This movie is not like my high school experience. I did not have a bad high school experience. I did not have a hard time making friends. I was not the brightest kid in my class. I was not a wallflower. But, I wasn't the opposite of these things either. I was awfully angsty as I recall. I also was sad a lot for no reason, and it would be a few more years before I realized that I was suffering from depression. I was a writer then, but not as I am now. I didnt' have my own voice then, and I like to at least pretend that I do now.
Reading and writing have always been my friend even when I didn't know that I needed them to be my friend. Music was always there, too. Music was in some ways less personal than reading and writing because when performing in a band, you are necessarily with other people, but you can perform your own music by yourself, and sing along with the music that you knew mattered even if no one else understood it.
I wasn't one of the popular kids growing up, but neither was I unpopular or one of the loners. It's easy to flashback now all of these decades later and think how I felt in third grade was how I felt in seventh grade was how I felt in eleventh grade. Except, I still remember, the only difference is that now I have a context to put my life into and a vocabulary better suited to explain how it really was.
I made friends easy enough and even when I ddin't feel comfortable in my own skin I still had a voice and a brain just barely nimble enough so that I would always have something to say, no matter to whom I was talking. I thought all friendships were equal because all friends were equal because all people were equal. I don't mean in a political or philosophical sense, I mean in a naive way. I was 17 before I figured out that some people really were stupid, I remember the class I was sitting in and the person I thought it about. I remember that I felt guilty that night for thinking she was stupid. It was that situation that made me realize that to someone else I was likely stupid and wondered for the first time what it would be like to be more than myself.
Revelations about others cruelty both intentional and unintentional had already occurred but they did not spark the personal epiphany. I had already learned that physical appearance could determine your social standing as much as how well-off financially your family was and that the two were often tied together, but I was still naive enough to think that a wit could compensate for looks or money. I thought little thoughts about little things and tried to jam my head as full of the other that wasn't my life in my town as I could so that one day down the road I would think slightly less little thoughts about slightly less little things.
I was so naive about what friends really were and was a horrible judge of character. I thought that once you became a friend to someone, you were true blue and would have their back to the very end and I don't think I was wrong about that, I was just wrong that other people would value our friendship the same way. This is by no means a declaration that all or even most of my friends did not feel the same way. I was not sophisticated enough in high school to realize that some people would sell you down the river and others would just stop talking to you all together and never give you a reason why. And then I look and try to see if I did this to anyone. Through high school I didn't, it wouldn't be until college that I started to unravel some of my friendships, but not frivolously and not without a great amount of fore-thought.
I never slept much. Not as a child or as an adolescent. Even now it's the rare night that I sleep more than six hours. But when I was younger it was much worse. From first through twelfth grade I slept about five hours a night on average and there was at least one day every month for those twelve years where I didn't sleep at all. It seems somewhat ironic to me now that with all of this extra time for reflecting that I didn't do very much of it. If you want to know what I thought about, just imagine something banal from your childhood and I was likely thinking about something similar. I did spend most of sixth grade worrying about nuclear annihilation. You know how it goes, go to school, come home and maybe hang out with friends for a little while, eat dinner, watch television or read a book and when everyone else goes to bed and to sleep you lie in your bed thinking that the President might have just given the order to launch a peremptory nuclear strike at the Soviet Union of China and that I wouldn't know until I actually hear the explosion of the first missile hitting in retaliation, which would come approximately 15 minutes after the initial launch. I lamented that I lived far enough away from a primary target (15 miles from the state capital) that I wouldn't die in the blast but would likely succumb to radiation poisoning or starvation or frostbite which would inevitably come after a couple of days of the nuclear night. I would play this game, and game is such a cruel mockery of a real game, that if the launch just happened, I would have to stay awake another 15 minutes to verify if it had or not. It didn't? Okay, what if it started now? Repeat until time to get up and get ready for school. At least by the time I was in eighth grade I had stopped obsessing about nuclear war and had switched my focus to the 8 minute gap between the time the sun would be extinguished and that we would know about it.
A side effect of these sleepless nights was listening to am radio to try and find confirmations of my worst fears. As you might have guessed, I never got those confirmations, but I did get exposed to a lot of interesting music. The part of me that wants to come off as a musical hipster thinks I should start dropping the names of cool bands that you've never heard of. Some of that actually did occur, but mostly I heard pop hits and classic pop hits and classic rock hits. And the part that really disavows my hipsterosity is that I loved all of it. The kids in this movie really are musical hipsters. I was so there with them when they first hear the David Bowie song, "Heroes" and don't know what it's called or who it's by and then go looking for it. Other songs in the film that I'm rather fond of - "No New Tale to Tell" by Love and Rockets (a band which I was so in love with in high school), "Dear God" by XTC whom I really got into my senior year of high school, and "Low" by Cracker which I got into in college right towards the end.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower on IMDb
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