Sweet and sour sixteen
I am of a dying breed, I am fully aware of it.
I have been a weird kid for as long as I can remember and I am very proud of it, thank you very much. Everything about me just makes sense by its complete absurdity, like the fact that I have always eaten my greens without protesting one bit or that I can have a panic attack at the thought of the Vanilla City Naked Bike Race taking place every June on the ONE Sunday I actually have to go to work. Don’t ask me why it’s a thing, it just is. Welcome to Vanilla City.
That might be the reason why I decided to leave my banlieue lifestyle to live the dream in a place full of weirdos. Obviously, when I arrived I didn’t realised that living in a place full of weirdos would be expensive as hell, emotionally draining and not as funny as you would think at times but then again, I also didn’t know that Alan Partridge and Steve Coogan were the same person until the tender age of 28 years old. Yikes!
The point I am trying to make is that I am a weirdo living the weird kid fantasy to its fullest because I was lucky enough to have the almost perfect adolescence. Usually, your oddities come from a place of discomfort that has started with the apparition of your first armpit hair and next thing you know, you are questioning everything that ever made sense to you because all of a sudden, you just realise that it was all horse shit the whole goddamn time. Not like when you realised that Santa is just a dude putting on a costume for extra cash in December, but more like “I am not a boy/girl anymore, then why can’t I do whatever I want like grown-ups do?”. Because you are 16 and grown-ups don’t tend to listen to sixteen year-old girls because they know jack about life. Just look at Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg. You would have told me that at sixteen, I would have happily told you this:
“Yeah, I know nothing about life. But do you, boo? Do you? What do you know about life apart from the fact that you are working 40 hours a week and still struggle to make your ends meet? That your life is revolving around a routine you created then hated? That people lie and suck? That dreams don’t pay the bills? That the world is dying and we won’t do anything about it? Do you know anything else about life apart from this? See, I am sixteen and I knew it already so, don’t you worry about me, I will do just fine at your age…”
Sixteen year old me was a RIOT! No wonders I was never invited at parties in my hometown… I was a snotty little-miss-know-it-all, dressed as a cheap goth, pretended to be the ultimate Black Daria Morgendorffer, who knew so many things but was craving for more. I was the nerd who could spend hours reading Ellroy, Dumas and the Brontë sisters for fun, watch political debates and quiz games on television and when I wasn’t at home doing those things, I was hanging out on MySpace looking for more bands to bond over, strolling in the streets of Paris going to the record stores and screaming at the top of my lungs how much I hated my hometown and everyone I ever met from there. Sixteen year old me was a mystery, or so I thought I was and I loved it.
I loved the fact that I was so careless about anything. I dressed myself almost exclusively in black even though my parents were very poor and I would have my clothes bought at the open market because my mum could very much afford to go there only.
I never resented my mum for being precarious, I knew she was working very hard to put things on the table and sometimes, she would ask me to come to work with her and I’d say yes. She wouldn’t tag me along to the offices and mansions she had to clean because I was a fairy house — I’d barely make my bed and would refuse to do dishes because my hands are made to do wonders, not washing greasy pots and pans — but because we would have those blessed and privileged mother-daughter times when she would treat me like the woman I was becoming. I would rediscover the woman through her work, her humility, her unchallenged faith, her place on earth as an unhappy married mother-of-three living in those grimy council blocks outside the A86 highway. I would think then that she is trying to change me through sly tactics into something I never wanted to be, a carbon copy of her but more literate, but it took me years to realise that no, she was just trying to figure out how to deal with me. She knew I was a weird kid from the start, so she accepted (as much as a woman of her background could) to bear with my eccentricities and if those eccentricities would involve listening to Slayer, wearing terrible make up and being dressed up all in black, then so be it.
I loved the fact that I watched horror movies all by myself and would even recommend some flicks to the boys in high school because they knew that trying to talk action movies with me would be a waste of our times. I loved the fact that I was hanging out with whoever was up for a conversation and that would mean anyone that wasn’t a popular kid would have a bit of knowledge and culture provided by yours truly. I would hang out with the popular kids only if I needed to be in the know for something, I’ve learned my lesson from those horrendous school years when nobody would dared to say hello to me and I would be fine with that. 14 year-old me was a wreck, 16 year-old me would never let that happen, as if my stint in Southampton (because I lived there a bit when things were tough at home) provided me the tiniest of confidence to shout at someone “HEY SAC A MERDE, LA POLITESSE C’EST PAS POUR LES HAMSTERS!” and get away with it. Sorry, what I just said could be translated as “Hey shit-bag, politeness is not for hamsters!” and yes, it really sounds better in French.
I loved the fact that I was obsessed with pop culture as much as I was for anything remotely related to extreme metal. I would read all about it, see all the documentaries I could get from telly (because YouTube wasn’t the thing in was, when I was 16 — at the time it was Dailymotion or nothing) and I would dream about it. I would dream to be part of a sludge band and be like Julie Christmas but I knew I was a terrible singer, so I’d probably be drumming somewhere. I loved the fact that I could grasp so many valuable informations about music and yet, not giving a fuck about what was said about so-and-so. In my sixteen year-old brain, if this information will be useful to me , then I’ll retain it. That will surely explain why I excelled in English and Spanish classes and would fail miserably in Law and Economics. I knew that I would have friends from over the world and travel at any occasion I’d have. I also knew I wouldn’t be a lawyer and that the economic system as we knew it in 2005 was doomed to fail. I was right, I just wished I wouldn’t be that right about it when I had to pass the baccalauréat three years later. Damn you, sub primes! I could have had honours.
I loved the fact that I was already open-minded with homosexuality and queerness in general. I thought that there is nothing wrong with finding a girl attractive when you are a girl yourself and that I’d fancy it if a girl ever kissed me or found me attractive, because if boys can do it, so should girls. I was cool with it. I remember that childhood friend of mine who did his coming out to us during recess and I was happy but not surprised by his confession. I just told him, “yeah, I kinda noticed. I love you too, mate” and carried on. I loved the idea that the future can be female but still had a lot of work to do when it came to slut-shaming. Nobody’s perfect, especially at sixteen.
I loved the fact that I was not like the other girls in my class because I loved watching wrestling games and roller skating and dancing on my own in my bedroom but quickly hide it if anyone came nearby because it was none of their business. I loved daydreaming about a better tomorrow away from my hometown. I loved playing songs on repeat in my disc-walkman because I was (yet again) too poor to have an iPod, let alone a MP3 Player that didn’t came from the open market or China (everything in that open market that wasn’t comestible was indubitably made in China). I loved the fact that I was better than anyone else because I loved myself, my skin colour, even my hair wasn’t an issue then because my mum would take care of it. I loved the fact that I could go back to my father’s cassettes and go back to my happy place, somewhere in the nineties, I loved that I was sleeping next to a giant poster of Kurt Cobain on his guitar and another giant poster from Slipknot. I loved the fact that high school isn’t as bad as people love to portray it. In fact, I loved high school. It gave me anxiety at times and I would have awful panic attacks and yet, despite having everything to be the perfect scapegoat, only one person dared to have a go at me in class. I clocked her on the window of a bus stop in front of all my classmates. It happened sometime in November, I was left unscathed for the rest of the school year thanks to my leading role as the weird kid who got along with everyone. I had the time of my life when I was sixteen. My only concerns at the time were the following:
- Will I be able to be transferred to a new high-school next year?
- How I am going to get some new clothes that doesn’t have to cost a fortune without having to ask money from Mum?
- When will I ever leave this hellhole of a hometown?
- Is journalist a well paid job?
See? First world problems, right here!
Honestly, when I think about how sixteen year old me went through life, I’m astonished by how self-conscious I was about the world in 2005. It wasn’t great but it was doable. I knew if that if I could survive high school without a scratch, then I’ll be doing just fine. If only adulting was as easy…
I got transferred into a new high school in July 2006 thanks to my excellent grades, I started to work that same summer as a dog-walker and by doing chores at home (even dishes) so I could buy clothes from actual clothing stores (they were just as cheap), I left my hometown for good ten years later to settle in Vanilla City and no, being a journalist isn’t as well paid as people think — it’s a thing that only a few privileged freelance people can allow themselves to do it nowadays if they are wordsmiths at heart. I’m not a wordsmith, I’m a joker. A jolly chatterbox who loves talking about music with a clap-back machine as her mystical sword.
In conclusion, just remember that every time you see me dressed in my coolest Dawn Ray’d long sleeve, my patched vest sewn with love, my short skirt, my thick tights XXL and my slick black boots, walking the streets of Vanilla City with my cat-eye sunglasses and my headphones looking cool, that this cool chick with a 90’s cool kid vibe is more likely to be listening to “Floyd The Barber” by Nirvana but is actually blasting “Informer” by Snow on repeat. That’s what I love the most about sixteen year old me at almost 31.
