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.

[Kevy Baby]

Love the concept. If I allowed myself to have a life, it would be something I would love to check out.

[Alex]

I'm always amazed at how many people have evidence of their childhood. It isn't that I intentionally hid or destroyed it, I just don't seem to have ever produced any artifacts. I never journaled. I never purchased high school year books. I didn't letter in any sports. I didn't write for the school newspaper. There isn't an email archive or old message board posts (for obvious reasons of them barely existing at the time). Other than family I am not in contact with a single person I knew before moving to California in 1998 after grad school.


And it is kind of sad at times. I actually enjoyed my teen years. School was not a drama. I got along with the nerds, the dweebs, the athletes, and the popular kids without ever really being at the core of any of them. Motorheads were about the only ones I could never find any point of commonality with. So I'd be interested to have more than just my memory of those times to see if I'd be embarrassed in hindsight.

[Not Afraid]

I never wrote or journaled and my memory is, at best, flawed. However, every once in a while I find out something about myself from a friend. The events told in these tales are usually raunchy and naughty. Sometimes I wish I was a fly on the wall with a tape recorder viewing my teen years and committing them to memory. Most of the time, I'm glad I don't remember.

[€uroMeinke]

I think I may have started journaling at 16, but I didn't start in earnest till I was 18. Almost makes me want to wander out to the garage and see what I might find...

Or make sure they are lost forever

[alphabassettgrrl]

I journaled, of sorts, though I don't know where those are. I'm sure I still have them somewhere. Kind of took the heart out of it when I caught my mother reading it.

My friend in high school a couple years ago found the notebook we passed back and forth, writing conversations in it. I'm not sure what we wrote. I'll have to have a look at it next time I'm home. She's the only one from my high school years that I still contact, other than my (small) family.

One of my teachers told me it was sad that I don't remember much of my childhood. There just wasn't that much to remember. Mom stayed home with us until my younger brother got in school; she went back to school to get her degree and she took a job to pay for it. I played sports with the neighborhood boys. I don't remember being ravaged by puberty. Mostly I thought for years I was damaged, asexual. That there was something wrong with me. I had a crush on a boy, mostly I think to cover the fact that I didn't really want a boyfriend. I had a boyfriend in high school but he was safely at another school and didn't get in my way much.

My childhood was pretty boring. Hardly worth remembering I think. I'm not sure I'd want to share details with others though, at least on a wholesale basis. Individually maybe.

[blueerica]

I have some stuff from when I was younger, but I'll have to investigate next month, when I go back to Cali. I also have a few pictures that I think would be fun to recreate.

Interesting concept, indeed.

[Stan4dSteph]

I think my scrapbook still exists at my parent's house. That would probably qualify. I clipped pictures out of entertainment magazines. I never journaled so there's not a whole lot of my writing that's personal.

[katiesue]

I've got tons of stuff. Letters, school papers, photos, clippings. I use mine to mortify my friends. Kidding. I did actually put together an ipod for my best friend for her 40th. I put on all our music and scaned in tons of old photos from pre-school on.

[Morrigoon]

I never really journaled as a kid. Tried a couple times but just couldn't get into it. I think it's because I can't really write just for myself. It's only the concept of having an audience who wasn't there, and relating the days events or thoughts to that audience, that allows me the mental freedom of rehashing things in print.

Which isn't to say that I haven't occasionally LJ'd and set it to private, but even those entries were written with an audience in mind before I thought better of it. More often than not, though, I'll just delete it if there's no audience for it.

Which is to say, I have no journals from that time of my life. Plenty of purple cows, but no journals.

Just as well... I don't think I'd enjoy reading my thoughts from that time period, as they probably bordered on morose and would only bring up things that could still make me feel bad today.