Fake

a nonfiction essay written for a workshop. messy, but from the heart.

People with neon-colored hair and counterculture clothing will tell you with conviction that weird is good and you should tend your weird like a garden. I see them advocating their beliefs on street corners, and I pause to think about how they got there. Sometimes I think that they must have been the different ones as kids, and had the choice of changing to match and fading into the scenery, or cranking it up to eleven and seeing how far it got them. This seems like a solid hypothesis until I realize that there’s a grey area in between. It holds the people who have been different all along, and have felt it acutely, but couldn’t find it in them to assimilate, and weren’t proud enough of their quirks to shout it from the rooftops. I’m especially aware of these people, being one of them myself.

In retrospect, finding this identity in myself goes as far back as memory. My first funeral took place when I was six, and barely old enough to understand. Up to a certain age, children are living in something of a daydream and don’t quite have the capacity to grieve. I was still too young to hang my head and appear distressed. I didn’t see a need because I didn’t yet understand that one acts a certain way at funerals to leave the right impression, and create the right atmosphere. Looking back, it’s likely that I was uncomfortable with such an alien and somber occasion. My child’s heart couldn’t hold something so heavy.

It’s one story when the person in the coffin or the urn is your parent, or your best friend, or someone you loved. However, for an estranged friend of the family the tears don’t flow the same way, and sometimes you have to do a little acting. When I was seventeen I attended a funeral for Tim. He was a friend of mine when I was a child but I hadn’t seen him in years. I knew through the grapevine that he had since become a free-spirited, blue-haired college student, but I hadn’t heard anything about him recently until word reached me about his fatal overdose on crystal meth. His funeral took place in a grey stone chapel, rain pouring down heavily outside. Every wall inside the spacious church was paneled richly in dark wood, creating the unique effect one hears in cathedrals, turning tiny coughs into haunting echoes. It was when Tim’s grieving family entered the ceremony that I cast down my eyes. I felt the awkward detachment I often feel around death, and a film of guilt settled on me. I made an appropriate introspective expression to match those around me. It’s not that I’m apathetic toward death, but I’m not hit by sadness at the same times as everyone else. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not just me, and I’m just the only one who’s bad at faking it. It seems cynical, but the longer I live the more I have that same thought. I was so numb during that funeral that I started to feel it in my limbs. When the time came for those close to Tim to speak, I felt a change. His red-eyed father stepped up and talked about their summers spent fishing and making blueberry pancakes. His girlfriend told us, with a wavering voice, how she had loved his smile. So many things hit me during those short speeches, the most painful being that this would, over the course of my life, happen to lots of the people I loved. Those people would be gone somewhere I couldn’t reach them anymore. That thought cut into me too fast for me to recover in time, and tears spilled over. I’ve since realized that I can hear about tragedy all day, but when I hear the individual stories, I break down, because I envision these people as my own friends, and I don’t want them to hurt. That’s what happened to me at Tim’s funeral. After the years we spent apart, the gap was closed by his family’s words. I remembered spending a summer day at his house. I remembered Tim’s infectious smile. There was nothing fake.

The honest tears that came to me then, and to anyone enduring a funeral, become a tangible catharsis. We don’t like to admit it, but we live in a society of too many fake emotions. We are told how to feel at every turn, and often judged if we don’t fulfill our roles. If you aren’t sad at a funeral, you will try to look like it. Every unfortunate story warrants a sympathetic grimace and words of comfort, regardless of the how the listener may feel. We’ve become too sensitive for a response of, “Sorry, I care about you, but not your story.” We crave affirmation in the form of sympathy. One must be on good terms with everyone, and so we comply. This is how we smoothly run our lives. This is not to say there is no honesty left, but I would be hard-pressed to call it a majority.

Growing up, I was too introverted to even approach someone to try and make friends. It didn’t come easily for me as it did for many others. Nearly everyone has had a phase, lasting anywhere from a year to decades, when he or she was a unique snowflake and therefore something of an outcast. For me, though, becoming a “normal” kid was so difficult that it never happened. I couldn’t pretend to like sports just because everyone else did, and I couldn’t pretend to care about boys and popularity just to get invited to parties. I wasn’t the only kid with issues, but growing up, you always feel like the only one.

A bitterness started to grow in me at that young age, for the people who had it easy just being themselves, being and feeling all the right things at the right times. I felt both envious and a bit hostile toward kids who were naturally athletic, born with radiant charisma, or had an in because of older siblings in the community. I hung tight in gym classes, surrounded by enthusiastic classmates bedecked in the school colors, while I curled my legs into my chest to cover my bright orange t-shirt and boys’ basketball shorts bought from the consignment shop. Others competed, ran hard to get the best time on the mile, scrambled for the team captain slot. I hid behind taller students, was picked last, and consequently had little expected of me. I would rather have been reading than playing kickball, but I knew what my gym teacher would say to that. Work up a sweat! Where was my competitive spirit? I couldn’t have told you that if you gave me an atlas, a compass, and access to Google Maps. The other kids sweated away their recess outside, and I watched from my perch on top of the monkey bars, wondering what was wrong with being a bookworm. All of my favorite people were, after all.

My problem was that I could not force myself to do anything, which was more of a dysfunction than you’d think it would be. When invited to parties themed for My Little Pony, I clutched my Harry Potter paperback and nervously shook my head, eyes on the floor, the repeated need for excuses polishing my lying abilities to a luster. My parents saw this introversion as a major personality flaw and encouraged me to branch out socially, but I couldn’t imagine what I would do or talk about at a party with the girls who, at ten years old, were somehow already recognized as the popular crowd. I didn’t understand the secrets of scrunchies and gel pens and neon trapper-keepers that had elevated them to their status, so I hung back and picked up a ruled notebook instead. In this way, I had started writing my poems and stories by the fourth grade. Middle and high school did little to change me; I wrote more and read more, stopped wearing consignment clothes but continued to be a fashion standout. Party invites stopped coming since everyone knew the response. Despite my lack of popularity, I had my own small circle of friends now, and recognized that this was my place. I was more comfortable ducking behind the library shelves during lunch than networking in the crowded cafeteria, and I started to feel like maybe that was a legitimate place to belong.

Most of us grow out of our painfully oblivious phase and move on to become well-adjusted, doing what the world wants. When I look around, though, I find that the brutally honest reactions are the ones that are the most beautiful. The photographers who shoot the models pouting with slick, cotton-candy lips cannot hold a candle to those who capture genuine suffering or compassion. When we as humans lift our veils and let ourselves unfold in the light, when we break down into tears at a funeral, when we forget our apprehensions and love with all of ourselves for just a moment, when we say the exact thing on our minds without fear of consequences: these are the times when we as humans shine. I have spent my life, and plan to spend my future, denying nothing to myself or anyone else, and thus putting all my passion into everything. I think that’s the purest way one can live, and for me, the only way I know how. Even if it hurts me, I have to let both my darkness and my passions thrive. I have tried, and learned my truth; I can’t be fake.

Author's Note

I'm aware that this is sort of two essays in one, the funerals and the growing up different, so no need to emphasize that