Twelve-Year-Old Badass

I want to recapture the badass I was when I was twelve. Twelve-year-old me wasn’t afraid to raise her hand in class when she knew the right answer. Twelve-year-old me wasn’t afraid to be an outspoken liberal in a conservative town. Twelve-year-old me wasn’t afraid to be feminist, and pagan, and publically weird. Twelve-year-old me was confident that she’d withstand the societal pressure and always be true to herself.

I wouldn’t say that I completely lost my twelve-year-old self. I maintained just enough of her that I didn’t notice the parts that slowly chipped away. I didn’t notice myself slipping into silence. I didn’t notice the fear sneaking up on me. I was still feminist, I was still weird, but I stopped raising my hand, I stopped speaking out. Because it was easy.

And there are reasons why it was easy to fade. I spent a significant portion of my high school years out sick, certain that there was something deeply wrong with my body but unable to find any answers until in my senior year I was diagnosed with a slew of food allergies and sensitivities that had left me immune-compromised. It took so much energy just to keep up with school work that I didn’t notice the bits of myself disappearing. I couldn’t afford to waste energy on self-examination.

And then I got to college. I thought that would be the time to mold myself, to confirm myself as the sophisticated, college-educated, cultured woman I’d always wanted to be. But college wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and I didn’t thrive there. I think, subconsciously, I used the illness that eventually forced me to withdraw from school as a mask to cover up the fact that college wasn’t for me because deep in the back of myself that twelve-year-old badass poked holes in the system my classmates accepted as a matter of course. “Why do my professors assign me so much work that I have to sacrifice sleep?” asked twelve-year-old me who remembered reading once that sleep is essential for learning, that it’s better to sleep the night before a test than to cram, that sleep-deprivation effects the brain in a similar way to alcohol.

But nineteen-year-old me, scared me, the me that didn’t want to fail a step in my life-plan tried not to sleep, tried to get all the work done, and nineteen-year-old me got sick. I’ve blogged about leaving college before, about the depression and the low self-esteem that followed the leaving, and the long, slow slog to accepting what happened. I won’t go into that now.

But one of the things that helped me out of that depressed state was finding a job in the field I’d hoped to work in post-graduation: technical writing. When I was sixteen, I made a plan: I’d work as a technical writer while writing novels and trying to break into publishing. It was a solid plan, a way to pursue my dreams while still maintaining a safety net. But I spent three and a half years getting tangled further and further into that safety net because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a job. You’re supposed to commit.

But now, I’ve cut the safety net and resigned my job (which I liked) to fulfill a deeper dream: to travel, to be with my Person, to write freely and uninterrupted by obligation or responsibility. And the dark voice of my self-saboteur is whispering in my ear that I’ve made a mistake, that I’m selfish and immature, that this isn’t what adults are supposed to do.

Luckily, I can hear twelve-year-old me shouting against that darkness. She stands at the gates of my self-confidence, sword in hand, in full armor and she reminds me that I have to fight for the life I want, for the person I want to be. I can’t just sit in my living room waiting for that life to come to me. I can’t just keep my mouth shut and hope that people will understand my dream and my ideas of me. I have to stand up and speak out. I have to be twelve and unafraid to accept that my life is abnormal – always has been – and that that’s not a bad thing.

I think that twelve-year-old me would be proud of twenty-five-year-old me as I sit in a living room that is the antipode of my own, writing a book I was once too scared to write, living a life that is terrifyingly fulfilling. I hope that when I look back on these words in five years – in ten, twenty, thirty and on – that I’ll still be on this self-forged path, that I won’t have run back to my safety net. I hope that once I rebecome that twelve-year-old badass, I never let her fade again.

Thank you for reading