Katsucon and Getting Beat Up

Hey y'all!

So I'll be at Katsucon the weekend after this, for Friday only (just going down for the day with some friends).  If you're awake at 9 am on Friday, you can catch me at the gazebo with the big Sakizou cosplay group!  I'll be dressed as Alice, so just look for the Alice with the toy white rabbit. :3  Katsucon is in National Harbor, Maryland, at the fabulous Gaylord Hotel.

So that's all fun and good, but also I wanted to mention a thing on here about something I hear all the time.  I get a lot of feedback from fans who, for reasons unknown to me, bemoan the fact that they wish they looked like me or were popular like me.  Seriously.  People say this.  I can't count how many girls write to me and say they wished they were me, because they feel they're not pretty or outgoing enough.  I have nothing but sympathy for young people, especially girls, who feel they aren't attractive or well-liked, or feel like outsiders in their school or social groups.  So let me tell you a little story.

When I was in middle school, I got the shit kicked out of me, all day, every day.  That's the story right there.  I got beat up constantly, I was the absolute lowest rung on the popularity ladder, I ate lunch by myself every day and the other kids made fun of me to my face, in front of teachers, whenever they felt like it.  It was a different time, before bullying awareness, when "kids will be kids" was the lazy teacher response to most harassment.  I was everybody's punching bag, from breakfast until I got off the bus after school.  I got my stuff stolen, I got slapped across the head when I walked by people, I had rumors about me spread as on-going jokes for everyone in my grade, I got my locker graffitti'd and one time this one boy wrote a short story for literature class about me and my brother being involved in a drive-by shooting.  He got away with it, because this was 1994 and also my literature teacher was a horrible woman who cared not one jot for the funny "foreign" family that had moved to their small redneck town (I grew up in Germany, but I was born in Kansas and was an american citizen.  Didn't matter.  From the moment I arrived, I got the nickname "nazi" and it stuck forever).  One time in 5th grade, my teacher took me outside the classroom and gave me a candy bar and told me to wait in the stairwell.  The next day, I learned from a girl that she had herded the WHOLE GRADE into one room and implored them to stop being mean to me.  That was easily the most humiliating moment of my life.  And it only made the bullying worse.  I wasn't allowed to SPEAK in the hallways, for fear of getting jeered and mocked, so I just learned to be quiet and look at the floor when walking.  It took me many years to train myself to make eye contact with people after I left school, because I spent so long trying to avoid other people's eyes in case they felt like beating me up.  I still have a very hard time looking in people's eyes when I talk to them.

On top of that, I was damned funny-looking.  I didn't feel comfortable with myself and had low self-esteem, so I wore my dad's big plaid flannel shirts and a baseball cap all the time.  My hair was super oily and so frizzy that one of my nicknames was Mary LeFro.  I didn't own any makeup, didn't know how to apply it anyway and was generally an all-around stringy, gawky kid right up til high school.  I spent a lot of time hiding under the stairwell to eat my lunch so I wouldn't get picked on in the cafeteria.  Even the lunch ladies felt sorry for me and would offer me extra dessert sometimes, which only embarrassed me more.

The point is, I spent a lot of time reading and drawing and avoiding everyone around me, for self-preservation's sake.  But inside, I never let it break me.  I never stopped thinking that I was worth something and that I had every right to whatever everyone else was enjoying at the time.  To this day, I have no idea why I didn't just become an utter introvert and give up, since I couldn't even open my mouth most of the time without getting yelled at or mocked or shoved.  But I never let it stop me from doing what I wanted.  I think I was just too stupid to quit.  When we had to do the humiliating activity of square-dancing in gym class and the teacher said the girls could pick their partners, every girl froze up and refused.  Wouldn't you, at age 11?  Not me.  I picked the cutest boy in class, the one every girl had a crush on, the one so far out of my league that the light leaving HIS league right now wouldn't reach me for another 35 million years.  And even though he moaned and gagged and made insulting complaints the entire time he was forced to dance with me, I MADE THAT BASTARD DANCE WITH ME.  Because I didn't care.  I was a human being and I deserved every chance that other people got.  When we had student elections, I put my name on the ballot.  When we voted for middle school prom queen, I put my name on that ballot too.  I didn't care.  Didn't matter that I'd be laughed at.  Something inside of me always told me to just go for it, no matter how crazy it was.

And when I went on to high school, things got better.  It was a bigger school, with a lot of different kids being bused in from other towns...people who didn't know me or care.  I started experimenting with my appearance, trying new clothes, speaking up in class and generally becoming more accepted.  I even got on the short-lived cheerleading squad our school started (short-lived because that school was very liberal, WAY full of nerds and we cared more about the chemistry-h/physics-h club than cheering, apparently).  I was later diagnosed with clinical depression and put on medication, which I'm still on, but even that didn't slow me down.  Even developing an eating disorder from the years of peer taunting about my looks didn't slow me down.  I beat it down and I control it and I don't let it control me.

Now I can look back and know that I am who I am today, not because I was blessed from birth with looks or charm or good fashion sense or confidence, but because I was blessed with something far more important: a need to prove myself and an unquenchable fire inside me.  Nobody could ever put it out, no matter how hard they tried.  Everything I have or am today is because I worked hard for it, studied it, practiced it, asked for it, demanded it and then took it anyways when people said no.  And these experiences haven't made me bitter or made me hate everyone.  I like people and I have a persistent optimism (meditation and positive thinking have helped greatly), mostly because I can take a look back at my formative years and think "at least it's never going to be THAT bad again."  I think I accomplished a lot just by living through that and not becoming a hateful, jaded person who persists on looking down on anyone fashionable or outgoing or popular out of habit.  I never became the comic book nerd who likes to laugh at "the pretty, stupid people who watch reality TV and go shopping all the time."  Because judging other people without knowing them is one of the things that people did to me when I was young, and I always said I'd never be that kind of person.

So if you're young and you feel like you can't measure up to someone whom you think has everything, you're wrong.  You've got absolutely everything they've got, you just haven't used it yet.  The only thing they've got that you don't are their own personal problems that you don't even know about.  Trust me, everyone has huge problems of their own and their lives are far less wonderful than a couple online photos and a blog make it look.

Anyone under the age of 20 has no reason to expect perfection from themselves.  Being awkward and goofy-looking and not knowing where you belong in life is the actual DEFINITION of the word teenager.  Don't compare yourself or your accomplishments to someone who is twice as old as you and has twice as long to figure all that stuff out.  Just do your best and don't let anyone make you feel like you're inferior to them, because I'm giving you my personal guarantee that you're not.    

And if you have the chance to square-dance with the cutest boy in school, don't care that he's going to call you ugly and horrible for picking him.  Grab that bastard and make him dance.