Teen angst, 11 years later.

Tonight is another one of those nights where I really, really, really should be working on eBay listings, but instead I'm watching late nineties music videos on youtube.  Something about them is mesmerizing.  I don't know if I would call it nostalgia, for there are few memories from my school years I wish to revisit.  The late nineties were horrible for me.  I was the weird kid that everybody had to remind that she was weird just in case she didn't already notice.  A few classmates followed me around and threw rocks at me.  Others waited at the top of the stairs when they saw me at the bottom just so they could spit in the hopes that it would hit me.

I hated my life. Any time I ever complained to an adult, I was met with the cliche that I should enjoy it because these were the best years of my life. I felt that if those would be the best years, that the rest would be horrible and unlivable. It really would have been nice if someone, anyone, would have told me that it would get better.  Angry adolescent Xombea would have hugged the time traveler who told her that there would be a magic place in futureland called Facebook where she could see how pathetic some of her tormentors had become.

At one point, I fantasized about a school shooting.  I never wanted to kill my classmates.  I just wanted to shoot them in a nonessential body part so they could suffer too. My teenage fantasies included shooting off their baby toes while asking, "Oh, does that hurt? Remember me with every step you take."  I wished I could make them feel the way they made me feel every day.  I wanted them to feel it the rest of their lives.

Thanks to my magical interweb box, I can now see that some of the girls who teased me about being pale are now wrinkly with tits like old leather purses, bodies sprinkled with age spots in their early thirties.  Speaking of tits, you may have teased me about my small ones, but they came in useful and now they're not brushing against my navel.  The boys who teased me for being ugly have now lost those looks on which they depended and a few of them have even messaged me to apologize and tell me they secretly wanted to date me way back when but didn't want their friends to know.  Their dreams of professional sports have long since been squashed and they're toiling away at miserable, minimum wage jobs they had deemed themselves too good to work.  Oh, you made fun of me for working at the dollar store in high school?  Have fun working at the gas station, mister superstar.  They may have secretly been miserable back then, too.

I might not be living my dream life, but at least I stayed true to myself.  I'm still the same weird kid with crazy ideas, yet a little less angry.  I no longer want to shoot off anyone's baby toes.  I have a husband, kids, animals, two businesses.  And my paint can.  I'll always have my paint can.  

If my kids go through the same "phase" I went through, I'll be sure to remind them that these aren't the best years of their lives and it should get much, much better.