Dear Cadence, Part Seven: You’ll Look Back and Laugh

This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and Part Six

So Kyle Kelley didn’t work out, but I wasn’t too heartbroken, and part of that was because I already moved onto the next unattainable crush. And this one was scandalous.

But first, I want you to listen to a song called “Dear John” by Taylor Swift, an artist who is probably doing a nostalgic Vegas residency or farewell tour by the time you read this. To fully understand the situation, you need to put yourself in the shoes of a teenage me, crying on the swingset to this song sometime in 2010. Just like how Taylor had John Mayer (who’s probably dead by now), I had, well, let’s stick with John.

John was the anti-Kyle. He was this tall, dark, and handsome emo kid with long hair, skinny jeans, and a dangerous air about him, despite being a good little church boy on paper. He was one of the members of the worship team at the church I was going to. I remember every Sunday gazing up at him and his alpine white Les Paul hanging near his hips, his hands dancing over the fretboard like I could only dream of doing. I never paid him much mind until the worship team played a cover of “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey for an event. That guitar solo he played took me to another plane of existence. I had to have him.

Because he was technically a leader, it would have been frowned upon for him to pursue me, but that didn’t stop me from daydreaming about him constantly. I’d comb through his pictures on MySpace, where he was a bit of a minor celebrity, and look through all the comments from thirsty girls who wanted him as much as I did. But I was special — I played guitar too, and I loved Jesus too, and I knew I would understand him better than any one of those girls. I just needed to get his attention somehow, but at this point, I was still shy and awkward, despite having blossomed into a somewhat conventionally attractive young woman.

Then the crazy thing happened. He reached out to me!

I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I’m pretty sure he started a conversation with me on MySpace, then asked for my number. I was floored. John had finally noticed me, despite me having barely spoken to him in person (I think I asked him about his pedalboard once). We talked all night about everything — soup, favorite bands, his extensive hair care routine. And to my surprise, he continued to talk to me the next night, and the night after that. I was absolutely floored. Did he feel the same way for me that I felt for him?

Still, he never went as far as to ask me out or even talk to me in person. After this tango continued for several weeks with no moves being made, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I confessed my feelings toward him.

“I do like you a lot—“ he wrote back. “—as a friend.”

I was crushed. John meant everything to me. I’d gotten used to doodling my first name with his last name and imagining what our future children would look like. We were meant to be. I knew it. But I’d been — dare I say — friend-zoned by the love of my life. I realize I sound like an entirely unsympathetic “nice girl” at this point in the story, and John could have easily gotten away with looking like the good guy in this story, had he not done what he did next.

“Let’s play 20 questions,” he texted me one night, sometime around 2 a.m. “You go first.”

I was miraculously awake, despite having to get up in a few hours for school. “Favorite guitarist?”

“Jimmy Page.” Then came the message that changed everything. “Are you a virgin?”

A flutter of hope overtook me. Was he interested after all? “Yes,” I wrote back. “What do you look for in a girl.”

“A good heart and nice tits,” he responded.

It went back and forth like this for a while, getting increasingly steamy. I’m not going to gross you out with the details, but things got spicy, fast. Before I knew it, I had dropped any pretense of innocence and confessed all my filthiest desires to this guy, who had similarly dropped his facade of “respectable church leader.”

This went on for weeks. Every night, I’d fake going to bed and wait for the text from John. And every Sunday, I’d see him on stage, and he’d act as if he hadn’t told me how badly he wanted to touch my boobs the night before. When I did go to talk to him, he’d cut it short and go off to talk to someone else, almost like he didn’t want to be seen with me. It hurt so bad. I felt so close to him every night when he’d text me, yet he felt so far away in person.

Then my mom found out.

I remember her sitting me down to talk about it. She wasn’t mad at me, but at him for taking advantage of me.

“He doesn’t love you,” she told me. “He only wants your body.”

And it hit me like a truckload of hams. Of course he didn’t want to date me or even be seen with me. Socially I was below him — but he wasn’t above telling me all the nasty things he wanted to do to me. To me, he was my dream, my emo John Mayer in skinny jeans, everything I ever wanted. To him, I was little more than a piece of meat he could use when he was awake and horny in the middle of the night.

I left the church when I went off to college, but it wouldn’t be the last I heard of him. We eventually reconnected and had a short-lived fling, and I’d go on to marry someone else, but that never stopped him from continuing to pursue me. And the funniest thing happened. He fell in love with me! He’d tell me how he regretted what happened, how he wished he would have put a ring on it when he had the chance. By that time, though, I’d already long moved on.

As of writing, Taylor Swift just released a re-recorded version of “Dear John,” and it hits differently knowing how it ends. I wish I could go back and tell that heartsick teenager that she’d look back and laugh at the whole situation. Someday, John would realize what he missed out on. Sometimes I visit the Downriver area and drive past the places where I used to cry about him, like that old swingset. He could have had me. But now, I’m shining like fireworks over his sad empty town.

Dear Cadence, Part Six: Your Middle School Crush is Just a Guy

This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five

My first crush was Peter Frampton.

Peter Frampton was a British musician from the 70s, when you’re grandmother was young and hip. She’s the one who passed along her humble vinyl collection to me, including a Peter Frampton record called “I’m In You.”

Now this album cover awakened something in me. Was it the fluffy blonde hair? Was it the tight purple pants? Was it the seductive pose? Was it the hilariously overtly sexual title? Maybe it was a combination of these things, plus my own burgeoning sexuality at the age of 12, that led me to feel weird tinglies I’m sure you don’t want to imagine your mother having. All I knew is I wanted to die and be reincarnated as this man’s talk box. Like, I’d never been so jealous of a plastic tube.

But shortly after Peter Frampton came Kyle Kelley. Kyle Kelley was not a British musician from the 70s, but a guy who was actually my age and lived in Michigan and was, you know, actually attainable. But he didn’t feel attainable to me at the time, because he was gorgeous and popular and I was still a tiny weirdo. He had floppy auburn hair with bangs that fell just above his sea-glass eyes. He was short, maybe an inch taller then me, but I could care less. To me, he was the most handsome specimen I’d ever laid eyes on.

We met at church youth group, something I’d been talked into while attending a wedding for one of my aunt’s family members. The youth pastor and his wife were in attendance, and with me being 13-ish and lonely, they figured inviting me to one of their events was the perfect antidote. And it was there that I’d find Jesus — and Kyle Kelley.

I was a little hesitant about the church thing at first, mostly because I wasn’t sure if there was anything supernatural out there at that point. But Kyle Kelley — he was supernatural, this otherworldly beautiful being to me. He looked like a literal angel. Not the terrifying Biblical five-billion-eyes-having angel, thankfully, but part of me was convinced that I’d still be madly in love with him even if he did have five billion eyes. He could be a disembodied foot for all I cared. I just wanted him — bad.

But alas, he was already spoken for. His girlfriend, Cati, was everything I wasn’t. She was a cheerleader (of course), tan and curvy, outgoing and likeable, and generally the antithesis of teenage me. I remember them joking about getting married someday, because doesn’t everyone marry their middle school sweetheart?

I had to do something to win him over, to make him notice me. Like, I did do a pretty mean performance at the youth group air guitar contest to Relient K’s “Sadie Hawkins Dance,” one of Kyle’s favorite songs, which got him to talk to me to congratulate me. It also won me a four-pack of Monster, which everyone joked I did not need after that. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.

We went on a couple of trips to the quintessential Midwest amusement parks, Cedar Point and it’s little sister, King’s Island. On the King’s Island trip, his parents were chaperoning, funnily enough, and Chelsea and I got to ride down with them. Kyle was too cool to hang out with his parents and us plebs, so he rode with the cool kids in the cool kid van.

When we finally got there, though, Chelsea and I found ourselves sucked into the cool kids group, somehow, as we all went to ride the biggest roller coaster in the park. Nothing of interest happened here, except that Cati insisted we pray before getting on the ride, and crazily enough, the ride malfunctioned the very next day and I think people died or something. I’d like to think Cati’s prayers spared us.

Cati was turning out to be a literal saint, somehow, which was not the plot twist I was expecting from the pretty, popular cheerleader. When we went to bed that night, she noticed I didn’t have a place to sleep, so she went out of her way to build me a comfy little nest out of couch cushions and blankets. And she made it a point to talk to me, the loser, whenever she saw me by myself (which was a lot). Suddenly, I felt a little guilty for daydreaming about ways to steal her man. She was so…good.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to steal her man, because they ended up breaking it off in eighth grade. I think Chelsea was the one who told me excitedly as soon as she got the news Kyle Kelley was back on the market. And I finally got my chance to show him how badass I was on our youth group trip to Cedar Point.

I don’t know exactly how it happened. He and his friends split, and I got separated from my friends, and somehow we ended up in line for the Millenium Force together. That warm late September night, we stood in the crowded line, so close our hands brushed several times, and he regaled me with stories of hockey and…well, whatever else he was into. This was middle school — not exactly a deep relationship, you know? He was Into sports, though, so I let him yammer on about that, hanging on his every word because he was Kyle Kelley and I was madly in love. When we finally got to the front of the line, he chose the front row seats. I mustered up all the courage in my body to sit down next to him in the front row. We tightened our seatbelts, the car began to move, and he leaned over and whispered to me.

“Keep your hands up.”

And I did. And in that moment, I’d never felt more alive. I was there, with who I believed to be the love of my life, racing through the night sky at breakneck speeds, hands in the air. When we finally landed back on solid ground, we traversed the park to meet up with the others, running through the arcade and laughing the whole time. It was like a movie, and if it had ended at that very moment, that would have been the “good” ending.

Unfortunately, happy endings are just stories that haven’t ended yet. (Isn’t that a Mayday Parade song?)

We didn’t get together immediately after that. It took a few more years of playful flirting and banter for him to finally ask me to be his girlfriend. And when he finally did, I guess it was a little more anticlimactic than I was expecting. Sure, we went through the motions of high school sweethearts, him picking me up for movie dates in his white Grand Prix and all that, but there something was missing. And we never kissed, not until one night at the end of youth group. It was our first kiss, and I had a gut feeling that it was also our last. His lips were like sandpaper. There were no sparks. We had nothing in common. Why was I even dating this guy?

I thought back to the countless nights I cried over at Chelsea’s because I was so scared I’d never end up with him. I remembered all the times I’d fantasized about that moment, our first kiss, and how badly my entire body ached to be close to him. And somehow, now that I had everything I wanted, I could see how shallow this puppy love really was. We were the gender-flipped Avril Lavigne “Sk8r Boi” couple, me the musically-inclined emo kid and him, well…his favorite back was Nickelback. I’d built my entire life around a dude whose favorite band was Nickelback.

My relationship with Kyle Kelley fizzled out with little fanfare, and to be honest, I wasn’t even hurt. Sometimes you need to get what you want to realize you never really wanted it. Sometimes, you just wanted the idea of it. I held onto this idealized version of him for so long, I couldn’t see what he really was — just some guy. And not even a guy I really connected with. In the end, he was just a guy.

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Dear Cadence, Part Five: Find Your Passion

This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four

From the moment I emerged from the womb, I was obsessed with music.

Well, maybe not from that exact moment. I was probably preoccupied with, you know, learning how to breathe air and stuff.

But music was my first love and first language. I remember humming little songs to myself as I spun around, my first dabblings in songwriting. I didn’t know how to write those songs down, as I was a literal toddler, but I loved making up little melodies and singing them to myself. My parents even got me a tiny Walkman with a “record” option and had me singing into it from time to time. I wish I knew whatever happened to those old cassettes. If I ever hit it big, those tapes would be worth millions.

Some of my favorite memories involved singing and dancing around pretending I was Dodger, a cool dog voiced by Billy Joel from an old Disney film called Oliver and Company. (If, by happenstance, you end up with a brother, his name will likely be Oliver. He is not named after this film. Let this be clear. Your brother was not named after a movie with a cool dog voiced by Billy Joel. I just liked the name, okay?) Sometimes my mom would work out and play stuff like Foo Fighters and the Backstreet Boys, which is probably considered oldies by the time you read this. While she would do this, I’d stand in the mirror and lip-synch to the songs, make-believing I was some kind of rock star.

The point being, music and performing have always been an integral part of my identity. Noting this, “Santa” gifted me my first guitar for my eighth Christmas. A year or two later, my parents signed me up for one-on-one guitar lessons with a young punk named Eric, who my mom thought was hot. I’d been kicked out of swimming, gymnastics, dance, and pretty much everything else due to my then-very-undiagnosed ADHD, but I couldn’t get kicked out of guitar lessons. And I didn’t want to be kicked out either! I took to the instrument like a seal to water, and while I didn’t practice as much as I should’ve (read: undiagnosed ADHD), I was a natural. The language and theory of music just made sense to me.

But there was more to my love of music than just the music itself. I loved the idea of sharing it with people. I would watch Behind the Music documentaries for hours on end all about the inner workings of bands I liked. Maybe it’s because I had trouble making friends and was hilariously unpopular as a kid, but I idolized the idea of having a musical found family. I craved the intimacy of working closely with other people who had the same goals and interests as me.

Still, music was very much my personal thing, until one fateful day when I realized I needed to perform, to share my music with people outside my inner circle. It was the first time I ever sang in front of an audience.

In seventh grade, we took an end-of-the-year field trip to the Motown Museum in Detroit. My days at that school were numbered — I’d convinced my parents to let me switch to a semi-private school to escape the constant bullying. Still, I had to get through this stupid trip, which actually was a welcome reprieve from my usual day of sitting in the library like a loser and actively trying to avoid contact with my peers.

The museum, nicknamed Hitsville, USA, was actually more like a small house than whatever you’re picturing, and it’s been said some of the greatest songs of all time had been recorded there. I don’t remember much about the field trip itself, except that in the recording studio, there was a giant hole in the ceiling. This was a reverb chamber, where recordings would be played into and recorded back in order to get a crisp echo effect. The tour guide wanted a student to demonstrate how it worked by singing beneath it. No one’s hands went up. A shiver ran down my spine.

I will never see these people again.

Meekly, I raised my hand and all eyes were on me, the class weirdo who never talked. I took my place underneath the reverb chamber and sang the chorus of my favorite Motown song, “My Girl” by the Temptations.

The silence that followed was deafening as dozens of wide eyes zoned in on me. Suddenly, the room erupted into applause. As I took my place back in the group, I was greeted with a flurry of “Woah, that was incredible!” Even my biggest bully asked me not to forget her when I won American Idol. For my last few days at that school, I was no longer the class pariah, but the class Mariah.

Things changed quickly once I discovered my niche in life. I started playing guitar and singing for literally anything I could weasel my way into. At my new school, I became “the voice” of the student population, singing the national anthem for every event and accompanying the jazz band with its vocal pieces. I even got to play (an obviously much whiter) Beyoncé in a choral performance of “Single Ladies,” leotard and all. I became a significantly more confident person with every performance under my belt.

Cadence, I don’t know what your calling will be. Considering who’s likely going into making you, you’ll probably be musically gifted as well. And incredibly smart. And beautiful. And probably have IBS, but you win some and you lose some. No matter what, I know your passion will find you one way or another. And once you find it, chase it with everything you’ve got.

Dear Cadence, Part Four: Never Take Friendship For Granted

This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

These stories are going to jump around a lot. I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. Probably.

I mentioned in the last chapter that I wasn’t exactly popular in grade school. I could count all the friends I had on one finger, and she didn’t even go to my school. That changed when I met Chelsea, though.

I don’t even remember how I met Chelsea. I’m pretty sure she was the cousin of one of the few girls in my grade who didn’t run away out of fear of catching the Unpopular when I approached them. Her name was Natalie, I think. It doesn’t matter. Anyways, I’m pretty sure Natalie and I got called lesbians by the other girls in our class, which is hilarious in hindsight, but I was one hundred percent not attracted to her. In fact, my big gay crush at that time in my life was my classmate Shelby Cox, who had the same dark hair with bangs and cute perky lips as Ann Wilson from Heat. It would be another fifteen years or so before I’d ever admit it was a big gay crush, though.

But I digress. I don’t recall our first interaction, but I’m pretty sure Chelsea stood up for me when another kid was committing an unspeakable act like calling me a lesbian (which is totally not true, obviously). And she was so. Freakin. Cool. She was younger than me by a year but already quite taller than me, and incredibly svelte, like a dancer. She had a splash of freckles across her pale face and dark hair cut into a stereotypical emo style. If you don’t know what that looks like, Cadence, just look at any pictures of me between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Chelsea was the one to inspire me to get that haircut, actually. This girl was unnaturally beautiful, like a punk-rock Snow White. And even better, she liked me! Not in a gay way, although in retrospect some of my burgeoning sapphic feelings were definitely directed toward her. Girls that don’t have baby queer fee-fees toward their middle school best friend don’t scream “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. with them in the car on the way to Thursday night youth group. But for the most part, she was just this ridiculously cool girl who took a bizarre interest in being friends with the most unpopular girl in school.

I could list a bazillion memories with her, but I don’t think I could do any of them justice with words alone. We were inseparable. We were — dare I say — BFFs (best friends forever, if that term is antiquated by the time you read this). We had the quintessential teenage girl friendship. We went to the mall together. We went to the beach together (and freaked out because we thought we saw a jellyfish — in Michigan, mind you). We played in the mud on New Years Eve like absolute hooligans, and trick or treated like we weren’t too old. I remember we’d go to the aforementioned youth group and giggle together about the boys we liked there. One time, she tried to give me “cool” lessons.

“You don’t say ‘hi’ to a guy,” she said. “You have to do it all suave, like ‘heeeey.’” She immediately went up and demonstrated on her crush, this older hipster kid named Robert I think.

He never dated her, but she liked to think he liked her back.

Despite being younger than me, she was almost a big sister figure, the less-naive of the two of us. Another time, we were alone in her dad’s apartment watching Degrassi on her TV or music videos on a Stone Age version of YouTube or whatever it was we were into at the time. That’s when she discovered I’d never been kissed.

“Don’t you want to know how to impress Kyle Kelley when you finally get to make out with him?” she asked.

“It’s not like you’ve ever been kissed either,” I said.

“Watch this.” She grabbed a can of Coca Cola and placed her lips to the rim. “You just do it like this. Like, pretend the can is Kyle’s lips.” After her not-so-subtle demonstration, she handed me the can, which I clumsily fake-made out with.

“Oh Jessie, you’ll get there eventually,” she sighed.

Some of my favorite moments with her include the many times we dressed up like Bon Jovi and danced around the living room. She was always Richie Sambora because she had the darker hair, and I was Jon Bon Jovi. In reality though, she was the Jon of the friendship, the charismatic frontman, the natural leader, and I was her Richie, her trusty guitar-slinging sidekick.

The summer of my eighth grade year, we traveled up north with my parents and a mutual friend. If my memory serves me correctly, it was a pretty good trip. We stayed in a condo my brother’s family owned — I think it eventually got flooded and torn down, but it was beautiful at the time. We were right off the lake, just down the road from downtown Traverse City, and I savored every minute I got to spend with my dear friends. And I’m glad I did, because it all came crashing down when I got home and noticed the sunscreen we’d bought was missing. I sent Chelsea a simple message asking if she’d accidentally taken it home.

Her response knocked me backward.

“Why would you accuse me of stealing it, you lying (insert catty teen girl insult here)?”

My worst fears were realized. She’d fallen into the wrong crowd and was suddenly “too cool” for me. By this time, I’d switched schools, but it still hurt to lose her for such a petty reason. I’d go on to make a myriad more friends, believe it or not, and became quite the social butterfly over the course of several years. Still, I always held a tiny bit of a grudge against my childhood best friend for leaving me the way she did.

I wish this chapter had a happy ending. She reached out to me in adulthood after turning her life around, joining the military, marrying, and having a kid of her own. She was beyond apologetic for abandoning our friendship, but we never became as close as we were back in those halcyon days of youth. By that time, I’d moved on too, going off to college and touring with a band and eventually getting married myself. I never bothered to rekindle a meaningful relationship again, because I had my own life now.

And I’m kicking myself for it.

On the warmest Christmas morning, I got a message from a mutual friend that shook me to my core.

“Jessie, I’m so sorry about Chelsea.”

Turns out, she’d developed a rare cancer that eventually took her life. She was 27.

I wish I had a chance to get to know her as an adult. She’d grown up so much from the girl I knew and, by every account, was an amazing mother. She was an aspiring writer. She made art. She wanted to go into ministry. She absolutely deserved the sweetest, longest life. She deserved to watch her son grow up. And she deserved better from me. I wish I could have told her how much she meant to me before it was too late.

Cadence, you will have a revolving door of people coming in and out of your life every second you’re on this planet. Relationships don’t last forever, but love does. So while those people who mean the most to you are still around, shower them with all the love you have to give. Love so hard it hurts. Because someday, they’ll leave, or you’ll leave, or you’ll simply grow apart, or, like me and Chelsea, the grim reality of death will separate you until the next life, whatever that happens to be. You’ll regret a lot of things, but you’ll never regret love.

As the Red Hot Chili Peppers said in their song “Dosed,” show love with no remorse.

Dear Cadence, Part Three: Embrace What Makes You Weird

This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One and Part Two

My earliest memory was waking up from a nap on top of a stack of rugs inside a sketchy flea market. But my second earliest memory was watching Wheel of Fortune.

I didn’t know what it was – the colors, perhaps. That’s the only reason I can think of why a toddler would enjoy a words-based game show. I got a little older, and I found myself scared of cartoons because they were so loud and bright compared to my beloved Wheel of Fortune. And CNN. My dad always had our boxy TV on CNN, and it became such a thing to me, I’d freak out if anything else was on. And I needed the History Channel on my bedroom TV to sleep. I wouldn’t accept anything else.

I was really sensitive to noises. If my mom was vacuuming, I’d hide behind the recliner and cower for my life. There were some sounds I liked a lot, like the sound of the bath filling. I’d curl up in the corner of the bathroom and just listen to the sound of the water until my mom would inevitably pick me up and put me in the tub. Sometimes, I’d make little sounds just because it felt right, usually bird noises. And music. I always say music was my first language. Growing up, I didn’t talk a lot to people who were my age. I could and would give my entire life story to the cashier at Kmart, but I had a hard time socializing with peers. But I loved singing for absolutely anyone who would listen. My classmates would even throw coins at me for singing songs at recess.

What I didn’t realize, though, was that they were making fun of me.

I was 17 or 18 before my mom said the “a” word to me. As in autism. It’s a scary-sounding word to a lot of parents, and when I was a child, there was an even steeper stigma attached to it. No mom wanted their kid to get diagnosed with autism. So she never got me diagnosed, not even when my childhood psychologist had mentioned it. And my teachers didn’t bother to check up on me either. So little Jessie spins around in the back of the classroom during lectures, obsesses over 8-track tapes, and has no friends? Well, she gets good grades and doesn’t start problems, so we’ll just pretend there’s nothing weird about this child.

But I knew there was something wrong with me. There had to be. I had an encyclopedic knowledge of vintage music, but I couldn’t make eye contact or even speak a coherent sentence to someone my own age without feeling wildly uncomfy. And my ever-present weirdness made me an easy target for the innocent cruelty of schoolchildren. I remember how sensitive I was to the smell of ranch dressing. As soon as the other kids found out the stench alone made me gag, I had to start eating lunch in the library, lest I be pelted with ranch dressing packets.

Two memories stick out in particular. One was of my “frenemy” Carissa and her crony, another Jessica, framing me for hitting Other Jessica, simply because they didn’t like me. Because I didn’t “fit in.”Jessica had made a red mark on her face and claimed I’d hit her, and Carissa corroborated her story. It was my word against both of theirs, so I ended up getting sent to the principal’s office over it. I lost my trip to McDonald’s over that, actually.

Another time, I got punched in the stomach by some guy. Ouch.

My point is, if you’re anything like me — and I’m guessing you’re a lot more like me than you’d like to admit — you’re gonna be weird, and that’s going to make you a target for unsavory people. They’ll hurt you because they think it’s funny. They’ll take advantage of you because they know they can get away with it. And a younger, less-wisened version of myself would have said your best course of action would be to change yourself, to fit in.

Because that’s exactly what I did.

I meticulously studied what the “cool girls” were doing and started copying their mannerisms and adopting their interests. I learned to shut my big dumb face when I wanted to obsess over Bon Jovi or Pokémon. I ditched my 70s rocker style for a more conventional preppy look, and my beloved red lipstick got thrown in the trash. I stopped talking about my special interests and “smart kid things” and put on a bimbo facade because it made people tease me less. Everything that made me unique got watered down to something more palatable.

I broke my own bones to fit in someone else’s box.

Sure, I made friends, but inside I was miserable. It took so much out of me to hide parts of myself. And I knew deep down I still didn’t fit in entirely. I was last to be picked in literally everything. I remember going to on a trip to Chicago with the marching band and my “friend” group chose to room together without me. I did manage to get voted senior class president — because no one else ran.

My saving grace was that around the time I became an adult, the “manic pixie dream girl” stereotype became the hottest thing, and suddenly everything that made me eccentric and weird made me desirable. In college, I started dropping the act and grew into what I was all along — a confidently autistic woman, quirks and all. And it won me way more genuine friends, people who have stuck around in the long run, who would never ditch me or pick me last. My college years were filled with so many experiences of legitimate joy, the kind that only comes when you’re living as your authentic self.

So if your thing is trains, be the biggest freaking ferroequinologist out there. If you like dressing like a pirate in everyday life, tighten up that corset and straighten that eyepatch. If you love music like I do, sing and dance your heart out and don’t give a damn who throws coins at you and laughs. History forgets normal people like them, but weird people like us live on forever. Being yourself is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do, but it’s worth it.

Dear Cadence, Part Two: The Furnace Man Can’t Hurt You

I promise this will make sense. But first, we need some exposition.

I was born in the middle of a snowstorm on March 5th, 1993. Two other very important people were born on March 5th as well — John Frusciante, the greatest guitarist ever, and your grandmother, my mom. I was indeed a birthday present. In the immortal words of Kanye West, who may or may not still be a Nazi sympathizer by the time you read this (hopefully not), my presence is a present, kiss my ass.

This was planned, kind of. You see, I had the cord wrapped around my neck in utero. I was a suicidal fetus. Instead of letting me abort myself, the doctors decided to cut me out. My mom planned the surgery for her birthday, since my original due date was about a week afterwards anyways. There are a lot of other unusual circumstances behind my birth and how exactly I came to exist, which I will get into later on. (Don’t worry, I’m not gonna explain the birds and the bees in the context of your grandmother, uh… making me.)

Our family moved frequently when I was very young, or as your grandmother would say, we were a bunch of gypsies, which is a word that American baby boomers could get away with saying but is actually pretty offensive to actual Romani people. To be clear, we are not actually Romani, or anything exciting for that matter. I’m literally 95 percent British, which means you are approximately half-British. But most of our immediate ancestors came from Kentucky.

Your great-grandparents all moved up to Michigan to take part in the industrial boom that was happening in the 1950s, as did many other Kentuckians, settling in the working class southern suburbs of Detroit. This region, called the Downriver area, is not to be confused with the affluent WASP-y northern suburbs where your other mom came from. No, Downriver was hillbilly heaven. Trailer parks as far as the eye can see, confederate flags, NASCAR merch, the works. And our family, we settled as far into the country as you could get and still be considered a suburb of Detroit.

Your grandfather was a steelworker, and your grandmother was a homemaker, much like her mother before her, and her mother before that. The women in our family traditionally had very little contact with the outside world. This was less because of the misogynistic worldview that was prevalent in their formative years and more because of their crippling anxiety. As in, your grandmother was too scared to drive most of the time, and your great-grandmother didn’t drive at all after crashing her car into a bank or something during her first attempt behind the wheel.

Me, I was fearless. Or so I liked to think.

The reality was I was scared of absolutely everything. One of my earliest memories was at my grandma’s house for Christmas Eve, a tradition that persisted until her death. I still remember my brother and cousin pulling all kinds of shenanigans, like hiding jewelry inside a box inside a bigger box inside an even bigger box (and so on), then giving it to my grandma as a good-natured prank. I remember my uncle Arnie bringing weird smelly cheese and shrimp cocktails every year. The men in my family would have a few beers and play poker — that was the only time my dad ever drank around me, in fact. And then there was Furnace Man.

Furnace Man lived in my grandma’s furnace. He wore a plaid shirt and had no head, and every time the furnace made a sound, I imagined him kicking around in there, lying in wait, ready to like, eat me or something. Sometimes I would get close to the furnace, as if to test my theory that he was lurking, then got scared and ran away, terrified.

Obviously, Furnace Man was not real. In fact, my “vision” of him came from my dad going into the utility room to try on a flannel he received one Christmas Eve and getting his head stuck in the head-hole. I was too little to know what was going on, so my brain pieced together “headless man from the utility room,” and decided he came from the creepy blue-gray furnace that always creaked and croaked menacingly when I walked past it.

Looking back, this was when my OCD first manifested, and it took on a lot of forms throughout my life. As I got a little older, I was scared of my precious irreplaceable adult teeth falling out, so I’d wiggle them a little every day to make sure they weren’t loose. In kindergarten, we had a fire drill, and that sparked a fear that our house would catch on fire and I’d lose all of my stuff. A watched pot doesn’t boil, or something like that, so I thought if I never left the house, nothing would catch on fire.

Keep in mind this was how my brain worked in kindergarten.

It evolved into even scarier things as I got into my teenage years, like a fear of death or of hurting people I love. I was even afraid to have you for years because I was scared I’d lose my sanity somehow and hurt you. I wish I could say some inspirational “oh, I just prayed and God miraculously cured me” spiel, but the truth is, my saving grace was getting the help I needed from psychiatrists and therapists. Although, to give credit where credit is due, perhaps God put those people in my life to save me from myself and my crippling anxiety. There’s a lot of things I don’t know about this universe and how it works, and while that’s another source of anxiety for me at times, in a way, it’s almost reassuring that I’ll never have all the answers.

I don’t know why He chose to pass along the generational curse of anxiety and mental illness to me, but I’d like to think it was to better prepare me for taking care of whatever mental health needs arise for you. I pray you never have to deal with the severe mental health issues that have plagued our family for so many years, but if you do, just know that I’m on your side. I’ve been to hell and back again — I could get there with my eyes closed. But now I know the way back home, and if I ever find you there, I’m ready to fight alongside you.

No matter how real he seems, the Furnace Man can’t hurt you.

Dear Cadence, Part One

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll hopefully turn into a book someday. It’s a story that’s particularly close to my heart, because it’s my story. I wanted to write down all my experiences and advice for my theoretical future daughter, so that she can read it someday when she’s not theoretical. I don’t know how regularly I’ll post from this series, mostly because I want to put my heart and soul into it to make sure it’s JUST RIGHT, but I wanted to share my progress on this project for you all to read and enjoy as well. If any part of my story resonates with you, feel free to leave a comment. I hope you love this project as much as I do.

Dear Cadence,

If you’re reading this, I’m dead.

Kidding! Well, maybe not. It depends on if I die before you get this little book of wisdom. When will I give it to you? Who knows! Maybe when you go to college. Maybe when the red peony blooms, if you know what I mean. Maybe I’ll read it to you on my deathbed. Maybe I’ll even publish it as a memoir-type thing, and we’ll both be famous someday, me as an author, and you as the recipient of my 30-ish years of knowledge.

As of writing this, you are not alive yet. You’re just a lil egg floating around in my ovary, probably. That, or you’re adopted. I’ll probably break that news to you before I give you this book, though. Or—more disappointingly, I die before I can birth/adopt you, in which case, I give full permission to my surviving family to publish whatever is written here. Seriously, it’s okay! The saddest stories are the ones that get irretrievably forgotten, and the least I can do is immortalize my crazy life in writing.

I’m not a celebrity or anyone of note, at least not yet. By the time you read this, I could be the frontwoman of a celebrated, beloved rock band, or an esteemed professor of music therapy, or a Folgers jar of ashes on your mantle (and I swear to God you better put me in a more respectable urn than that or I will haunt you). But I’m your mom (or maybe dad—your other mom and I didn’t want you to get us confused). I don’t even know you yet, but as my firstborn/possibly only daughter, you mean the absolute world to me. This little collection of anecdotes is more than just a bunch of autobiographical stories I want to preserve and share with you and the generations to come. It’s a book of hard-earned advice I’ve gained from three decades on this giant rock we call home.

So, with that in mind, here’s the life story of yours truly, the greatest woman to ever walk this planet (well, at least until you arrive!).