megan collins

What’s that like

I have a friend. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those bridge-burning posts I love to accidentally write; I don’t even have anything bad to say about her, so just…don’t worry.

My friend is a lawyer in Chicago, married to a soon-to-be lawyer. They attended rival high schools and started dating in college in the town where we grew up. She’s one of three girl friends I’ve stayed close with since leaving Wisconsin, and I’d certainly bore you if I started listing everything that’s great about her.

We became friends freshman year of high school; Catholic school girls sticking together in the big bad public school system. It took me awhile to even really believe we were friends because she was just so…pretty. And well-adjusted. And normal. She had shiny hair, and a family that seemed to all like each other all of the time. She played sports and served on student council. She threw an epic party at her house once when her parents were out of town sophomore year. Even at fourteen, I remember thinking that she could never have the same worries that I did about where she’d end up, what kind of impact she’d make on the world, when she’d “show” everyone the evidence of all the potential she was told she possessed. And indeed, my friend went to a good school and became a lawyer and married a guy who grew up less than five miles away from her. Everything worked out.

Every so often, when I’m feeling particularly close to thirty while living alone in Brooklyn trying to “make it,” I think about my friend. Coming home to her apartment in Chicago. Talking with her now-husband about their respective days at the office. Making dinner. Catching up on “their” shows on the dvr.

And I idly wonder if maybe if i’d tried harder, I could have passed for normal too. If I could have found a boy in town to marry me and live close enough to drive home for holidays and long weekends. We’d have normal jobs with work-life balance and a group of friends we’ve known since before we could vote, and life would be…and that’s where I get stuck. Life would be great? Maybe, but I’d like to think the path I chose is the great one for me. Doing what I’m doing..even when i don’t know exactly what that is. Because as much as things worked out for my friend, I believe that life would have been the wrong one for me. Because I did have the option for such a life and ran kicking and screaming from it when I graduated college. And I have to just hope I made the right decision. Because I’ll be pissed if, at seventy years old, I think, goddamnit I really should have just married my college boyfriend and bought a house in Madison across town from my parents.

Whenever I read one of those “in-depth” celebrity interview, I skim until I hit the part where said-celebrity recounts how far outside of “normal” he or she felt growing up. The profiles I trust are of those who claim to have been an awkward, ugly duckling, whose height that now makes them a supermodel then made them the butt of jokes who boys who hadn’t yet hit puberty. Of weirdos who ended up designing life-changing computers and starting up companies doing things people had only ever dreamed would one day be taken care of for them.

That’s why when a celebrity owns up to being the pretty popular girl, it’s jarring. Refreshing, sure, to hear the beautiful actress admit to her past as a cheerleader homecoming queen, but also a little suspicious. If you were so comfortable, how were you motivated to break out? I wonder. To work so hard? Pretty, popular people are supposed to become lawyers in Chicago with well-adjusted, balanced lives. The outcasts and misfits are the ones with something to prove, the ones who break out (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse).

I certainly wasn’t normal, which should come as absolute zero surprise. And as early as I remember sensing that, I wrapped myself in its warm comfort, like a blanket knitted by a grandmother. I was different.

That feeling of dissonance is what spurred me to go out and, as they say, find my tribe. From thirteen years old, I set my sights on New York. That’s where I’ll be me, I told myself. That’s where I’ll make sense.

And even being here now, that same feeling pushes me today. I want to make good on feeling far from normal. I want to make the years of feeling ‘separate than’ and ‘destined for’ actually mean something. Hell, I want to say in a magazine one day, “I always felt different” and know some gangly kid in Wisconsin will read it and say, “Thank God, so it’s not just me.”