Today, for the most trivial thing: I lost it. I admit it. I am mostly a 13 year old, in 7th grade, in braces, with long unstyled hair, wearing a training bra under an undershirt, 3 layers and an oversized Wheaties sweatshirt that should have been washed a week ago, terrified that someone might notice my changing body. I'm that 13 year old with a crush on Scott Braun or Nick Carinigi or someone else who wouldn't look my way because I'm the new girl in town. Mostly, I go there. To that girl. She's my default. We all have her (or him) inside of us. 13 year old me on the outside doesn't fit in. On the inside: she's fierce. She's smart and gets straight As and does all of her homework. She practices piano 2 hours a day because she loves to hear the music under her fingers and it calms her loneliness. She doesn't know any good jokes and she doesn't want to drink yet, although all the cool girls are drinking, swearing and kissing. She's afraid of kissing, but she secretly wishes to feel boy lips on hers. She cries too easily and writes bad poetry in her diary. She goes to church every Sunday but stares at the altar boys the entire time. I am her. Scared and brave. And happy alone but afraid of getting too comfortable alone.
Today someone said something quite innocuous to me. And because I wanted to hear something else, wanted something else from all of it, I got off the phone and then built it up as the Big Bang and felt the explosion boiling inside. Luckily I'm in a place I can go scurry off into the woods, away from everything, and I did, decided right then I needed a long hike up a State Park Trail. I got up to the point I was out of breath and sweating in the Fall chill and doubled over, clutching my stomach in pain, crying until I was wailing like a widow, spit pouring out of my mouth, looking to the setting sun through the tall bare trees as if I was searching for God herself to come and cradle me. Jesus take the wheel and all that shit. And I cried until I was laughing. Until something came to me. That I can't really ask anyone else I know to do anything. Until I realized it wasn't about them. It was about me. It was about attachment and expectation and all that bullshit. And I just wiped the spit off my lips and walked back from whence I came.
So this might not seem like much. Or maybe we're all sick of hearing about people crying over their own things, whatever they are, small or large. There's bigger pools of spilt milk out there, believe me. Mine is a drop. But later, I got a little post from someone, saying "Me Too" and it felt like an earthquake. Me Too. It means a lot. And I realized Me Too isn't a whisper. Its a huge scream through the void. Me Too means I wasn't crying in the birches alone. Me Too means the God I don't believe in because I was raised Catholic and am currently toying with the name-tag "My Name Is Amy and I'm an Enlightened Atheist" although I wrote it in erasable pen, just in case-- Me Too means if God is in US rather than OUT THERE, then God spoke. And that's huge.
Me Too.
It means more than you think.
