The Miseducation of Jennifer Cross

There is something to be said about a touch, a touch that makes you skin stand up at attention to welcome the contact with increasing heat and decreasing tension.

A hand smooths itsself across your body, a breath hits the back of your neck. Your eyes close. Your chest expands and contracts. Your skin warms with every stroke. Your muscles relax with every caress. Your senses ignite with every brush.

You can’t help but exhale with the release of excitement. The heat begins to settle. The muscles begin to calm. The body absorbs the hand running over it. You experience peace unlike you’ve known before.

You become intimate with intimacy. You become OK with vulnerability.

When I was not even 20 years old, I met a boy who told me that I had beautiful eyes. I remember reading this in our AIM chat window while I was preparing for my afternoon lecture. I had been completely taken aback by the compliment, pretending to not understand what it meant because I had the propensity to jump to conclusions and I did not, could not, believe that such a compliment could be meant for me. I could not believe that I could be seen as beautiful to anyone, let alone this boy. I began to feel vulnerable, confused, ensnared, exposed and unsure, feelings of which I could not abide nor afford at the time. I do not remember how I responded; I would like to think that I thanked him for the compliment and gave him one of his own, but I know that my life would have turned out differently had it played out this way in my hindsight’s eye. More likely than not, the sniveling, confused emotional infant of 20 years of age made an egotistical joke in response in order to shake off the vulnerability and immediately signed off.

I did this. I did this to the boy who told me that I had beautiful eyes. I did this to the boy whom I had met the last night of the previous semester with my friend who had become enamored of him. I had spoken a maximum of six sentences to this boy on that night; my friend put forth her effort in dominating his attention. My friend had become enamored with the boy and communicated with him throughout the entire summer…and when we returned to school for the fall, I was the one who he had approached. The boy to whom I had spoken six sentences the night before I had left for Chicago four months prior called out my name while I was leaving the Student Union during peer advising training. I had known him for roughly three hours. I had difficulty remembering his name that day. I threw his compliment back in his face. This is how I treated the boy who told me that I had beautiful eyes.

I do not know where this boy, who would now be a man, is presently. He disappeared from my life after one last defensive slight from my tongue. I cannot tell him that I am sorry for what I have done, because I spared him from at least one trauma out of the hundreds that life generally visits upon us. When looking at this logically, I suppose that I cannot tell him anything right now. I can only hope that he is happy, that he has found the love that I could not [or would not] give him. I can only hope that he has forgotten me: the girl with beautiful eyes.

I say this because he was the first, but certainly not the last. I say this because this story and its antecedents concluded in this manner due to one rudimentary thought bathed in fear and fear alone: what he wants does not matter.

I will make no proclamations that my two sizes too small heart has seen the error of its ways.  However, I will not be so cynical to proclaim that I will remain bathed in fear for the remainder of my days. Well then, where does that leave the girl with beautiful eyes? With any luck, I’m left at the crossroads where I’ll be able to send the compliment back without worrying about confusion, ensnarement, exposure and uncertainty…and without thinking whether I can abide or afford the feelings at the time.

What’s the worst thing that could happen to a girl who spent the pivotal years of her life as an ugly, outcasted, regimented, nerd-tastic loner?

(1)  She gets pretty. REALLY pretty…and people start to notice. My Tumblr profile picture was taken when I was 27 years old. Three years prior to the taking of that photograph, very few people could see my eyes very clearly due to the copious amounts of baby fat that rested in my cheeks…even with spending 3-4 nights a week at my do-jang.

(2)  She no longer has an institutionalized religio-demic bubble to keep her goal path in check. I had never been exposed to the real world until I landed in downtown Chicago in June 2002.  I had been the product of private schools and Pentacostal environments from birth through university and never tasted the pungent realism of the masses.

Due to a lack of emotional maturity on my part, I left college without a solid plan of how or when I was going to attend, let alone apply for, law school. Many of my university friends had spent their senior year farming themselves out to internships, MCAT/LSAT prep sessions and graduate school interviews. I spent my senior year taking advantage of happy hours-student discounts at every other bar in Paris and London. I found this behavior to be much to my detriment, not because I was floating in professional limbo, but because I had developed a higher tolerance (and lighter wallet) for those lovely liquid fermented complex carbohydrates.

So here I was in my hometown: broke, unskilled, uncouth, unflattering, uncompromising, and unprofessional. The perfect hire, if I do say so myself.

Despite having so many and much, much more of the “admirable” qualities listed above, I managed to snag a job as a paralegal at a small consumer protection rights law firm within a month of graduation. I patted myself on the back for finding employment so quickly, once again reaffirming my need to believe that I was better than everyone else because I could not accept how far behind I had fallen. I hadn’t even bothered to establish a base in Chicago because I had myself convinced that this situation was “only temporary”. I would be back to the east coast enrolled in law school with my real friends within the next year! I knew it to be the truth because anything else was unimaginable.

Fast forward to 2005: still in Chicago, still not back to school, still thinking that my place at home was “only temporary”. On a unspecific night in April on the north side of the city, I had once again suited up for my perpetual role as the “fat, clunky, ugly, loyal and sarcastic” handmaid/sidekick to my [current] roommate’s “delicate, blond, demure and coy” princess/protagonist. I had grown accustomed to this role; I had even grown fond of it. Being ignored gave me the opportunity to develop keen objective insight of my surroundings and the people who populated them, and I had been privileged to have all of high school, all of college and three years into adulthood to develop this insight.

And on this specific night, it was all ruined by a man who simply said “Hi”.

What followed after that unspecific night were 15 months of lying, cheating, emotional complexity, loss of boundaries and lots of drug use; this particular era deserves, and will at some point receive, its own blog, or possibly a book…but first things first, I must talk about the transformation.

I had never seen myself as a woman to be desired, let alone seen myself as a woman. It has been over 7 years since that unspecific night in April, and I still have difficulty thinking about myself as a woman. Society has a knack for pushing its definitions of “what is” into every subset of culture, instead of encouraging one to discover his or her own ways. I had my ways; society had her ways. We met on the battlefield; we sparred; we bled; society was triumphant. My ways were not the ways of a woman, so I never referred to myself as one. Yet here was this man who saw a woman and said “Hi”. This man burst my religio-demic bubble, and I lost approximately 25 lbs of uncertainty, androgyny and anonimity…

I came home to a bowl of radioactive chili to discover that HBO was showing The Prince of Egypt. I immediately scoffed the movie as complete and total bunk, adapted from an intangible, over-edited 5,000 year old story which relies on no credible, physical evidence in order to support it. Then, something happened that almost always happens but not in its typical fashion: I became sad. I do often become sad after scoffing, but it is usually due to the fact that there are so many people who buy into ideals that are childlike at their core. This time, I scoffed because I remembered that I once loved this movie and found it inspirational.

I hardly talk about being an atheist. I don’t belong to any nationally recognized or official atheist organizations. I don’t politically lobby for the separation of church and state. I don’t even get miffed when the clerks at Walgreen’s conclude our transactions with the meme “Have A Blessed Day”. I suppose one could say that I am a “bad” atheist. Then this past Saturday came…

I was sitting in Café Iberico with other members of the {Group Name Withdrawn} after the Bughouse Square debates sharing pithy comments about the various soap boxes speakers and their intangible diatribes when a gentleman reeking of that ominous dark blue Astro Van Owners’ Club vibe approached a table and gruffly said, “Let me ask you all a question! Who’s the youngest disbeliever here?!”

Putting aside his complete lack of social graces, my comrades and I looked at each other and tried to deduce the meaning behind his vague and belittling inquiry while maintaining a sense of decorum that our adequately developed right brains had been fortunate enough to grant us.

The Serial Killer Stereotype asked his question again; this time, he started pointing at each of us: “You! When did you stop believing?!”

Each person at my table took his or her turn, giving a succinct response in the hopes that he would return to the other table from which he had probably been banned. When we had successfully responded to Mr. Serial, he pointed at a friend of mine and said, “You! I have something for you! You’re the youngest nonbeliever here so I’m bequeathing you with this ‘ex-baptism’ soap. You still reek of theism and you need to scrub the rest of it off!”

Um…EXCUSE-A-FUCKING ME???!!!!!

I was not born into atheism. Quite the opposite, I was born to a uber-religious mother who spent/spends most of her free time in or around church and thus, my brother and I spent most of our free time in or around the church. When I had made it quite plain to my mother that I was not enjoying the time I spent “basking in the Holy Spirit” (mostly on account of being the Oreo oddball out and never feeling the presence of Jesus), she had me spend most of the time with the adults instead of the teenagers because I was “too advanced” to be stuck learning about god at a level that was “beneath me.”

I grew up religious, but I was never spiritual. Jesus dictated a good portion of my life, though I never felt him near. When I broke with my faith, I felt a type of catharsis to which sexual orgasms cannot even compare. That being said, when you break with something that has defined who you are, what you are, what you think, feel, hear, interpret everything for 18 years, a part of you becomes broken with it. Your identity suddenly comes into question and you find yourself lost, confused, angry, and hurt. You feel betrayed by those who are closest to you, especially by your parents whom you can never forgive or understand why they spent so many years filling your head with lies only to put you out there in the real world where the evidence crushes those lies like Gojira crushes Tokyo.

What is my point with this diatribe? My point is that walking away from your faith is an arduous task, and no one, absolutely NO ONE, has the right to make gaffes about it. That man who poked fun at my friend for being the “youngest disbeliever” was no better than Ted Haggart, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Fred Phelps, Grand Ayatollah Khameni, Osama bin Laden, Ultra Orthodox Rabbis, and the list can go on and on and on. When you walk away from your faith, you put yourself at risk for ridicule and isolation, and that is if you are lucky. To joke about it in anyway makes you no better than those with whom we attempt to rationally debate.

My friends, this man who taunted my friend is a bad atheist. I’m just a woman trying to live her life in the manner that I intended: honest, exciting and rarely sober. ;-)

All Hail the American University Education System! That giant bastion where Self-Absorption and Self-Reliance meet at a 4-year DIY house party in [insert your college town here], each carrying the desperate hope of hooking up with Identity. It is at this great stage of life where we are introduced to red plastic cups, orgasms and the politics of sexual inequality. It is at this great stage of life when knowledge can be equivocally acquired from a game of Kings or an adjunct professor. It is at this great stage of life where the real lessons begin…that is, if you don’t arrive with a repressive, ignorant, naive, religious view of the world that caps your emotional age out at 10 years old.

I went to Boston 13 years ago with dreams clouding my eyes with visions of a world inhabited by Vulcans: sentient, logical beings constantly engaged in intellectual discourse who found the superficialities of the world (make-up, gossip, clothes and boy bands) irrelevant, and therefore unnecessary and beneath them. Yeah, I know. Who the fuck prepared me for college? No one prepared me, at least not for anything that occurs outside of a classroom, a place in which only 11% of the average college experience takes places. Noticing a pattern here?

I wasn’t prepare for the emotion. The intricacies of the complex, interdependent webs that were woven between individuals made the subject matter over which they were created so incomprehensible. I became caught up in so many passions over so many subjects that were so much bigger than myself and my textbooks, yet so intangible and derivative in the grand scheme of things.

I wasn’t prepared for more than one right answer to exist for almost every question, problem, dilemma or situation posed to me. I wasn’t prepare to learn the term “Manichean” and to have a two-millenia old term hit me where it hurt.

I wasn’t prepared to make real friends again. I had played the survival and manipulation game for so long that I had forgotten how to just be and what it was like to be surrounded by those who saw you for you and didn’t run in the other direction or turn you into their Cher Horowitz-esque pet project for social modification.

I wasn’t prepared for sex. (Wasn’t prepared for college outside the classroom, remember?) Yeah, I’m a moron. Honestly, I felt (and still feel) that sex was an activity in which only adults could and should participate. I was no adult; none of us were, and I was spared from the raging hormones thanks to a lack of any sexual activity and a genetic predisposition for late implementation of human developmental stages. Simply enough, the interest and the curiosity were never there, at least not within nor directed towards me…at first…when it was, I became frozen, undecisive. Somewhere, deep down, I knew that I did not want to be sexualized, but I also knew that it was the “normal” course of things. As a result, I did what any intellectually adept, socially awkward 20 year old would do: I ran away…3200 miles away to be precise.

Out of everything for which I was wholly unprepared, I was most unprepared to become a person again. After high school, I never expected to be anything more than just a composite of facts, figures, and correlating arguments. I never expected that I would start doing things simply because I liked them and not for the advancement of any potential career. Midnight madness; pointless debates; bullshit epiphanies; laughing so hard I would cry; crying so hard I would laugh; tripping, falling and picking myself up again, taking a piece of an 1,800 year old Roman road with me; revelations so profound that they unmade me; ideas that challenged me.

I never expected to become a human being again. I never expected to like what I was and what I had to offer again. Peace is what I won, and peace was what I did not expect.

Too bad that the real world doesn’t like human beings. Too bad that was another fact that no one ever told me.