Getting Mortified

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

For most of us in the United States, the rite of passage we share as we navigate the treacherous waters between childhood and adulthood is Junior High School, a kind of concentration camp melting pot where we are sent to learn but instead experience a kind of personal and social annihilation. Whether you were popular or dumped on, I say poor babies each and every one of us. (Well, okay, maaaaaybe I spit in the eyes of the popular kids a wee bit, but just a wee. I think puberty takes its toll on all.)

Most of us were ill prepared for the transition. We became sexual beings but our newfound sexualities were policed. As our bodies betrayed us and hormones assumed control, no one was spared: the popular kids, the freaks and geeks, so suffered us all.

After the nuclear holocaust of adolescence, what evidence remains to prove that hated peons and worshiped beauty queens suffered silently alongside each other in their own unique ways?

The written word.

Pictures don’t necessarily “tell a thousand words.” If you were to compare my bad perm, zitty skin, braces-on-teeth 9th grade photo to the flawless visage of some of my female classmates, the only conclusion one could come to is that I had it worse. And, on the surface, that might have been true. My name probably showed up in SLAM books more often. People made fun of me. Blah, blah, social pariah with one or two friends, blah, blah. Pretty, ugly, smart, dumb, the proof is in the tales we wrote down.

I tore up and threw away every scrap of writing I committed to notepad or journal between the ages of eleven and eighteen. Nothing survived. I could stomach my old angst, angry diatribes and poetry horror shows just fine, but the idea that someone *else* would read them? Terrifying. So I amputated that part of my life and put the year books in permanent storage. Bye-bye 1988 – 1992!

Thankfully, not everyone did that. Thankfully, many held onto their written treasures and are now willing to share their mortification gleefully and publicly online and as performance art.

Last night I attended a Mortified event in celebration of a friend’s birthday. She still has all of her old journals and knows someone who kept all of her old Wil Wheaton fan fiction stories from when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air.

After seeing Mortified, I wish I could have all of that old writing of mine back, even the three page essay I wrote, complete with pictures, about being in love with Edward Scissorhands.

Mortified is a celebration. Years after the fact, popular kid and nerd come together to share battle scars by reading aloud from old masterpieces: A privileged teen lamenting her trip to Paris and complaining about her “bitch” housekeeper while signing off multiple times with, “I have to pee. [heart], Lara!” An intelligent girl with God and sex on the brain, who addressed all of her entries, “Dear Jesus…” The naval cadet unable to get an erection during his first encounter with a prostitute because “I watched as she stood up to pee in a bucket, and then wiped the WRONG way, back to front!” The nerdy screwed up intellectual type who preferred damaged girls because they were worse off than him, “I spoke [x] in the library. She told me she was molested. I. Am. In. Love.” And so on. The autobiographies of our adolescence = the best stand up comedy out there. Our trials were different but we all went through it and survivied.

And, in a similar vein, here is YOUNGME – NOWME. Hee-hee.