Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 7: The last hurrah

From the outside, as I began grade 12, it might have looked like I had finally gotten my act together, and that my life was looking up. . I belonged to several groups, I had a certain amount of popularity within my school, and at home screaming and violence had been replaced by silence and long absences.

Unfortunately, I resembled an iceberg - all the really dangerous stuff was happening below the surface ...

The two unaddressed issues - my gender and my abuse - were like weights that dragged me down even on good days.

It didn’t matter what I was doing - continuing my steady if unspectacular academic studies, participating in the school musical, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or hanging out with friends, I was never allowed to forget I just wasn’t like other boys.

Perhaps nothing showed this more clearly than my almost laughable attempts to get girls to think of me as a potential boyfriend.
Perhaps none of these was as bad as one little drama that took most of my high school life to play out ...

It had started in Grade 10.

As I have said before, my strategy when it came to girls was to hang around in the hopes that my sheer availability would make me attractive to them. In one case, that plan actually seemed to be working - one girl and I had conversations that included the topic of love.

I mentioned the idea of using “One-four-three” as a way of saying “I love you” when you couldn’t actually say the words, and at the end of grade ten she signed my yearbook with those three numbers, making me think that come September I was going to actually have a girlfriend.

But in September she changed her mind, and tried to gloss over her use of the numbers, which left me feeling very confused and angry.

To this day, I am not sure what happened between her signing the book and the start of the new school year, but the fact remained that I felt like a vision of a oasis had turned out to be a mirage.

By the end of grade eleven, I had started to get over the hurt, and in grade twelve we managed to re-connect as friends, but it was never as good as what we had in grade ten.

Still, she was as close as I would come to getting a girlfriend while in high school, which considering how things went for me for a long while afterward, maybe that was for the best ...

Time wore on, and I came to the end of my high school experience, but before it was over I had two last memorable moments. The first was the grad dinner and dance. I hadn’t been looking forward to it, as they had set things up so we sat at tables of eight - four couples. I ended up at a table with some of the other drama people, but as I didn’t have a date, the first part of the night was extremely awkward as I sat with an empty chair to my right I tried a sad joke about dating the Invisible Woman, but it was a hard meal to get through, in all honesty.

The dancing that followed was just as awkward, as I lacked the courage or social skills to ask any girl to dance, and I found myself standing against a wall, wishing I knew how to make myself fit in better.

But as the event wore down, the two girls from Dungeons and Dragons who i had shared a day in our underwear with decided they had enough, and talked me into walking home with them. So as I like to point out, I may have come without a date, but I left with a girl on each arm ...

Then it was graduation day. I remember clearly my struggle that day, especially after I learned we would be wearing gowns over our clothes. The idea of wearing a skirt under the gown, of opening it up after I got my diploma and showing the world who I really was gnawed at my brain, leaving me feeling both guilty for wanting to do it and guilty for not having to courage to go through with the idea ...

Then the day came, and my name was called, and the whole place went bonkers. Nobody, not even the valedictorian, got the level of applause I got. To this day, I am not entirely sure why it happened ...

The best way I can describe how I felt was ... lifted up on the waves of appreciation. It was strong enough to lift me past my guilt, past my fears, for one shining moment I thought I saw a possibility for a life.

It would be a long time for that feeling to return ...

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