#125 Feeling Outside, Feelings Inside.

My mother wanted me to be shy,
until it became an embarrassment.

Under my picture in the high school yearbook,
it said, “silence is golden.”
Did I really not talk to anyone
for five years?
The caption should have read,
“was anyone there?”

In the half century since,
I have hid behind many masks:
bashful, anxious,
androgynous, obese,
aloof, depressed;
keeping people out;
not letting people know me.

Telling myself that
I am too crazy, too stupid, too weird
to fit in.

The me that-is-me does not belong here.
The me that-is me-does not really know why.