Reader Stories 2: Sad Lost Puppy Finds Her Way
by Margaret Cioffe
During the summer between 5th and 6th grade, some kind of fundamental shift or growth took place that I missed out on. I spent the summer alone on my back porch reading Harry Potter while apparently all of my friends did something completely different. Something so different and so life changing that when we went to our first day of 6th grade they had stopped speaking to me completely. They were all in agreement about this and no one told me ahead of time. It was very confusing and scary and absolutely mortifying.
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It would have been nice to have an older sibling or friend to give me a heads up about how things were going to change as I grew and as my body changed. How people, especially girls, were going to change and evolve too, why they became bitches. But I didn’t. At one point (either middle school or high school) my mom handed me The Life Cycle Library for Young People. Published in 1969, I can only assume it was given to her by her parents and was also the extent of her sex education. It did not quite jibe with what I was seeing every morning before school on MTV and VH1. It did little to explain any of the habits of dating for a young girl in the late 90’s-early 00’s. I did wind up making new friends, but this trend of me finding out what was cool or how things worked after everyone else seemed to already just know continued, and it continued to be mortifying.
But when you are bullied, when your closest friends suddenly cast you out and always seem to be in possession of knowledge that you just can’t seem to figure out, when your peers all seem to surpass your understanding of the world and you are constantly that lost puppy playing catch up to understand what the hell you are supposed to say, or do, or wear (and constantly doing all of those things “wrong”), you are bound to reach a breaking point. Mine came somewhere in junior or senior year of high school. This is when I discovered Teen Vogue and a world outside of Summerville, South Carolina. Because I spent so much time in my room, alone, and so much time reading, both books and magazines, I began to read two very different things with lessons that forever changed my approach to myself and my life.
In Teen Vogue I learned that all of the clothes that the girls in my town wore were wrong (sorry, girls, but they were) and on me, they looked especially wrong or I just didn’t do them right. Pearls, polo shirts, anything khaki, anything Vera Bradly or Lily Pulitzer, Sperry’s boat shoes…please, God, just burn it all. But Boho Chic with a hint of the now grown up and in college Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen attitude, yes please. A little Sex and the City? OK! Did I wear stilettos to high school? Sure did. Did I get made fun of still? Sure did. But this time, I was proud of it because I finally knew why I was getting made fun of. It wasn’t because I was behind and didn’t know what the latest trends were, it was because I was ahead. I was wearing what the fashion students in New York City were wearing, but go on, enjoy your overpriced Lacoste shirts.
I also read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. That book did something for me that was so necessary and life changing that I will forever stand behind its value in the world. It taught me that there were people in the world who value intelligence. Whose entire existence can rely on the need to sit and talk. About life, about books, about music and emotions. Not sports. Not Jesus. But everything else under the sun that is important to the rest of humanity. Traveling and meeting people who live differently than you do can be educational and can shift your perspective on the world, and most importantly, shifting your perspective on the world is the only way that you can ever live in the world. The only way that you can coexist with people who do not fit into the little boxes that you are used to. Those people are beautiful and wonderful and valuable, just like you. You, who also do not have to fit into those little boxes.
This was also when the movie Rent came out, and that was also monumentally life changing. Rent told me where to go to find my people. Teen Vogue said New York City for fashion and career. Rent said New York City to meet artists and musicians and the weirdos that Kerouac was talking about when he wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
I moved to New York at 19 and found my people — the ones who wanted to sit and talk about everything that mattered, who didn’t care what you were wearing as long as you had something to say. But here’s the thing I didn’t figure out until much later: it wasn’t that I had finally found the right group to belong to. The weirdos in New York didn’t accept me despite my differences — they made the whole concept of fitting in completely beside the point. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody cared. There were no rules to decode because nobody was interested in rules. There was just conversation, and books, and people who thought deeply about things, and it turned out I had been training for exactly this my entire life without knowing it.
The girl on the library couch wasn’t broken. She wasn’t behind. She wasn’t doing it wrong. She was building something — quietly, alone, one book at a time — and all those years of not fitting in, of retreating into her own head, of being the sad lost puppy following people who didn’t want her? That wasn’t falling behind. That was the head start.
Margaret Cioffe spent her childhood on library couches and her twenties in Brooklyn. She’s been sober for five years and is writing a recovery memoir called Everything is Gray — because black and white thinking never did her any favors. She writes at margaretcioffe.substack.com.