For The Misfits

My fourteen-year-old daughter told me the other day that I’m the ‘OG Emo’. She saw a picture of her father and me from the early two-thousands. We had engagement photos done at Sears, and the matching bangs gelled into points below our chins inspired her awe. That wasn’t a word we used back then, but if I were to describe myself along these lines, I would say I’m a nineties punker bitch with the heart of a poet. A non-conformist from the get-go, I have quietly forged my own path. I say quietly because few people have unconditionally accepted the walking contrast that I am. Instead of understanding that I choose a balance between all things, some have seen me as a hypocrite. Little miss-understood, that’s me. Though an intrinsically private person, I’ve also come to understand that our honest exchanges connect us. This is my constant struggle. I have this love and curiosity for people, but I’ve also wanted to hide myself away from them all. I’m half introverted, and small talk makes me cringe. But I'm here if you’re struggling and need someone to listen. Seek me out and tell me about your dreams, hopes, failures, and secrets. I will not judge. When I see a stranger crying, I hug them. I may possess bottomless compassion for all humanity, but I don’t have time for superficial conversations. Holding both your baby’s and your mother’s lifeless bodies will strip away all socially acceptable pantomimes. It’s from within my darkness I will reach out to you, my reader, and sit quietly alongside you as you face your own. To do this, I must bare my raw, human soul through the intimate stories of my eccentric life. This takes courage. So, I say, fuck it. Here I am baring all for the sake of art and humanity. I’ve written the first of my memoirs, which you can read excerpts at www.leahmarguerite.wixsite.com/hardthings, but I think you want to hear my gritty day-to-day. Well, my friend, let’s get @leahmargueritelit, together.

At the end of seventh grade, Nick ‘asked me out’. This meant he had his friend Della sidle up to me and tell me that Nick wanted me to be his girlfriend. I was shocked he would choose me. This was akin to being chosen Prom Queen. Nick was the cool kid that had just recently moved to our buttfuck nowhere small town from the city. He was a skater boy and had the right clothes. Like the other girls, I thought he was cute with his coffee-coloured skin and shoulder-length undercut, but something about him scared me. Swallowing my nerves, I accepted my anointment with the proper mix of humility and gratitude.

As the year-end culmination of our Hunters Education Class, we had a campout planned for the weekend. For us seventh graders, it was beyond exciting to be heading out to the woods together with limited supervision. After arriving at our campsites, we split into groups and built our lean-to’s from plans we had drawn up in class. Nick had Della come and invite me to his site, the bad boy’s campfire. She and I made our way over there. Self-conscious as I was, I sat awkwardly on a log as the boys joked and jostled with each other, performing for their audience. Della eventually wandered back to her campsite and Nick sat next to me. I was vibrating with nerves at the possibility of him holding my sweaty hand. When he put his arm around my shoulders, I was sure he could feel me shaking nervously. I was as innocent and naïve as they came. Sure, I had tongue-kissed a boy once. Goaded by my classmates to perform the regaled French kiss while Jason stood on a skateboard to reach my formidable height. Nick’s skateboard. But that was sixth grade, and this was seven.

As Nick confidently leaned in and started kissing my neck, his tongue slithered into the curve of my ear. Shooting up from the log where I was sitting, I made some incoherent excuse and ran back to my campsite; flushed, embarrassed, and confused. I didn’t want to be labelled as frigid, a sentence worse than death. But I didn’t want that either. I can still feel the heebie-jeebies crawling up my spine as his hot, wet breath touched me uninvitedly. When we returned from our campout, amidst waves of pre-teen panic attacks, I promptly told Della to tell Nick he was ‘dumped’. I wasn’t the kind of girl he was looking for and was much more comfortable with my nose in the middle of a novel, without anyone’s tongue in my ear.

Nick didn’t take the breakup well. He found any way he could to harass me. His eyes sat piercingly dark and relentless upon me during work time in class. He would sneer at me from his perch on the other side of the room when I spoke, his Vans hung crossed atop his desk. He easily convinced the girls to target me in gym class. When the kids stared at me and whispered behind their hands as I walked down the hallway, I may have felt forsaken, but I wasn’t surprised. Lunch periods became internal wars where I carefully pretended that I didn’t want to sit with anyone, so they wouldn’t know how much it hurt that no one would. It wasn’t my first sentence as a pariah, I had always felt like the odd one out. It was a shoe that comfortably fit. When Mr. Wagner, the Vice Principal, pulled me into his office near the end of eighth grade, I thought I was in trouble. For all my introverted tendencies, I had a mouth like an angsty trucker, and it could have been numerous interactions which brought on the unexpected meeting.

Everyone loved Mr. Wagner. He was gentle and funny, and he liked even the fucked-up kids. Plus, he was just a no-bullshit kind of guy. By some strange twist of fate, he was also the brother of my Godfather. This had transpired a thousand miles away when my parents were expecting me and they named Sharon and Jim, their best friends, my godparents. Fast-forward seven years and my parents move back in together after a long separation, to a tiny town in Alberta, where my mom got a good job. They knew no one in town, or so they thought. Enter, Mr. Wagner. I admit that I liked having a familial claim on him that none of the other kids had.

He seemed nervous, which wasn’t his usual way. His cheeks flushed, wiping his wet brow with Kleenex, Mr. Wagner asked me a few questions about how school and friends were going. This is a pity chat. I thought to myself, He’s noticed me eating alone and he just feels sorry for me. Everyone knew Mr. Wagner had a soft spot for the misfits. Then he came out and asked me, “Leah, there’s been a rumour going around for some time and I wanted to ask you about it directly. Nick is telling people that you and he had sex at the Hunter’s Ed campout, is that true?” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Immediately, shame and guilt washed over me. Don’t let him see you cry, or he’ll think you’re lying, I attempted to steel my nerves. The hot tears came anyway, and it made me even angrier. What I had learned up to that point was that it didn’t matter what you did, just what people thought you did. You were only ever as good as people thought you were, and no one seemed to think I was any good. I had a hard time choking out the words, but somehow, I croaked that I hadn’t, I didn’t, I would never… I can’t say if he believed me, though at the time I was certain he didn’t. I remember leaving his office feeling dirty. Mr. Wagner had a soft spot for the misfits, but no one liked dirty sluts. Now even he saw me as trash.

Looking back, I’m glad he asked me. People don’t ask the source when they hear a rumour. They propagate it. Even if they haven’t judged and condemned the person based on the rumour, they’ll continue the gossip, if they’re as morbidly curious as I am anyway. I’ve had all sorts of things said about me, and very few of them are true. I let them hurt me anyway. They became a weight upon my shoulders that I chose to carry around. For so long, there I was, constantly worrying about what people thought of me. I knew they could take a tiny bit of truth and morph it into some grotesque unrecognizable thing. I spent half my life trying to be a good girl because I felt like I wasn’t ever going to be granted any leniency. I had to be better, so I could sleep at night. And you know what? It didn’t change a thing. People still told lies about me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint. We all lie sometimes. As an observer of human nature, I get that we all like to keep parts of ourselves private. Or we can’t tell the truth because we don’t know what to do with it yet. Or we just don’t want to go to your fucking Scentsy party Brittney, so we lie and say our kids are sick. But it still blows my mind when someone tells a complete, vindictive, targeted lie about another person. Like, wow, who has the time and energy?

I recently experienced this again, at nearly forty-three years old. Someone beloved to me, someone I welcomed into my family and my life, tried to destroy mine. They manufactured lies to make me look like a terrible person and turn the people I love against me. Again, no saint here, but at least say something true. If they had said, “That Leah is a nut, she can’t sing worth shit and should dress her age.” Okay, you got me. History has come full circle, ridiculous rumours thrown at me once again, but this time is different. I’m different. I live an authentic life in which I have nothing to hide. I reject the weight of these lies; they are not mine to carry. What I’ve realized about this kind of deceit is that they have little or nothing to do with the person being slandered. It’s so much more about the person conjuring the lies. It’s about their insecurities, their perceived failures, and their shortcomings. Nick didn’t tell everyone that I had sex with him because he truly thought I was a skank. No. He told people that because I rejected him, so he wanted to hurt me as much as I hurt him. His ego couldn’t handle the reality that I had spurned his romantic advances and broke it off mercilessly, so he created a different one. And that’s the true intention of these types of lies, to make the other person look ‘bad’ while transforming the liar into a hero or a victim. The people who perpetuate these untruths are the ones who are not brave enough to be honest with themselves.

I’m neither a hero nor a victim, but I am bulletproof. For the first time in my life, I don’t care what other people think of me. I know who I am, and I’m proud of myself. I love myself unconditionally, and for the perfectly imperfect human I am. No one else’s words can change that, therefore I am immune. There was a time when I dreamt of feeling this way and could not fathom holding that calibre of confidence within myself. The years spent envisioning my warrior self and all the hard knocks between then and now have paid off. I have become. Gratitude washes over me for this most recent trial as it has revealed to me my inner strength. The only person that gets to decide who I am, is me. My reaction to what has transpired is intentional as well. I won’t allow my emotions to rule my actions. I still see this person nearly every day, and they sneer and scoff at me just like Nick did. I could thrash their lying ass, but then I would be no better than the depravity they’re choosing. Instead, I hold my head high. Once the anger washed through me and I was no longer obsessed about 101 ways to murder someone, I find I wish them love and healing. For it is they who are truly suffering.

My hope is for all of you originals out there to harness the same acceptance of yourselves. The same unwavering love. Through reading my experiences maybe you’ll see your own. I’ll meet you there. In the meantime, be kind to yourself, forgive others for their weaknesses, and live an intentional life that you’re proud of. Accept what you can’t change, change what you can, and screw the haters.

As the punk band The Transplants put so eloquently, I say, “This is for the misfits, the freaks and the runts/ Fuck the motherfuckin’ backstabbin’ cunts.”

~Leah Marguerite