Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on December 4, 2011
When I was in 8th grade, I read Sylvia Plath’s The Belljar. It was the most depressing piece of literature I’d ever read; I can’t even remember if I picked it up because it was assigned, or because someone liked it and recommended it.
That book put me in a MOOD. I went to school the next day, pissed as hell about how nobody talks about what’s really bothering them. And when I sat down at the cafeteria table with my quasi friends and said to them that nobody ever talks about what’s really going on, or cops to what we’re all really feeling, my pseudo-friend Audrey said vehemently “Of course we don’t all say what’s on our minds. Nobody goes around telling people what they really think, because you can’t just DO that! Nobody does that. So get used to it!”
I cried that day, because she was right. People don’t say what’s really bugging them, or how things didn’t work out the way they hoped, and how disappointing business or life, or plenty of things can be.
Audrey went on to Penn State and got knocked up in her freshman year and quit school because she needed to have the baby and marry the guy who was a young naive ROTC, maybe like a fling to her.
Funny how karma got her back for shouting at me that way. I hope she learned how to say what was bothering her.