The Girl Who Never Smiles

I went to sleep away camp for much of the 1990s, during those formative years of my life when shaving my legs and kissing boys on the lips were the markers that the past was past and the future was golden. Camp was a dreamworld in which everything was 75% more intense, and each day felt like a week and a half. In a good way. 

After five years as a camper, I graduated one glorious, yet intimidating summer to junior counselor. I was running shit now along with my cohort or scrappy young teens. We had come up in the traditions we were now carrying on for the next generation of sunburnt, Midwestern jews. 

Camp split the summers into two sessions, the first being four weeks and the second being three. As a camper you could pick or choose, one or both. As a counselor you were in it for the long haul, but you had the freedom to leave at night for a few hours, to party in town, eating Taco bell and lounging in the central park and gazebo of the teeny tiny neighboring town. 

I loved my newfound authority and freedom. It was like camp, only grownup, with the same campy feelings, the same warm fuzzies. Plus money. That first session was a breeze. I was placed in the art shack, dipping wax candles and weaving dreamcatchers on sticks. Easy. Natural. Comfortable. 

But second session saw my two closest friends taking off to do other things, leaving me all alone to run the cooking activity, making s'mores and mud pies in a kitchen the size of a closet for the indoor kids that signed up. Fine, but lonelier. 

Those second session days brought me a bit more inside myself. I looked around for the first time and noticed the other counselors, their easy smiles and their poolside banter. I sat by myself sometimes, wide eyed, and awkwardly staring. Wishing they were my friends, but they weren't. My friends were mostly absent. I was just me. 

The pool staff was the top of the pecking order. The totem pole of cool saw them perched atop their lifeguard chairs, twirling their whistles and flexing their brown, toned thighs. They laughed, and they laughed. Oh, how they laughed. They were not my friends. 

And it turned out, they didn't even know who I was. After five years of dedicated camperhood, I considered it part of my identity. But a single exchange with a bleach blond lifeguard that summer brought it all crashing down around my bruised sense of self. 

"Hey." 

"Hi." 

"What's your name again?" 

"Oh, I'm ******." I already knew her name, of course. Of COURSE. 

"Oh, sure. ******. Yeah. You know what we've been calling you all summer?" Flash of a gleaming white smile. 

"......." 

"We've been referring to you as the girl who never smiles, because we didn't know your name." 

Boom. Crash. Slam. The remains of my exploded ventricles dripping down the walls of my chest cavity. 

"...Oh. Ha. Weird." 

That was the first time of MANY in my life that my image would be reflected to me in this way. That somehow my physical person presented in a way that seemed fine from my perspective, but rubbed people the wrong way. Made them uncomfortable. It was a jolt to my sense of self, and it made me seriously consider what was WRONG with me, and how I could fix it to be BETTER in the world. 

That journey of self-loathing and confusion lasted years. A lifetime, it seems. I battle remnants of it even today. My face vs. my insides. Who I am and who the world sees. They don't match... or do they? 

It was not until recent years that I have realized that this problem did not begin that day at camp. I've been living with it since birth, in this cisgendered female body. I've struggled to be the girl the world wanted me to be, and I still struggle to be an acceptable woman. I also struggle to not care about being that woman. 

I may or may not smile enough. It may be ludicrous to quantify the friendliness of my outer appearance, but it has been a central question of my quest to just be. 

And it has made me tired, and a bit bitter. It brings me, in all honesty, to where we stand today, right here, facing off across our screens. You reading this. You learning me. You will judge me, I suppose, but in the anonymity of these words I seek to stop judging myself.