A Laugh at my Expense

In fourth grade, everybody was on a level playing field.  I had lots of friends and assumed I was just a likable person.  In fifth grade, five elementary schools poured into one middle school.  It seemed instinctual as ranking began.  I was miserable; nerdy and alone.  Who would have thought that the girl with large pink plastic glasses with yellow and blue confetti imbedded in the frames wouldn’t fit in?  At the end of the school year, the glasses were destroyed in a fortunate jump roping accident.

Freed of the weight of a poor fashion choice, I felt this was my opportunity to come back from the summer and wow my fellow peers.  The month of August was left to plotting that ever-so important first day of school outfit.  Then as if fate brought us together, I stumbled upon the accessory that would set me apart from my adoring fans.  There at Big Lots, passed over by the cool people of this world despite drastic markdowns on the regular department store shelves, I found ridiculously large plastic (when will plastic finally be cool???) bright purple clip-on earrings.  They were a dollar.  They were, in my mind, perfect.
 
Having received permission from my mother, I made my purchase with the hope that my future of popularity was secured.  The car ride home I drew pictures of myself wearing my grape diamond-shaped earrings.  Would they be best set off by a high ponytail, a cascade of curls pulled over one shoulder, or perhaps a side ponytail?  I chose the high ponytail, determining that it was the best way to draw all attention to the atrocities I had fallen in love with.  If only I knew.

Fate placed Alice behind me in the lunch line-up.  The high ponytail revealed the clips of my earrings.  My mother did not allow us to pierce our ears until we were 13.  My peers had more lenient parents.  Alice cleverly sang, “Clip-on, clip-off!” to the tune of the Clapper commercial and drew the class’s attention to my only-now-apparent fashion faux-pas.  The whole class joined.  They clapped and giggled.  I slowly pulled each earring off the once proud lobes, knowing that I had again secured myself in the ranks of Nerd-dom.  Oh were I never to have found those earrings or had settled on wearing my hair down, hiding the clips from the masses who clearly were just jealous of my earrings and needed to find some flaw to feel validated.

Thus began a middle school career of trying to get people to like me, and never quite getting why my mom’s sister’s bright red corduroy bib overalls were a big, fat fail or why you would not want to be friends with the girl who had all of the answers in class and handed in ten page papers when the requirement was for two.  It was not until high school that I embraced my identity as the nerdy-and-loving-it-type.  It was a long haul trying to find a place in this world that I was comfortable with and that was comfortable with me.

Now that middle school is only a painful distant memory, I can accept that Alice’s mean-spirited outburst was simply an attempt like my own to be wanted, needed, loved.  It is what we are all looking for.  God designed us with the need to interact with and to love others.  Few humans ignore this desire.  But many make poor choices in their attempt to fulfill that need.  I suppose we all have our own stories of popularity contest flops, even the popular girls who were just better at hiding their desire to still play house when they were in seventh grade.

I look back at fifth-through-eighth-grade-Katie and she just makes me sad.  At times I wish the older, wiser me could go back in time and coach her not to emblazon with silver puffy paint the nickname “Chinsy” on her sixth grade camp ball cap.  But the sorrow does not come from reflecting on an embarrassing history, but in knowing that a little girl spent years ignorant to God’s delight in what He was creating.  He was molding me then and He is molding me now.  Life’s difficulties and rejections that often seem so empty of love, are just opportunities for Him to fill us up with all of His good love.

It took years of poorly plotted superficial decisions to break me down, before I sought the one love that mattered.  I used to think that no one could love me until I learned to love myself, but I think we all know that we are at times very unloveable.  I made some very unloveable decisions toward friends, just so I could move up the popularity ranks.  But discovering a God who could love me right where I was, in the midst of unloveable sins, was the only way I learned to love others, even those that were the demise of my social life.  And when I was able to love others and forgive others- to offer them something of value and not just attempt to dazzle them- I finally discovered my own self worth.

“We love because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19  We are all worthy of God’s love.  Go fill up on it until it overflows to others.  There are a lot of desperate people in need of it.