how i became brannon, part III

part III: artist in an ambulance 
"When I was a child my bones spread out like peacock feathers alive
Now the feathers wilt like cancerous boils leaving sagging pores in my hide…

 

I remember not wanting my picture taken. I felt huge and miserable.

 

I added this picture just to show how wide I was. How’d I fit through the door?

 

My dad and me at Christmas.

 

 

 

At my sister’s wedding.

 

Homecoming.

 

Another art show.

 

My worst yearbook photo. And THE worst one ever.

 

Junior prom.

 

This was about the time I really lost myself.  I knew I liked to draw and my peers were beginning to see my talent emerging past the pimples and pallor.  But no one e

lse was interested in drawing.  No one else was as big of a fan of television like I was.  No one liked to sit around and watch horror movies like I did.  People actually got out and socialized.  

I went to a party or two but I always felt like the fat wallflower.  I couldn’t talk, couldn’t interact because I was not smooth.  I tripped on my words or even worse, could not produce words to trip on.  I had an uncanny talent for going completely blank when put in a situation where I was supposed to use my head and mouth in tandem.  

I tried so hard to fit in.  I went from wanting to disappear to wanting to be popular.  And I think in many ways, I thought being popular would help me disappear.  If I could be a part of the in-crowd, I’d blend in  and would not be an outcast.  I wanted to be noticed in a way that was not substantial.  I worked hard at it.  When I was in high school, it was actually a good thing to be smart.  Nerds were cool because our town was small and poor and if you wanted to be successful, if you wanted to get out of this redneck cesspool, you had to be smart, had to make something of yourself, so you could go to college and get a degree and escape.  And so I made good grades.  I was on the advanced diploma.  I took AP classes.  I was book smart but socially stupid.  And eventually, I couldn’t even keep up with my classmates academically.

I was never good at math.  It was the only subject I struggled with consistently.  At my school, students took trigonometry in 11th grade and calculus in 12th.  The same teacher taught both classes and for a student to advance to calculus, he or she had to have expressed permission from the teacher to move on.  I remember all the students in trigonometry class handing her their permission slips and her signing them and when I brought mine to her, she looked at me square in the face and said, "No."  I felt so ashamed of myself.  I doubled up on pizza squares at lunch that day.

Then I met a girl in one of my art classes.  She was a grade ahead of me and most would consider her emo.  She dressed in black and listened to Mindless Self Indulgence and Marilyn Manson and she wore smokey eyes and spiked platinum blonde hair.  And as preppy as I tried to be, and as alternative as she was, we somehow came together.

She was really cool and I was so impressed with how she didn’t care what people thought about her, which was a concept that confounded me.  Our friendship advanced beyond class and I saw her outside of school several times.  She smoked cigarettes and told me about the band Otep and her poetry.  She introduced me to her friends, all goth and emo and all quirky and awesome.  When they got together, it was a mess of smoke and eyeliner and they made it seem cool to not fit in.  They felt genuine.  They felt real.  They were overweight and had dirty hair and didn’t make good grades and they didn’t give a shit.  They had more important things to worry about like their art and music and instead of feeling repulsed, I was impressed. 

They opened up my eyes and made me feel it was okay to be who I was instead of chasing an image of who I thought I should be.  The problem was I didn’t know who I was.  I had buried my true self long ago underneath layers of fat and shame.  I had constructed this ideal of what I thought I wanted, the thin and popular guy who was good with the girls and who could draw and was liked by everyone.  But that just wasn’t me.  I wasn’t good with the girls.  I was weird and often trapped in a fantasy world where superheroes still existed.  But the girl and her friends helped me break away from the mold I was constructing.  I didn’t like who I was past the portrayal of popularity but I began to understand it was more important to be myself, warts (and acne and stretch marks) and all.

I discovered other, more alternative, forms of music and started to dress differently.  I wore studded belts and Converse and band shirts.  I straightened my hair and died it plum and even tried guyliner once (or maybe twice).  I was still trying to figure out who I was.  I wasn’t popular.  I wasn’t even interested in it anymore because I realized how inconsequential popularity was.  It was small town Alabama and being on top of small town Alabama didn’t equal much.  Who did any of us think we were going to impress?  Being popular made things easier but I realized it wasn’t going to open any doors for me.  My art would do that and that’s what I wanted to focus on.  I was not that guy anymore, the one desperate to belong.  I did not belong and for the first time, I did not rail against it.  I owned it.  I needed people to know it, to see it.  I suppose I was still conforming, just conforming to nonconformity.  I felt like an outcast, a divergent, so I thought I should dress and act the part.

The loneliness escalated at an alarming rate.

I had friends but I had no girlfriend.  I had classmates but I had no best friend.  The relationships I had felt forced.  These were people thrust into my life based on age and location.  Born around the same time and in the same city?  Bam, here’s your kindergarten classmates who you will grow up with over the next decade or so.  Built in best friends.  Better learn to like these people ’cause they’re all you’ve got.

I prayed to God to send me a girlfriend.  All the while, I watched as everyone else around me got a girlfriend.  And talked to me about their girlfriends.  And the girls talked about their boyfriends and they all gushed and all I felt were gashes.  For the longest time, I wondered what was wrong with me.  It was because I was fat, wasn’t it?  Or maybe the acne?  It was probably my dismal personality.

I don’t want to say I was depressed because people throw that word around way too easily but I definitely suffered from some form of intense sadness.  I felt depressed.  I felt impossible.  I inadvertently pushed people away with my negativity.  There were no girlfriends and there were barely any friends at all.  I look back now and I’m not surprised people wandered off.  I made it tough to like me.

In 2001, I turned 16 and got my driver’s license and immediately went to work.  I was in the VICA program at my high school, which let me out of school early to go to my job.  VICA also got a job for me, which took some of the pressure off trying to find one.  I was paired with a florist in town and became her delivery driver.  And I screwed it up big time.  I got lost several times, swerved the delivery van into a ditch and even popped the rear view mirror off the vehicle when I tried to squeeze through a bank

drive thru and smashed into one of the columns.

The owner and other coworkers hated me as much as I hated the job so I quit and found work at a drugstore, which was actually enjoyable until I got fired six months in.  From there, I got a summer job at a clothing store and when I couldn’t find any other work, the job became more long-term.

Around this time, I met my first almost girlfriend.  She moved to my town and attended church with a classmate of mine.  The classmate set us up and she was really into me.  And I was into her.  We spent a week together and when I finally thought something good was going to come of it, the day I was going to ask her to be my girlfriend, she told me she had to move back to where she moved from.  As fast as she swooped in, she was thrust out and I was alone again.

It was so quick.  As soon as I finished a prayer to God thanking him for sending her to me, I was back on my knees with my hands clasped asking why he had to take her away.  What was the tease all about?  It almost felt as if God was not only absent but intentionally hurting me.  Had I not suffered enough physical damage?  Why did my heart have to be hampered as well?   

There were times when I did not want to face the world one more day.  I felt I had receded too far from society that I would never be able to rejoin.  And as much as I read my Bible and tried to attend church and pray and develop a relationship with Jesus, that wasn’t working out so well, either.  I thought as good as I had tried to be for him, the least he could do was put me out of my misery.  I prayed nightly for death, that I could just slip away in my sleep.  But, each day I woke up.  And my first thought was always, "Damn."

I wanted to die but not to the point where I was suicidal.  I hoped God would do the honors.  But since he didn’t, I didn’t let it go any further than that.  I just fantasized about how nice it would be if all this could end.  If high school would just get it over with and swallow me up like it always intended to do.  I couldn’t stand the small nibbles at my confidence, the teeth marks that marred my self-worth.

But the girl I grew up with, my babysitter’s granddaughter, the one who was more of a sister to me than my actual sister, also had depression.  She mentioned suicide casually once or twice and there was one night of panic in particular where I actually talked her out of killing herself.  I was ready to jump into my vehicle and go get her.  I tried to use the logic I applied to my friends when dealing with failed relationships.  Would it work on failed lives?  I hoped.  I asked her to think of all the people she’d hurt if she took her own life.  I asked her to consider my feelings, her oldest friend, her brother.  She wailed on the phone and said she did not care how it made anyone else feel and that she was going to do it.  And my heart raced and I felt such fear but after about two hours, managed to talk her out of it.  I don’t know how serious she actually was, if she ever really resolved to kill herself or not but it was real for me and I thought almost lost her that night.

I always wondered if that panic I felt helped me realize I did not want to kill myself.  I didn’t want to hurt my family the way I would have been hurt had she ended her life.

 

Senior portrait.

 

Senior picture.

 

Junior prom.

 

High school graduation with my sister.

 

I tried everything to clear up my skin but nothing worked until I took the prescription medication Accutane.  It finally fixed my face and brought along with it a huge dose of confidence.  But when I stepped out and finally faced the world outside my bedroom, I realized I had no social skills and all of my peers were light years ahead of me.  And I felt too behind to catch up.  That’s when I turned to writing. 

I

wrote to vent those feelings of inferiority because I didn’t have too many friends to turn to.  I was usually their therapist and when they got off the couch after venting, they didn’t think to turn around and ask me if I had any troubles I’d like to discuss.  I don’t blame any of them.  I always wanted help, wanted to be heard and understood but I also didn’t feel good enough to be heard or understood.  It was the vermin inside me, the pockmarked pariah that shut out all hope for a connection.  But despite holding myself back, I always hoped someone would pick up on my pain and ask about it.  No one ever did.  And it was no one’s fault.  They couldn’t read my mind.  So writing became my friend.  For me, writing became a healthier form of therapy besides eating.  And I actually got a catharsis out of it.  It was a new toy, a good feeling, a relief.  So I took that relief and ran with it.

This was about the time I started writing in Open Diary.  I had another blog I wrote in but that was one my friends knew about.  OD was more private.  Over the years, I had several other blogs but continued with OD because it was the only site that gave me feedback.  And it was positive feedback.  Writing felt good but I didn’t know I could actually be good at it, especially because I started out so late.  But the compliments propelled me forward and helped me to explore writing in different forms, from prose to poetry to a bit of fiction here and there.

One day I discovered a girl on OD.  I read her diary for several weeks before I drudged up enough courage to tell her I thought she was awesome.  She was a photographer and writer.  I thought her pictures and prose were wonderful and to my surprise, she not only responded but thought my words were pretty good as well.  It was one of the first times I had my writing praised and it meant more to me in this instance because I had a talented person tell me I was good.

We exchanged notes until we progressed to instant messaging and even sporadic phone conversations.  This girl was just great.  She was talented and interesting and a bit quirky and seemed like an outcast but not because she was lame but because she was full of ideas and opinions that did not mesh with the mainstream.  And I liked that.  I liked different.  I liked outcasts.  And I liked her.  To me, she was one of the first people who came closest to understanding me and what I was about and what I wanted out of life and what I wanted to give to the world, even if I didn’t quite understand it myself.  Neither one of us could articulate how we felt about ourselves or each other but we didn’t need to.  We just got it.  We became close over music and movies and poetry.  And for the first time in my life, I felt a real, deep connection to someone.

It was a wonderful feeling.

The more I liked her, the most confused I found myself.  Did I like her as a really good friend or was it more?  I hadn’t felt this way about a girl before and I didn’t know how to categorize her.  I had no prior experience in dating or girls or anything remotely involving the opposite sex in a romantic or physical way.  It didn’t help that she lived nearly 900 miles from me.  I just knew I liked talking to her.

I never entertained the notion of a long-distance relationship, mostly because I craved physical intimacy, especially since I hadn’t had it before.  I knew if I were to ever have a relationship with a girl, I wanted to be able to hold and kiss her.  Insecurity also played a big part.  If I wasn’t there to keep her distracted, she’d surely find someone better in no time.  So I settled on a really good friendship with a lot of innocent flirting thrown in.  I didn’t allow myself to go any further.  We talked daily and I was happy just to have that.   

I thought I was smart for my young age.  I thought I knew more about the world than my parents did.  I thought I knew more about people than my peers did.  I thought I knew more about God than my pastor did.  I saw things with an open mind and open eyes.  I analyzed everything and asked questions.  I wanted to know why things were the way they were.  I was inquisitive, curious, thirsty for knowledge.  I wanted to be smarter.  I wanted to be more mature.  I chased logic.  And writing helped me do that.  It was a tool I used to organize my thoughts and to help me explore myself and my surroundings in a more meaningful way.

That exploration helped me reach a point where I wasn’t so ready to die.  There was something inside me that I felt had too much potential to waste by withering away without first making a dent in the world.  I didn’t want my short miserable life to be meaningless.  I had to help a few million people first.

This was also the time my drawing started to decline.  As I became more secure in my ability to write, I became more insecure about my inability to draw.  My skills had been blown out of proportion thanks to a couple of people who thought I was the next Leonardo and told everyone about it.  My reputation proceeded me in the worst way and could not live up to such high standards.

In 2004 at age 18, I graduated from high school with art on my mind.  Despite my trepidation with my talent, I knew I wanted to study art because although I wasn’t as great as people made me out to be, I had potential.  I could be that good and art college would teach me how to tap into that potential and actually become that good.  I still had passion although I lacked confidence.  But I knew I’d get it.  It was meant to be.  Things were crappy but they were going to get better.  I just knew it.