Reading Oscar Wao has opened up parts of me that I thought were dead, long buried by the success of a 3 year battle to straighten my teeth, by my discovery of contact lens, and by my decade long war to conquer my weight. People who are just meeting me now probably will never believe that I was Columbia's biggest nerd. I was the ultimate stereotype. I was socially awkward, very shy, very overweight, had glasses, and owned more books than the public library, ate lunch in the bathroom, would take my recess in the library. My best friends were Laura Ingalls Wilder, Judy Bloom, and Rachel (my equally geeky friend who lived in the house on the top of the hill... she also had an awesome Barbie collection).
It was this passage from Oscar Wao that inspired me to blog, and forced me to reminisce about my own adolescence:
His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of chance he had for young love. Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class... and watched his adolescence stream by (pg. 23.)
Though I wasn't the cheerleader, prom queen, or student body president; though I ate lunch in the girl's bathroom instead of in the cafeteria, though I was always scribbling in my composition book ideas for stories instead of passing notes to my friends, and though my first love were books and not James Danko (my high school's resident heart throb)... I don't really regret how my life ultimately turned out. While I was going through adolescence I often wished for death... but what moody and kinda lonely teenager doesn't?
Moving to New York has allowed me to have a second childhood in many ways. I'm less insecure about myself, I know who I am, and living a life outside of the popular cliche and with 30 extra pounds of padding has given me one heck of sense of humor :) I catch myself looking out at my young students and thinking to myself that not much has changed since I've graduated from high school. I see myself in the geeky English girls and boys. I wanna tell them that they're the ones that are going to win in life. That the cheerleader gets fat, that the prom queen will be a grandmother before she's 30, and that at the end of the day, at the end of life, what really matters is that you're true to yourself no matter how cliche that sounds.
There's one girl in my class who I feel is my exact mirror in many ways. She's half Asian, half black, same hair as me, prettier than me, smarter than me, shy like me... On the first day of school she came up to me to ask if I was half Asian and black... She couldn't contain her joy when I answered yes. She'd never met anyone like me before... I told her that we're an endangered species and with that we must represent our people well. It made her smile.
Who would have thought... little geeky Carol is a role model. So maybe that's why I went through hell in back growing up geeky biracial kid in a mostly all white community in South Carolina. My manicurist always remarks about how soft my skin is, but what she doesn't know is that below it all... I've got some tough skin... conditioned over time and for which I feel is my best feature (next to my sense of humor.)
If I can give one word of advice to the Wondrous Oscar Wao and to those similar to him. It would be... you've already won.
x,
Ms. P
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