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.
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