Revolutions

The harrowing process of puberty hit me in 2005, around the midpoint between my 10th and 11th birthday. I blame whatever weird hormones we feed kids these days, and that I probably continue to consume today, for its early onset, or perhaps I can deflect the blame to my parents and chalk it up to genetics — but whichever way, suddenly I found hair creeping up where it had never been before, dried blood on bargain brand, butterfly-clad underwear. Under oversized tee shirts, burgeoning breasts lumped together, hardly noticeable, but they would surely be big one day, I told myself with equal parts dread and wonder — after all, I had already donned my first bra, one of the first in my class, but certainly not the first to worry whether these new marks of my sex would throw my jump shot, bar me from swimming pools for twelve weeks out of the year, and shepherd me into the “girl’s section” of clothing stores where I’d exchange cargo shorts and sneakers for dresses and romances. I’d worry about entering middle school, about finding my locker and my classrooms, about making friends and who my future self would be, whether she’d look anything like the girl I saw reflected in the mirror.

Ten years later, it turns out that my chest would never be full enough to matter much and that I would leave behind that basketball of my own volition, sooner than I expected. I would realize that, much the same as I squirreled poetry under my mattress and concealed any tears to the quiet dark of my pillow, I hid from femininity all those years because I equated it to sensitivity and vulnerability, to love and expression, my paramount fears. I’m still afraid today. The great takeaway from my teenage years is learning to trace, to accept, to embrace, and eventually, to overcome that fear, but I didn’t reach that point alone. There are a variety of influences I could name and explore, but somewhere between all my petty and beautiful adolescent struggles, I found gaps in time to turn my brain off for a few hours with video games. Among my illustrious collection of the hallmarks of  the PlayStation 2-era were entries from the Tony Hawk skateboarding games; I practically salivated in anticipation over Tony Hawk’s Underground, a Tony Hawk game that boasted a literally game-changing innovation: the ability to leave your skateboard. I ran and climbed through the streets of various settings in that game, reacted with shock and thrill at the prospect of a Tony Hawk game with characters and a story (for I’ve always been, at heart, a reader and a critic, who specializes in the two). And in the midst of the grinds and kickflips and hijinks, I would hear a song.