I had the “ganas”, the music, the wardrobe, the look, an instrument to get started (though not the right one just yet)…hours and hours of MTV, but something else was happening.
I was painfully shy as a kid. I still am, but I’ve learned to push through it, especially since it’s more or less a job requirement not to be. There are days when it’s still way too “people-y” out there for me and I’d rather stay in bed petting a cat.
However, one of the best changes to come out of my heavy metal transformation was the ability to talk to strangers and not sound like a stuttering moron. I didn’t literally have a stutter, but previous to that summer of 1985, the thought of speaking to someone I didn’t know terrified me. Sometimes speaking to people I actually knew terrified me. Some people probably think I still feel this way (and yeah, it pops up on occasion) and others probably think I never felt this way.
(Should we really care what people think? Do they even think about us anyway?)
I’ve always been able to go out on a stage and do “that” stuff. Being in a play, playing in the band and being the drum major, pretending to be a white Tina Turner, lip-syncing Duran Duran songs, blah, blah, blah, but that’s different for me. It may be in front of a large group of people, but there’s a huge invisible safety barrier between performer and audience. It keeps the masses at a distance. It was always the one-on-one I couldn’t stomach. Still can’t to an extent. For me, that’s too much exposure. You can hide vulnerabilities behind lights and costumes. You’re somebody else at that point.
Getting full-throttle into music, though, especially the kind that wasn’t very mainstream at the time, that helped me open up a bit. The more I learned and listened, the more I was able to relate to other people who were also fans. I can remember one particular day I was perusing the Walmart record section and there was this guy, never saw him before or again in my life, but he said something about some obscure metal band (can’t remember what), and I piped up with some comment because I knew who that band was, and some short conversation followed.
I would NEVER have done that prior to that day.
From that point forward, I had more confidence, felt less like a socially awkward nerd (even though that’s never gone away), but I felt more like I was part of something more…cool? Listen, it was NOT cool to be a nerd in the early 80s. And it was definitely not cool to be a nerd in Southwest Arkansas. It was even less cool to be a girl nerd. (Now, my new interest in being a rock chick bass player came with its own set of contingencies later on, but that’s for a future blog.) So, this was a welcome change for me. Maybe not so much for the parental units, but I felt a little bit more liberated.
Being sixteen is a challenge anyway, and those “demonic” musical choices didn’t help in some ways, because I was also starting to develop that “attitude.” I’d never been rebellious. I followed rules and went to church and made good grades and behaved at school and had never touched an illegal substance. I didn’t date, because, well…I think people thought I was some kind of freak. I didn’t even “drag main” or drive around the old Walmart parking lot or hang out at the Cone-N-Cue because I thought that was kinda lame. When I did, with my new ability to drive the car by myself, I was home long before curfew, listening to my new cassettes, watching videos, or writing or, after Christmas that year, practicing.
I was just different, I guess. And they say that to be “different” is to fight the hardest battle of your life every day of your life. I don’t remember how I heard that, or where that quote even came from, but it’s somewhat true. And with my new-found identity at that time, I had a lot to learn.
But that’s what more blog posts are for!
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