I was thirteen years old when a group of my friends were at my apartment and one of them, Zoe, said that we should listen to some “top 40.” While this is hardly a surprising suggestion from an eighth grader, I found myself beyond confused as I had never before heard of “top 40” radio. My friends suspiciously filled me in, unsure if I was feigning ignorance or not, and then blasted whatever was popular at the time, probably Katy Perry or Kesha (the two of whom I still don’t know much about). While this may seem like a pretentious “I don’t listen to pop music” mantra, I wasn’t alternative enough at age thirteen to use Kurt Cobn or Jerry Garcia as an angsty rebuttal. My ignorance was genuine, because instead of filling my time with poppy radio tunes as a young teenager, the only station I listened to was NPR, Radiolab, Prairie Home Companion, and, my personal favorite, This American Life. This wasn’t an elitist choice on my part, but instead a characteristic of a lifestyle that I grew up with and that I accepted as “normal.” It was at this time in my life that I began to feel as if my family, for the first time ever, was abnormal. This ostensibly trivial moment marked a transition in my overall attitude towards my life because from that point on as a teen I felt an internal sense of otherness, despite almost every aspect of my environment and external identity being accepted as a normal standard of existence. Superficially speaking, I am a fairly “average” human‚ a white, straight woman who is attractive enough, who conforms, for the most part, to female beauty standards, who lives a studious and hardworking life. I follow the expectations of the traditional narrative of American success: I graduated high school, I am pursuing a higher education, I have a job, I have a boyfriend, I have loving family and friends. Characteristics of me, my appearance and my lifestyle are deeply rooted in privilege, and it is true that I’ve had many people and social forces help me get to where I am today. These privileges have also given me what I can best describe as a “default status”: a state of being accepted by others as “natural” and “untarnished” and wholly “American” (whatever that means); this carries along with it an assumption that because I am where I am today and because I’ve achieved many expected milestones of Western success, that my background is the same as those who are of the same “default status.” While I grew up being able to relate to people in the media and in my everyday life on the basis of race, nationality and often gender, I began to feel that my whiteness, my nationality and my gender was not the same as those who shared those traits. I became aware that I couldn’t relate to depictions of the stereotypical white family with the white picket fence and the golden retriever named Sam because I lived with my single mother, my brother and a cat in 600 square feet of family student housing. I never related to sitcoms picturing family dinners with silent and grumpy children demanding to be excused in order to escape to their rooms. My mother, brother and I were, and still are, extremely close and valued every moment we spent together; our family dinners were special and filled with immersive and quirky conversations about the details of our days and interesting things we had learned. I never related to gossip about sleepovers with other kids because instead my mother brought me to all of her work functions as a form of daycare and entertainment; I loved interacting with her colleagues who engaged me in conversation and provided me with an immersive and unique academic environment. Frankly, I prefered to spend time with them than with people my age outside of school. In fact, my mother’ peers become some of my closest friends and confidants, one of whom I consider my fill-in-father because she attended all of my school functions alongside my mother and frequently picked me up from school to take me to get hot cocoa and get our nls done (this happened so consistently and openly that my friends and their parents assumed that she and my mother were lovers); in fact, we eventually ended up moving into a townhouse neighboring hers. I never could relate to “daddy daughter dances” and when I did attend, I brought another of my mom’ colleagues, a large and jolly Southern gay man named Brian, who gave me my first corsage and was happy to dance with me alongside my peers with their birth fathers.
These subtle differences in the way that I experienced adolescence in my seemingly cookie cutter life were unbeknownst to me until that moment in middle school that triggered a reactional awareness of the variances in the way that my family and I lived our lives compared to my friends. I suddenly began to feel shame and embarrassment for my upbringing and attempted to hide it from those around me. Yet, today, if I were to name what I am most grateful for in my childhood, it would be that my mom was a single parent who actively involved me within her life as an academic on campus because there I learned about intellectualism, compassion, understanding and activism which sprouted my passion for civic engagement. The feeling of unbelonging that I felt consume my sense of self began to transform as I became more involved with social justice and the idea of the “other” throughout high school‚ surrounding me with a community of people who felt underrepresented and stigmatized for various aspects of their identity, and giving me a richer understanding of the fallacy of normalcy‚ including that of the flawed image of the “normal” American household. It was at this point that I started to embrace and be thankful for my “nontraditional” childhood and for those who made it possible, because this is just my story within the complex, uncategorizable and evolving narrative of This American Life.