Published in The Siskiyou, October 17, 2005, as "The Illusion of Facades"

When I was in junior high I wanted to become an actress, just so the popular girls would regret having made fun of me. We all know the divisions of adolescent life... the jocks, the nerds, the stoners... Countless movies have been made about kids trying to break through these barriers, trying to find their own identity within such an impenetrable system.

Once we enter college these divisions begin to melt away. We room with complete strangers who may hail from an opposing social circle. We can read alone in the cafeteria without being branded a complete loser. Best of all, we are given the opportunity to create a new identity and shed whatever baggage came before.

But how successful are we in moving beyond high school reality?

My 15 year old sister is one of the most confident people I have ever known. She floats in and out of social circles making friends with everyone she meets along the way. High school for her is a place she is loath to part from. For me it was a campus I was loath to enter, my sense of security coming only through a clique of my own my senior year and slight ties of friendship with the homecoming king / big man on campus / senior class president.

Now that I am older my identity has changed to a degree. My hand-me-downs are replaced by carefully selected brand-new attire. My unruly hair is sometimes tamed. Cheerleader is no longer whisper behind my back in class, and I can give off the impression of nonchalant self-assurance.

Despite all this, I am still taken aback when the Valley girl wants to befriend me in biology or the sexy firefighter respects my contemplative nature over another girl’s wild façade. But is my new identity any less of a façade than her established one? Which is the true me… the one who walks boldly to the front of a Yerba Buena concert or the one who escapes out the back door when no one is looking? For all of my new-found self-assurance I find it hard to escape the “me” that was created in those formative years of junior high and high school.

And I doubt I am the only one. Maybe the jock just wants to write poetry.

Maybe the wild girl wants to be loved for her sensitive side. Maybe the homecoming king / big man on campus / senior class president felt just as insecure as I did. Maybe self-assurance is always a façade.

Whether our true selves create our high school image or whether our high school image creates our “true” selves, it seems that we all go through life as walking wounded -- our inner, complex selves wrestling with our outer, restrictive persona. If the trick to acceptance is to go through life as an actor, playing a part that doesn’t portray our entire being, then it doesn’t seem to matter what our social standing is. Maybe the individual who portrays uninterrupted self-confidence is just better at hiding his or her insecurities than those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves. For anyone else haunted by their high school identity, this knowledge can be a beautiful reality.

Copyright © 2005 Shannon Luders-Manuel