Choose your poison. Main the title page. Me all you'd ever wanna know. Writing poems, essays, stories. Art things I've drawn. Music shows, bands, good lines. You interactive inanity. Links good stuff I wish I'd made.
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"freak!"1/13/02When my friends and I walk around Bel Air, sometimes people shout at us. They say “freak.” If they don’t know us, and they’re just driving by us, they have to be deciding that we’re freaks just based on the way we look. Some of my friends recently took a survey at Fallston asking what groups exist at the school. Of those who responded, most identified “freaks” as a group. Some called them “people who wear black,” or “goths,” or “foreign language cluster people,” but overwhelmingly, the term used was “freak.” People wonder why kids choose to be freaks. Think back to elementary and middle school, when everyone still wore the clothes their moms put them in, and they were all trying to figure out where they belonged. Who did you call a nerd? Who did you try to push around and exclude? When you yourself don’t know who you are, you look to the people around you to tell you where you fit in. When they call you a “freak,” you believe them. It’s not a decision I made, really. In middle school, I was the kid nobody wanted to be friends with. When everyone I tried to connect to pushed me away for being a loser, I figured that was my role in life: to be an outcast. When I got to high school I found more kids like me, who liked looking different than the khaki-wearing Gap-shopping status quo. The media tells children that outcasts wear baggy pants and spiky jewelry, and listen to angry music. The rest of society finds this unappealing and extreme, and that’s why the “freaks” find it attractive. All of those kids who were ignored by their peers and parents needed attention the most. In black clothes and chains, they get that attention. When other people call us “freaks,” we smile. They think that they’re getting one up on us, hitting us where we’re vulnerable, but hearing them throw insults only means that we’ve succeeded. We’re different than everyone else, different than our tormentors, and they know it. |
