The Outsiders

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Almost exactly a year which is wild. 2022 was an extremely rough year for me. I’m hoping 2023 will be better; I’m trying to put it into the universe that 2023 will definitely be better.

I wish I was more consistent with writing on this site but I’m still trying to find my voice and trying to decide exactly what it is I want to say. I’ve joined a 52 week writing course to help me with this. Of course, sometimes I’ll do three or four of the prompts in one day and then not do any for three weeks but it doesn’t matter because I’m writing.

In this week’s prompt, it spoke about possessions. Prized possessions from different points in my life. Then the very last part of the prompt asked for a short essay from the point of view of a special object. The first thing I thought of was my twenty-year-old copy of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I thought this was a pretty neat thing to do and it’s the first piece of writing I’ve done in a while that I wanted to share. Even if it’s only with the few people who subscribe to my site. Here it is. A (VERY) short essay from the point of you of my favorite book that I bought when I was 13.

Being picked from the bookstore is the best day of my life. Sure, it’s a short, kinda chubby, nerdy girl who grabs me and brings me home but that’s better than sitting on the shelf in the store forever. She picks me because her 8th grade English teacher said she had to, no offense taken, that’s how a lot of us books are picked. I hear from other people in the house that my new owner is named Veronica.

Veronica reads me so fast. She can’t put me down. Absorbing the plot, the characters, and enamored by the fact that the story begins and ends with the exact same sentence. She can’t believe it. She didn’t realize you could do that with writing. When she finishes with me, she puts me on a shelf then rents the movie version of me. Thus begins her obsession.

She watches the movie countless times, she reads me at least once a year, my pages getting weak and a little yellow but it’s worth it to see the look on her face. To bring her comfort on those nights when she comes home crying. Or where she stays home because she has nowhere else to go. Loneliness clings to her over the years. A sadness that always seems to ease when she picks me up or when she puts in our movie. A sadness that comes and goes in waves. This room where she keeps me is her my favorite place. The place she spends most of her time and I watch her as she brings her friend Kait over every Thursday to watch Supernatural. I watch as she puts up a black and white poster of the cast of The Outsiders. I watch as all the posters change over the years but not ours. Ours always stays right above the TV, right where she can see it from every angle of the room.

I’m there for her when she needs me the most. When it feels like she’s completely alone in the world, she picks me up and reads me again and again. We eventually moved from her favorite room to a place of her own. She puts me on the top shelf of the bookcase, the shelf where she keeps her favorite novels. She never loans me out to anyone, never wanting them to ruin me. Only her hands can hold me, only her fingers can flip my pages, only her eyes get to read my words a thousand times.

We moved from one apartment to another, and then to her first home. Every time she packs me with care, then I’m one of the first things she unpacks, and I’m always on the top shelf of the bookcase. She goes longer now without reading me, it hurts in a way, but honestly, I’m happy about it. It means she doesn’t need me as much. It means she has a fuller life now. She’s not sitting in the loneliness of her room with only me as her comfort.

It means, she’s no longer an outsider.

Writing Prompt #3: If you could go back in time exactly 10 years and give yourself some advice, what would you tell yourself?

                Exactly 10 years ago, I was 19, quickly approaching 20 which means I was a sophomore at Holy Family University. I’m trying to think about what my state of mind was like back then. I could probably pull out my old journals to cheat and see what was going on with me but I won’t. I remember thinking twenty was a dumb age to reach because you’re no longer a teenager but you’re not 21 so who cares?

                Knowing myself though, I can tell you I was still overweight at 19. Most definitely in the 190-200lb range, if not more. I was probably wearing old shirts from my brother and my Dad because shopping was a nightmare and I’d rather look man-ish instead of braving the mirrors of a dressing room.

                My friends ten years ago are almost identical to who they are now. My core group of friends which consists of mostly men and my best female friend. Then there were the people I saw occasionally but still cared about, also the same people as now. Not to mention, my school friends. By sophomore year, I was in the same classes with the same six to eight people and we all became close (only talk to a couple of them now).

                I did get rid of one completely toxic human being from my life. Almost exactly a year before, around Spring Break when I was 18, I had to cut this person out. I had known him since I was kid and he became my best friend the last few years of high school. In college, we had a huge blowout where he said awful, horrific things to me so I said we’re done. Once and for all. It was the first time I ever did this to someone and to this day, I believe it to be one of the best decisions of my life.

                Advice. I’m supposed to be giving advice to almost 20-year-old Veronica. Well, my first piece of advice would be to have a more fun in college. I think because I was so traumatized from high school being the worst four years of my life, I was expecting college to be more of the same. It wasn’t, thank god. Once I was in my core classes for my English major, I found my fellow nerds and it felt so much easier to relax around them. However, I was still tense from the pressure of having maintain my scholarship. My skin was at its absolute worst in college from stress acne.

                My second piece of advice would be to not care so much about what other people think. I spent a lot of time in college trying to be smarter, wittier, cooler than I actually am. I don’t know if it’s because I was around new people and wanted to be a new person or if I was massively insecure about who I was. No wait, I know exactly which one of those it was. I was massively insecure- 100%. When you’re insecure and self-conscious about who you are, you try to adapt to the people around you because they seem more confident. They’re not. Everyone’s insecure. It’ll help you a lot if you keep repeating that to yourself whenever you’re starting to sink.

                Here’s my last piece of advice and this isn’t actually coming from me. One of my oldest and best friends once said this to me when I was having an incredibly low day. Be kind to yourself. Now, this isn’t just for 19-year-old Veronica. This is something I still have to say to myself constantly.  My whole life I have held myself to this higher expectation. It’s not pressure my parents ever put on me or my teachers or anyone except myself. There are certain aspects of my life where I’m always telling myself: you can do better than that. I’m the queen of beating myself up. It’s why when someone does put me down or says something horrible to me, I internalize it so deeply because I’ve already said the same horrible thing to myself a thousand times. You don’t need to judge me when I judge myself harsher than anyone else ever could.

                Be kind to yourself. I get so angry, back then and now, whenever I can’t do something. Whenever I can’t figure something out. Whenever I see other people having an easier time doing something that I find difficult. I berate myself as if it’s the end of the world and it’s NOT. It is not the end of the world if you screw up. It’s so important to remember that. The world will not come to a crashing halt if you don’t do something the way you were supposed to or if you did something incorrectly, or if it’s taking you longer to do something than others. In the words of mother, “Relax. It’ll get done.”

                In conclusion, 19 almost 20-year-old Veronica, here is my advice:

                Be kind to yourself.

                Relax.

                It’ll get done.

Writing Prompt #2: Does religion play an important role in your life? Why or why not?

                Religion. I have such a love/hate relationship with religion. It played a very important role in my childhood and adolescence. I went through 8 years of Catholic grade school and 4 years of Catholic high school. I also did 4 years at a Catholic college but that’s because they gave me the most money for a scholarship.

                Catholicism at its core is ridiculous to me. You’re telling a bunch of CHILDREN to be good and they’ll go to heaven. But if they’re bad, they’ll go to hell. NO PRESSURE, KIDS! Get out of here with that crap. Catholicism is all about putting the fear of God into people. You want me to fear God but also to obey him in every way? No thanks, I’m good.

                Let’s separate God from religion and talk about whether or not I believe in God instead. It’s taken me years to decide what I do and do not believe, and the truth is, I’m still not entirely sure. I used to say I toed the line between Agnostic and Atheist. I dangled between believing in something and not believing in anything.

                I’d say it started after my Grandpop died. He was my favorite person and he died the summer before I turned 14. The summer before high school, the four years where I think I could’ve used him the most. My Grandpop was religious. I mean, he went to Church and he prayed and he believed in God. He truly believed which always astounds me when I meet someone who wholeheartedly believes in God. When he died, I was so damn angry. Angry the God he trusted and believed in so much would take him from his family.

                After his death, Church became useless to me and God was nothing more than a pain in my ass. Especially because my Mom believes in God. Even after her father died, even after her best friend died, even after her cousin who was like a sister to her died. She still believes. How? Why? In what?!

                In my late teens, my Mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. That’s when I basically threw my hands up in the air and said, ‘screw it’. There’s nothing and no one looking out for us. If there was, they wouldn’t do this to my mother. Not to mention the fact that the world is terrifying. The gun violence, the rapists, the murderers, etc. It makes it impossible for me to believe there’s a God watching over us.

                Now wait, I know some of you believers are probably getting sick of me talking about how much I don’t believe but stay with me here. As I’ve aged, my views on this have altered slightly. I’ll be thirty this year (I’m not handling it well) and if you met most of my friends, they’re all atheists and they would love to talk to you about it. They’ll tell you when you die, you die, that’s it. You cease to exist, you are nothing but a dead body in the ground. The end.

                Um… does that not freak anyone else out?! I can barely think about it for too long because it gives me insane anxiety. That’s it? When we die, we’re just gone? Life is over and it won’t have ever mattered whether you lived or died because now you’re gone. You cease to exist. But about souls? Do we have souls? If we do, do they move on somewhere else? Where is this place? Is it a nice place or it is a place Dante himself could only write about?

                I think about death way too much. I mean WAY too much. It crosses my mind at least once or twice a day. Not only my death but other people I know and their death. If I don’t believe in anything, then the assumption is when I die, there’s nothingness. I don’t know how you feel, but I do NOT like the sound of that.

                Here’s what I’ve come up with: I don’t believe in anything, but I desperately wish I did. I think I would be able to sleep better if I had something to believe in. But I can’t believe in the Christian God, I can’t. It’s too farfetched, it’s too out there for me.

                When someone asks me if I’m religious, I always say “I’m spiritual, not religious”. I do believe in spirits because I’m not naïve to think human beings and animals are the only things on this earth and in our vast cosmos. In times of crisis, when other people pray to their gods, I pray to my Grandpop. I believe no matter where he is, heaven, hell, or another spiritual plane, he can hear me no matter what. I have to believe in that, at the very least, to get through the day.

                I don’t know what to believe in. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to believe in anything having to do with gods or religions.

                All I know is, I struggle with my beliefs and my faith because I’m not sure I have either one anymore.