Second, we had to treat my overbite. In my upper palate, another device was implanted to realign my jaw. It had a spot for a key, and a couple of times a day I would turn this key to bring my jaw back into its proper place.
Third, I got braces. Because what kid has ever gone to the orthodontist and not been told she needs braces? (Also, I feel it’s important for you to know, I thought it would be really cool to match the rubber bands on my braces with my glasses, so for a couple of years, between my eyes and mouth, I was rocking a lot of turquoise.)
And last, but most certainly not least, I was gifted with headgear. As you are visualizing, be sure you don’t mistakenly picture headgear’s slightly more attractive cousin, neck gear, which you could pretty effectively mask if you had long hair like I always have. Nope, I got the silly-looking strappy hat contraption which, even though it was pitched to me as blending in with my hair, most certainly did not.
So, to recap — tongue thrust corrector, jaw realigner, braces, and headgear. Shortly after my postapocalyptic makeover I was tasked with giving my first speech, a current-events presentation. I dreaded this day like a toddler dreads bedtime. Only substitute a tantrum for paralysis and alcohol withdrawal–like shakes.
When the day arrived, everything felt as if it was happening in slow motion. The twenty minutes of presentations that preceded mine might as well have been twenty hours. When it was finally my turn to speak, I made my way up to the front of the room and looked out at the sea of faces in my third-grade classroom. I took a deep breath, opened my mouth to start, and…nothing came out through my metal accoutrement.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. A nice visible driblet of drool did.
I closed my eyes. I took another deep breath, and as I attempted to begin again I realized that my classmates were now rocking in their seats, shaking, really, as they tried to suppress their mounting laughter. At me.
By this point my heart was beating so loudly I’m pretty sure it was heard a zip code or two or twenty away. I could feel the sweat running down my arms, and my knees knocking together, and meanwhile my words were still utterly trapped. Finally, I got something out, despite my quaky voice, and waded through the rest of the speech I’d prepared. Now all my classmates were audibly laughing, my tears were flowing — definitely with more ease than my words had — and I vowed that I would never put myself in a position where I could feel humiliated like that again. Sadly, that didn’t work out, but not from lack of effort.
I didn’t make a conscious decision that day to start disappearing. To rarely raise my voice for fear of shaking up the status quo. To overplease and behind the scenes seek to overperform. What I know with absolute certainty, however, is that as a result of that first, brutal speech I created a story for myself that I was a lousy public speaker. For too many years, whenever I had to get up to talk in front of a group of people, heck, many times when I was merely answering a question, I suffered from heart palpitations, body sweats, and self-talk so nasty it would have made Amy Schumer blush.
And of course, as stories are known to do, mine created my reality. Without fail, when I opened my mouth to speak, a part of me would time-travel back to that first speech, my voice would quaver, my body would shake, I would feel myself turning red, and often I would cry. And each time this happened, I wrote and later archived another chapter in my running narrative about my lousy communication abilities.
But alas, the more I feared humiliation, the more I excelled at attracting it. From accidentally peeing onstage during a dance recital to falling and breaking my arm in the middle of a school carnival, most days I felt like I was competing against myself for the Most Embarrassing Moment Award. And I kept on winning.
Then, the summer between sixth and seventh grade, I went to Space Academy. And things got even hairier. I was into math and science, so my dad had called the fine folks at Space Academy and told them, despite my age, which made me a better candidate for their younger Space Camp program, that because of my straight As, and my fierce work ethic, they should make an exception and let me join the older kids. Access granted.
I loved Space Academy, for about half a day. At the start of the program we took a test to determine our roles in an ongoing mock mission. When we got our test results back shortly after, I learned I had scored middle of the pack — impressive, given that I was testing alongside kids one, two, in some cases three years my senior. Not impressive, however, for a twelve-year-old whose self-worth was inextricably connected to her academic performance.
My score, or lack thereof, meant that I spent the rest of my four days in activities with the other “average” students — who happened to be the cool girls. Most of them had long blond hair — magically untouched by the Huntsville humidity that was making my brown hair look like I was camping without a tent in a hurricane. They rocked sinfully sweet Southern accents, and they had legs way smoother than mine. We’ll come back to that.
While to my face my girl crewmates dripped with kindness, every time they had to pick a mission buddy, they picked me last. In the dining hall, the first girl through the food line always managed to save a seat for everyone but yours truly. Then there was the night in my room when the girl in the bunk below me pulled a Swiss Army knife on the girl in the opposite bunk and I peed all over myself in bed while pretending to be asleep. Fortunately, my sleep performance was compelling enough that nobody noticed. (And while this episode has zero bearing on where we are headed, I’m throwing it in so you can appreciate why I stayed as far away from a science classroom as possible once I got home. Girl crew plus blade plus another unintended peeing mishap equaled “I hate science” in my tween head.)
Fast-forward to the last day of Space Academy. Everybody in my girl crew was exchanging her Academy yearbook, and every time I asked if somebody would sign mine, I was greeted with a painfully overenthusiastic, “Of course!” Yet nobody asked me to sign her yearbook in return. The good news is that by lunch I had figured out why. The bad news is — by lunch I had figured out why.
That final day I decided I would do anything to sit with the girl crew, so at lunch I skipped the food line, went to their table, and put my yearbook down next to the other ones that were reserving seats. And that’s when I saw it. The inside joke that had bonded the girl crew together. Next to my picture was a note, the note, that revealed all.
Had so much fun. We’ll always remember our Little Hairy Beast!
Simply typing the words Little Hairy Beast today feels as much like a sucker punch to the soul as it did when reading those words back then. Except when I was pregnant, I’ve been pencil thin my entire life, and I was lucky to escape the body shame so many adolescent girls experience, and perpetually experience, once they curve and fold in new ways. But being called hairy and discovering I hadn’t been oversensitive, that I had in fact been ostracized, also emboldened me. Unlike my friends, who often felt enslaved as their bodies betrayed them, I realized I could do something immediately about my beastliness.
When I got home early the next day, I promptly went into my mother’s bathroom, grabbed her razor, and shaved every inch of hair (and at least a few centimeters of skin) off my legs. Over the next year, I’d shave my armpits. Then my arms. Then the stray hairs above my upper lip. I won’t keep going, but you should know. I. Did. Keep. Going.
My current-events speech, complete with headgear, was humiliating because I performed badly. Space Academy was humiliating because of the mistreatment, sure, but also, and more important, because of who I concluded I was. Or wasn’t. Therefore, like an addict who transcends her pain every time she gets high, through my teen years and into much of my twenties, I similarly got addicted to my version of emotional numbness. I would temporarily rid myself of my congenital beastliness (thank you, Eastern European Jewish father and Greek mother) by shaving my body hair. But of course, within a couple of days, the hair always grew back. And with it came a new wave of self-hatred — and a desire to disappear that no amount of shaving