therapy recently we’ve been talking about masking and how it relates to neurodivergence, and I’ve been stuck feeling like I can’t tell which parts of me are a mask and which parts are me. Was I the most me when I was nine, acting in Shakespeare plays and taking film photos of our old house and quietly sneaking Harry Potter under my desk at school? Was I the most me when I was twelve, tripping my best friends in the school hallways and making “your mom” jokes and laughing as loud as possible at parties? Was I the most me when I was shy and reserved or when I wouldn’t stop talking or when I got excited about the things I enjoyed or when I held back my tears and refused to cry or? Because even though I developed a close connection with Ennui, I don’t know if that happened as a result of being thirteen and feeling uncool or if I was just always a reserved person. Was I unfazed and adaptable as a kid or did I condition myself to be like that in order to survive high school? Chicken or egg?
All of which to say, the way I perceived myself at thirteen is as follows. I was loud and annoying and downright mean to my friends and my parents. My mom and I used to fight all the time because I isolated myself and refused to talk about anything at all, and I weaponized silence any chance I got (although mostly that hostility was aimed at myself and the expectations put upon me). My seventh grade English teacher taught a lesson on body language at one point and to this day I no longer cross my arms in social settings because she used me as an example and told the entire class that I came across as hostile and unapproachable. I used to trip my friends at school because it always got a laugh. All of us teased each other relentlessly, taking things a step too far, making each other cry. I had a lot of friends and was mostly well-liked, but I was pretentious and had a superiority complex and I thought I was the best at almost everything (except gym class). I read a lot and listened to a lot of music on the bus, had dance parties in my room and sang constantly. I thought one day I was going to be famous, acted like I already was. I took way too many photos of everyone, to the extent that I became the friend with all the blackmail. (A majority of those photos were lost to a hard-drive failure a decade ago, so you’re welcome to all my friends.) I ate too much sugar and mooched off everyone and started gaining teenage weight (normal weight that felt like a punishment at that time when low-rise jeans from Hollister were all the rage), and all the while I was just discovering that my friends were horny as hell and I never got the memo that my body was supposed to want all that.
Somehow I was both the quiet shy friend and the friend that was too much, and ever since I was thirteen, I subconsciously decided that I had to kill the part of me that was too much. I was ashamed of the things that brought me joy because everyone else at school was growing up too fast, so I didn’t tell any of my friends about how I was coding Neopets HTML pages after school or how my most played artist on my iPod was still Hannah Montana and High School Musical. I stopped showing any excitement about my wants and needs, instead leaning into being easy and flexible, hoping that by not revealing what I truly wanted, nobody else would be offended or annoyed because a lot of my best friends were annoying (Sorry guys). I took care of myself like I always did, I built my walls higher and higher until the only people allowed into my fortress was my then-new best friend. I started growing a tiny tree of shame inside me, and I never let myself forget to water it. If I was just smaller, maybe I would stop feeling so overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Maybe my friends would stop laughing at me. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like a bad person.
Maybe all my past newsletters make a little more sense now.
Point is, all of that shit that I hid inside myself is still there, and it is a constant presence in my head when I meet new people or hang out with people I don’t know very well. Obviously, I have social anxiety, but what I’ve learned over the past few years is that all of the turmoil within me is completely absent on the outside. I have achieved the ultimate bait-and-switch: I am not the shy anxious girl who is uncool who wants everyone to like her, but rather I am a mysterious badass who doesn’t care what people think of her. I have managed to convince everybody that my aloofness is not discomfort but rather extreme confidence. People want to impress me for reasons unknown, and my taste is not only good, but it’s cool.
I’m just as confused as you are.
This all came about because I went to a cabin in the woods with my best friend’s wedding party, and we celebrated the upcoming festivities doing team bonding (rock-climbing, canoeing, playing cornhole, and singing Chappell Roan). At the start of the weekend I felt like a fish out of water, intensely anxious and uncomfortable, not sure how to break into the group that already had inside jokes and the ease of childhood friendships. (I’ve been friends with the bride since we were fifteen, but a bunch of the groom’s side grew up together as kids.) I didn’t necessarily need anybody to like me because it’s counter-productive - either they’ll like me as I am or they won’t - but I didn’t want anybody to be offended or put off by my presence. Plus, let’s not forget that I’m slightly terrified of men, and I am an introvert who needs alone time and fictional media to function properly.
Thankfully the group meshed well, and by the end of our trip we gave each other hugs and openly mourned the fact that we wouldn’t see each other in person for three months. But I did spend four days wondering if I was spending too much time reading my eBooks on my phone or if I should be offering to help cook/clean or if I needed to ask more questions about other people. As I’ve been learning how to work with my neurodivergence this year, I’ve tried to do more self-care in situations like this, so in my head, I wasn’t a very active participant for most of the weekend. I read almost two books while I was there, I really did not help out with much of anything, and most of my conversational contributions were snide comments and sarcastic jokes. (I got a guy I don’t know very well to high five me for saying “Brat [like Charli] Summer or Braht [like the hot dog] Summer” and that serotonin will carry me through the entire month of July.)
Most of the time I spend these trips or settings just sitting back, waiting to break into the conversation. I try to bring as little attention to myself as possible, both for self-defense and because I feel like I don’t have much to offer. But without fail, my close friends always always bring me into the spotlight. My reputation precedes me most of the time, and I can’t tell if I like that or hate it. My friends’ coworkers will say, “I’ve heard so much about you!” and they seem to know more about my life than I do. My friends’ partners will go on about who I was when I met their significant other before I’m even given the chance to explain how we became friends in the first place. I am seen and known before I even step into a conversation, and more often than not the “me” that they know is someone who is generous and funny and confident and kind and talented and creative and smart.
My best friend spent most of this weekend telling everybody that I was cool because I’ve been listening to Chappell Roan since 2020 (if you didn’t listen to a live iPhone recording of HOTTOGO! for months before the single dropped, you don’t get to do the dance, MY CULTURE IS NOT YOUR COSTUME, etc) or because I met Taylor Swift or because I used to be a semi-popular YouTuber. Even though I was surrounded by nerds (we’re talking Columbia grads and MIT students, folks), somehow I was the person giving out all the best book recommendations…even though the books I was devouring that weekend were smutty romance books. I was told after the fact that certain people were anxious that I wouldn’t like them, as if I were the person anybody needed to impress because I’m so cool or so important. Me! As if!
And this isn’t confined to just this weekend. Over the years, as my best friends have starting dating people, I’ve been told time and time again that I’m the person the significant others need to wow. I am a mysterious badass, apparently, and that just fuels thirteen-year-old me’s ego even more. Even though I am worried that I’ll dislike the new partner, or worried that they won’t like that I’m so close to my best friend, somehow they are anxious that I might not want to be their friend.
Once again, I feel like I am a narcissist masquerading as someone with low self-esteem. Surely if I hate myself so much, I can’t also hope that other people love me. How am I still so surprised when the feedback I get is, “They are obsessed with you?” Why does that make me feel so important? Why am I still chasing the approval of others? I may not be actively working the room in an attempt to get people to like me, but I am passively working the room by being myself, so what does that mean?
The truth is, I fear being perceived because I am afraid that people will be kind or complimentary or generous, and I will feel like I don’t deserve it because deep down I know that I am unkind to myself.
Even though I’m good at masking and shape-shifting and copying other people, I have always had a pretty strong sense of self. I know what I like, I know what I hate, and I don’t have the patience to pretend otherwise even if I am good at hiding how I actually feel. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and I do believe in loving what you love unabashedly. For as much as I want to reinvent myself, I do know who I am, and I think that’s something other people are drawn to. And frankly, I know that I’m cool. Maybe not in an effortless, conventionally attractive way, but in a creative nerd kind of way. I have cool handwriting, I read a lot of interesting books, I know a lot about a wide-variety of things, I am often a trend-setter. If I am unbiased towards myself, I can see just why people are impressed by me because yeah, okay, I am impressive.
I spent a lot of time this past weekend telling the groom’s sisters about all the semi-famous people I’ve met (mostly Taylor and Chappell and some authors) and even though I didn’t want to brag…I also love bragging. I’ve done some cool shit in my life and I’ve done things that thirteen-year-old me only dreamed about. I may not be a model or a rockstar, but yeah, I’ve read Les Miserables and seen Hamilton’s OBC in New York. My poetry book went #1 on Amazon and I’ve met fans of mine in Finland and I have over 2 million views on YouTube. I’ve been to Yellowstone and Yosemite and probably a dozen other National Parks. I’ve seen Taylor live in concert nine times and met Chappell Roan at a meet&greet and have an inside joke with Jack Antonoff.
But obviously there is still a lot of self-hatred in my heart. I think I still resent who I was at thirteen, and I have been holding a grudge against her for a long time. She was annoying, and most of the adults in her life saw her as selfish, and she never quite lived up to the expectations that society set for her. She hurt a lot of people because she wasn’t great at communicating (what thirteen-year-old girl is) and her only defense mechanism was to be quiet and hostile (because she was overstimulated and exhausted and didn’t know a lot about anything). And I know now that this is not her fault or mine or anyone’s really, it was just another part of life that we have to grow through.
Rationally, I know this. But I cannot bring myself to be fully confident in myself, to fully trust myself, to fully love myself because all I see is the trail of people I’ve hurt. The arguments with my mom are as fresh now as they were back then because sometimes I do still snap at her when I’m overstimulated. The superiority I felt back then is still within me when I meet someone who’s never listened to my favorite band, when someone doesn’t understand my favorite movie, when I hear someone’s life experience that is contrary to my own. I may not be tripping my friends physically, but sometimes I take the sarcasm a little too far. I can still be mean and I can still be avoidant and I can still be a know-it-all without knowing much at all. I can still weaponize my silence if I want to.
I think I’m afraid that if I don’t keep myself in check, I won’t be able to protect everyone from that past version of myself when she inevitably ruins things or makes people uncomfortable. I am the only person who is responsible for the worst parts of myself, and even though I served my time a long time ago, the crime still looms over me. And a bunch of people I’ve just met need to know that the crime was committed or else they won’t be on their guard. Nevermind that I’m older now, that I’ve changed, that the crimes I committed in my youth weren’t my fault and weren’t even that bad. Why am I so dedicated to playing the part of Javert when I’m so clearly Valjean? Why am I still, even now, perceiving myself as the villain of my own story? I am not who I used to be!! I am not who I used to be!!
This is why it feels so surreal when people perceive me in a wholly positive light. They are capable of something I’ve never been able to do myself. They are unbiased towards me, or worse they are biased for me, and I am still keeping a tally of all the wrongs I’ve committed. To quote Megan, “I’m killing myself when bitches would die to be me,” and my brain cannot accept another reality. I have achieved the one thing that felt out of my reach as a teenager: people want to be me. And that will never not shock me to my core, if only because I have spent the better part of three decades desperately wishing I could be anybody else.
When people talk about their late-twenties and early-thirties, they go on about this weird switch that happens. I have a vivid memory of my friend Michelle talking to me when she was thirty-three about how it all clicked for her and how her thirties set her free, in a way. That there comes a point where all those bad feelings you had in your teens and twenties just…melt away. And yeah, life is still hard and you’re still anxious, but you kind of stop caring so much what other people think. You no longer have the patience to be someone you’re not, to strive for something that is practically unreachable, to fit into the standards of society when you could just be yourself. And for a long time, I just thought all of that was bullshit.
It is! But also, it isn’t.
There’s no way you can just change overnight, that all your insecurities disappear and you stop having social anxiety and cease being a people pleaser. But I do think there comes a point when you age where you realize how much time and energy you spend on appeasing other people, and it starts to become less of a priority. If you’re stuck in your body for the rest of your life, what’s the point in berating it for looking a certain way or acting a certain way? Why do we spend so much of our youth chasing after impossible lives and ridiculous caricatures of ourselves? This is especially perplexing because when our dear friend Nostalgia comes around (Again, Inside Out 2 anybody?) we spend so much of our present just wishing we could return to that past we wished ourselves out of. If we are wasting all our time wishing for a future that will make us miss the past, then shouldn’t we be living more authentically in the present?
Maybe when you hit thirty you just get a heightened sense of mortality. Or maybe your body and mind are so exhausted from working overtime in adolescence that they decide you need a break from all that. Whatever the case, I’m finding more and more that I don’t need to cater to other people’s perception of me, especially since it seems like my aloof and distant personality is appealing in its own right. The bigger issue is not actually getting other people to like me, it’s getting myself to forgive all the past versions of me that never lived up to my own expectations. And guys, that is so so soooo much harder.
The thing about neurodivergence, mainly for not being aware of it at a young age is with the impression of fitting in with others. But there are things that are natural to you that others may look at as weird. You may struggle in something you don’t understand yourself that others may.
I know your struggles aren’t exactly related to it based on what I read but I’m saying it due to what I’ve seen with others, even those I know. Sometimes we think of ourselves as stupid due to not knowing better or regrets we may have, and even if who we are is much better now, it doesn’t exactly mean we love ourselves entirely or are proud of who we were before.
It’s good how you reflect on that, as it shows how you’ve grown and we still grow as we get older, finding out more about ourselves and how we integrate things we didn’t know about ourselves into how we go about things.