Different Now
Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004, 11:15 a.m.

I wasn't popular in high school. I wasn't the girl people wanted to get to know. I was a 'weirdo', with my strange clothes, friends, and hair. My hair was dyed black on top and blonde on the bottom in 9th grade...I had dreadlocks in my second year of 9th grade. Yes, I was the rebel. The 'loser'. The 'freak.' I dropped out for a year to take too much acid and blow coke and waste my life away. Then I went back for another year of 9th grade, and did the same things. That was me. I skipped so much school and was such an ass that I was sent to ALP.

I did good in ALP. I got good grades. I completed grades 9/10 in year 1, 11/12 was almost complete in year 2...and then I dropped out, for no reason, 3 months before graduation. I had given birth to Baby at this time, still attended school. I did good for awhile, I really did. I think that I tried to change things, tryed to stay away from drugs...I just couldn't. I wasn't done partying.

Because then I got into Ecstasy, and the club scene...I had just turned 18. Then came the stripping, and the coke. The drinking started somewhere in between all this. I was always a drinker, but between clubbing and then stripping it became a need.

And now...I'm...average. You may look at me and see a regular girl, with nice clothes and nicely groomed. A small child, a beautiful child at her side. A handsome man with her, smiling and kissing her on the forehead. This is me now.

Where did the 'freak' go? Am I glad she's gone?

I am, sometimes, most of the time...I'm so proud of me, proud of Baby, proud to be with C. I'm proud that I save money, that I live in a nice apartment and drive a nice car. I take care of myself. I don't do drugs. I make dinner for my family every night.

Suburbian Bliss.

What happened to the girl who was a nightmare? Has she fallen away? I'm glad to see her go. She started fires, she ruined things, she was violent...she was a druggie. She was disruptive at school, her teachers accused her of being in a cult in 8th grade. They accused her of drinking in the bathroom that same year, on her birthday.

I am so full of anger. Of hate. Of bad memories that I say I threw in the past and I haven't. Sometimes I can't sleep at night becuase my own images haunt me.

I'm glad that girl is gone. I'm glad of who I am. But sometimes I worry that I have forgotten my idenity, I have forgotten the things I used to love to do. But those things were bad. I was bad. And I really haven't changed...not me, just my preferences.

And now I'm good. But by what standards? My own. These are my own goddamn standards and I'm proud of myself.

I'm a mother now, and a wife. I'm not a teenager...and it's my own fault that I robbed myself of an adolescense by clouding it with drugs...my own fault I chose the path I did.

I guess I had a choice, to keep going down that path, or to take a right. I took a right. And I'm some one to be proud of now. Sometimes I just miss the old days. But I'm different now, and so is life. That's just it.

Things are different now.

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