All the answers I don’t know
When I was 12, I had a lot of questions, which is funny to think about now, because of course I did, because I was 12.
At the time, my questions seemed very specific to me and not to any other 12-year-old girl. Was I the only one in the dark about periods and sex and love, but mostly periods? Probably. It was constantly overwhelming — spilling anxiety into the crevices of everything I did every day.
I only ever experienced this same rush of hot fear once as an adult, and it was on a recent vacation where a handful of my smartest friends suggested we play the 1986 iteration of Trivial Pursuit because “none of us will know anything!!!!!!!!!!” but, of course, they all knew every single fucking answer to every single fucking question. (I faked “tired” and went to bed before my second turn.)
At 27, I am okay with surrendering to not knowing the answers and falling asleep instead.
But at 12, I was plagued.
I have a shoebox of folded notes from the late 90s that has traveled with me for no other reason than I don’t want my mom reading them the next time she decides she wants to (rightfully) gut her house of all the shit I swore one day I’d come back for but never will. The notes are to me, from me, and some are a mix of both (environmentally friendly, we wrote back-and-forth on the same ripped sheet of paper).
Though all of our handwriting looks the same, I can always figure out which stupid bubble letters belong to me, it’s easy: I’M THE ONE TRYING TO ASK QUESTIONS.
In one note (not pictured here, only in my memory) I casually asked cool girl Liz when she thought she’d have sex. She replied: “high school bc I feel like thatz [sic] when you can be a not prude but also a not slut.” In hindsight, that’s almost 100% incorrect thanks to the social constructs we’ve been built and continue to perpetuate.
As I look back on these notes half a lifetime later, I remain perplexed at what hindsight makes so clear: I wasn’t the only one asking the questions.
Look at these notes. Look at these notes! These notes are written to me from the cool girls of my time.
The questions range from “Why doesn’t he even try to call me?”
And “What should I say to him?”
To “Do you want to see the movie ‘Down to Earth’ starring Chris Rock?”
And whatever was going on here:
Something I’ve learned to embrace as an adult is my willingness to admit I don’t know shit about shit, and to trust that most people also don’t know shit about shit, but we’re all pretending we do so that we don’t become paralyzed trying to walk through a world we’re incredibly unsure of. I think about this every time I see a document floating around the internet asking people to anonymously divulge how much money they make at work. To me, that’s the ultimate manifestation of middle school notes. We’re just trying to make sure we’re all on the same page, that none of us are somehow getting fucked over without knowing it.
These notes remain in boxes and they’ll stay there forever, if only to serve as a reminder that I’ve never known anything, and I still don’t know anything, but neither do you.
