She’s My Croc Queen
My pink Crocs sit by the door and wait for the rainy Sunday mornings or the late Thursday evenings when I’m tired or stressed or in a hurry. They sit there, patient and kind and cushy, and wait for the days when I need to tell the world (and the wonderfully dressed hipsters in line behind me at the Redbox) to cut me some slack. They say to the nice waiter at the pho restaurant that my roommate and I go to when we’re hungover to maybe make our soup a little hotter than usual. They whisper to the cute broista at my favorite coffee place to maybe accidently on purpose give me a grande when I ordered a tall, and then maybe look the other way when I spill it on myself. They inform my teachers that I took that assignment very seriously, and let my friends know that I need control of the Netflix choices tonight.
Basically, my Crocs let everyone with eyes know that, for the moment, I have given up. Given up trying to impress you, put being cute and carefree on pause and accepted that, for now, everything sucks.
I’ve had my Crocs since middle school, when everything actually did suck and I was a lot less happy than I am today. I spent a lot of time worrying about how I looked and trying to figure out how to make everyone like me while still staying true to the “real me” that all the teen magazines kept telling me I needed to find and cherish.
I tried to be popular; I bought my clothes at Hollister and Abercrombie and straightened my hair until it was fried. I tried to be a jock; I played soccer and ran track and worked very hard in P.E. so everyone knew that I was serious and strong. I tried to be a brain; I took honors classes and got A’s and worked myself into a giant ball of stress worrying about whether or not I’d studied enough to make my parents proud. I even tried skateboarding for a while, listening to Green Day and layering my T-shirts.
It wasn’t until eighth grade, a year into my self-conscious transformation, that something felt right. I was sitting in the back row of my English class, wearing my Crocs and listening to the popular girls prattle on about some boy or some band at the front of the room. I’d gotten to class early that day — I don’t remember why, but I do remember being alone with these girls and realizing that I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation. They looked at me encouragingly and asked me questions I didn’t know the answers to until, finally, I panicked and made some unrelated joke about the Jonas Brothers being NSYNC’s cool out-of-town cousins that own jet skis, and these girls lost their damn minds. It was like they’d never heard a joke before.
Whoa, I thought, that wasn’t even that funny. The standards for humor are very low here. I could make this work for me.
I started saying all the weird stuff that I usually kept on a tight leash inside my head. I talked about wanting to take over the world, and how someday, I would raise goats in the mountains and wear tutus to work. I stopped straightening my hair and started watching standup comedy specials on demand. I read a lot of Dave Barry and began writing in earnest, trying to sneak jokes into all of my high school essays and penning silly columns for the paper. I was enlisted to sing the part of Timon when our choir had a Disney-themed concert, and my choir teacher announced loudly that I was the only one capable of making the solo in “Can you Feel the Love Tonight?” sound as ugly as it needed to be. What can I say? I have a gift for bringing fictional meerkats to life.
I transformed, fully and completely, into “the funny one.” And I loved it. I still do. Making people laugh is my favorite thing in world, and I feel my most confident when I’m at my most silly. I do standup and improv and take every chance I get to make my friends smile, even if it means dancing like Drake in a public space.
But it comes at a price. Being the funny one means you’re not really allowed to be stressed or sad or frustrated. Everyone needs you to tell them it’ll be okay and ease the tension and lick the wounds; you’re not allowed to cry or yell or scream into your pillow, and if you do, it can only be in the funny way, the FML way that makes everyone feel better about their own lives. I’ve built this construct of my personality that I present to the world like a shiny, glittery exotic bird that squawks and sings and does the Macarena on command. And I love her. She’s feisty and fun and full of fervor, and is a way more satisfying “me” to be than the scared, shy girl with the social anxiety and the pit stains of a few years ago.
But funny me, Party Marti if you will, is only part of the package, a glittery wrapping on the fruitcake beneath. She doesn’t share the rough stuff, the heartbreaks and letdowns and screw-ups that keep her up at night and give her cystic acne. She doesn’t tell you that she was bullied into an eating disorder in high school, or that she still thinks about the time her sixth-grade teacher called her stupid in front of her whole class. She doesn’t talk about the boy who broke her or the friends who left her or the million times she’s laid on the floor sobbing and listening to Taylor Swift while eating cream cheese with a spoon. We all have our ways of coping.
I’m constantly being told who I am. People, especially people who don’t know me that well, like to put me in these boxes, these archetypes: “Confident”, “Fun”, “Independent”, “Happy”, “Bubbly”. And I am those things, but I can’t be them all the time. Sometimes I’m the girl who hasn’t showered in three days and only left the house because she wanted a burrito. Sometimes I’m the one who spilled my entire coffee mug on my pants and now has coffee crotch. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m so worried, so scared about what’s going to happen tomorrow or so guilty about all the things I’ve done in the past. My friends, my family, my support circle, they see these sides of me; they know the whole truth and love me despite my mismatched socks and my tendency to talk to Lyft drivers who clearly do not care about my boy problems.
But I think I need to make it clearer for all the people who are trying to keep Party Marti in her rhinestone-studded cage. I need to be more honest about my feelings and my fears and tell people the truth, even when it’s easier to make a joke or do a dance. I need to revive all the parts of me I’ve stifled, talk about my past failures and my current problems, and be real, and be flawed, and be all the things middle school me was so worried about.
So I’ll be the Croc Queen, sassy but scared, tired but trying, here to make you laugh but finished with trying to be the one thing that’s easy to swallow. This is me, these are my shoes, now hand me my burrito.
