i always hated the idea of a role model. i think girls should be taught by their parents, and learn what’s right, not be a little copycat. everyone makes mistakes. and to tell a little girl that someone else is the perfect epitome of who they should emulate, it’s no wonder that their fragile youthful minds are easily confused when yet another teen pop sensation runs off the rails. even if parents are hypocrites, they should teach their children the right way to do things and try their best in a personal setting to help them reach that goal. a celebrity is not going to tailor to the needs of an anonymous viewer. televisions and cameras only work one way, and let me tell you, they don’t favor the viewer. sometimes they don’t favor the subject, either, but maybe that’s the point. be your own person! i always hated those standardized essays that asked for a hero. i dont think i’ve been any more influenced by one person than by everyone – i am a compilation of everyone i have ever known, but no more – my individualism, or what i would like to think i have, or am, comes from within me, not the workings of some arbitrary 6th grade teacher that contributed to less than a percentile in my entire existence. a drop in a bucket, perhaps a vibrantly colored one in a bucket of white paint, yet still simply a drop. and it is these drips and drops that eventually color me as i am. but not one person, and not one role model.
americans are too obsessed with writing off their children to other people. handing off their problems. making someone else do their work, my dad would say, just like what he thinks of welfare. maybe he’s wrong. it wasn’t like that in chile, he said. you were working at sixteen, you were in college at seventeen, you were out of the country and once you left, you never looked back. take responsibility for your children, he’d say, and what everyone elses young girls do is their business. it’s not your job to look down your nose at someone elses daughter for allegedly setting bad examples for yours – you should keep your own child in line regardless of what anyone else is doing. jesus christ. i never read tabloids, and i never cared much for celebrities or singers. my parents raised me right, i think. i listened to vivaldi, and i played scrabble and i read a book a week. two of the best friends i have ever had have moved away. i didn’t care much for middle school. i was shy, and no one ever picked on me but i wasn’t the kind of girl who sparkles. i wasn’t anything, really. i just was. i had school, i had art, i had the sacred order of the cheese and i had corinne. and then high school came. in with the new, perhaps.
theater did it, i think, and meeting grace and being a part of something with amy, who had always walked me to my first and second grade classrooms seven, eight years prior, when i was still that little wallflower who was too scared, and she the girl next door. i still am, i guess, shy. but realizing that i could do whatever i wanted, and that it didn’t really matter what anyone else thought because what anyone else thought would be what they thought, whether or not i wanted them to think it, whether or not they even knew they were thinking it. someone once told me i changed a lot in a year of high school; ‘you’re cooler now,’ it was said, ‘the way you carry yourself, the way you walk,’ but i can’t say i necessarily like it. nor do i miss whatever i used to walk like, but hindsight is difficult. new clothes, new friends, less books, more tv, more theater, more hugging, more swearing, more parties – but in the best way possible. and the foundation was there, anyway, and i remembered my, for lack of a cliche, roots, and i didn’t care much for being whatever anyone wanted me to be. not for the sake of being individualistic or a nonconformist – because being a conformist is fun and alright and necessary sometimes – but just because, who cared?
i guess that’s the bottom line. my dad says i don’t care enough. but i’ve been busier than ever, this year, and i think it’ll only get worse because a year from now i’ll be hearing back from colleges. but it’s okay, because i love life. and even if everything, all those new things, that i thought would last forever – over and over thought things would last forever – didn’t, i’m beginning to realize that they somewhat did: and someone moving away doesn’t mean the end of being best friends, and in particular how strong that one particular person has been and how we find time for each other amazes me and i don’t really know what i would do without it. everything we got over and through and everything we fought about and everything that only lasted a few days or a few months or a few minutes, everything we stayed up all night pouring out over keyboards or futons or cookies, all of it – is so much stronger and so much realer than any of the petty ignorances or purely convenient friendship or decisive ostracizing that seems to be such a fashion now. i don’t plan to be in nor out, i just plan to be, just like i was when i was little and really, i don’t need anyone who doesn’t want me just as i am. that goes for the people i call friends and the people who think they have the right to look down their nose at my whatever, because i won’t let fake friendship hurt, and i laugh every time i see girls wearing leggings as pants, and all that distasteful sour judging and the elevator eyes, and the pictures of the girls with the beer cans and the boys who won’t remember them in a few years.
and at the end of the day, when we all turn out our backlit electronics, i’ll be the one smiling as i fall asleep.
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