By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
If I were to write this piece a year ago it would have been filled with phony sentiments about authenticity and self-love. I was in no position to be writing about “finding” oneself, because I had a self-inflicted chain so tightly around my neck that the scars still linger and throb every once in a while. On my college campus, I was the professor’s daughter, always shaking hands and keeping my opinions to myself; a sad reflection of the timid teenage version of myself that spent four harrowing years secretly toasting to the freedom and wildness that would follow high school graduation. Often, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt a sense of boredom and melancholia hypnotize me; how did I let myself get to nineteen years old without taking any real risks? Inertia.
When my father stopped teaching at my college, I created a reputation for myself that completely contradicted the preppy debutante my parents envisioned when they saw two pink lines on their dollar store pregnancy test in 1998. Suddenly, I was wearing high heels, scarlet lipstick, and cat-eye sunglasses every day, listening to obscure music from the seventies and eighties, staring at canvases that evoked something buried in my psyche in my campus art gallery, and crossing the streets reading newspapers. I was writing edgy poetry about philosophical concepts that I was too scared to tap into as a teenager and denouncing my Catholic religion after years spent in green and red kilts, and dingy Sunday school church basements. At a family church event in the fall I gripped my mother’s hand and said, “It’s not that I don’t feel peaceful here, I do, and that’s just the problem. I should be on my knees with nausea and guilt for the sin I commit, but I feel fine. Maybe it’s my twenty-year-old narcissism or the literature I bury myself in, but every time I slide into those nostalgic pews I feel like a ghost.”
I spent a significant amount of time curating risqué theatrical scenes with a charismatic, but disingenuous actor whom I would admire unconditionally for six months, despite all of the youthful obstacles in my path. That man and acting class would lead me into a nervous breakdown so artistic and provocative that my reputation is still tainted in the theater department. As I started to unravel, my façade began to crumble against my will and one day I looked at myself in the theater dressing room mirror as I was powdering my face and felt a rush of adrenaline instead of indifference, and that day I performed a scene so outrageous that when I walked into the snowstorm that night with sunglasses and no coat, my classmates did not hide their wide-eyed stares, and I could only utter the word “mystified” loud enough for my teenage self to hear.
After that, I could get away with as much eccentric behavior as I wanted on campus since most people in the theater department assumed I was a woman on the edge; another manic artist. None of the so called “creatives” bothered to ask me what or whom drove me to that untamed December night, or why I fancy burying and holding beautiful funerals for my emotions while they are still breathing; screaming. I spent most of the spring semester wandering around the city of Albany in gray suede heels and floral dresses, with a pen and notebook in my hand; writing about the looks painted across the faces of stoic museum curators, construction men with chewing tobacco caked on their teeth, and the marvelous sight of a schizophrenic homeless man laughing at a mural I have overlooked for years. Often, I would walk to a local park, sit on the ground, and write poems so morbid and romantic that I could feel my chest tighten as I read them aloud to myself.
Maybe I am just romanticizing my own instability; a word that hides under the word people use to describe my behavior, intense. But if that is true, why do I now stop to sit with my dog and stare at the clouds like a schoolgirl when we walk on the serene Hudson River trails? Why does music sound different? The melodies leave me drunken and thirsty for something I can’t yet identify. Why do cousins I only knew during the worst years of my life squeeze my shoulders and patronize me by saying I look “different?”
In March, I sat on the Atlantic City Boardwalk with my parents, and said, “I suppose the debutante inside of me is officially dead,” while they watched the gray waves violently crash against the gritty sand. My gaze was focused on an elderly bum drinking a bottle of Jägermeister under the pier where I spent my summers as a child. The word “God” was written on his left hand with black permanent marker, and I thought to myself, maybe this man captures the essence of religion itself.
See more of Kaylee Johnson’s “Tales From…” stories here. She is a junior education major concentrating in English.
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