Stranger Danger

**While in the throws of polishing my resume, designing a brand new website, updating my LinkedIn profile and freelance-alot portfolio (all in preparation for my move back home) I came across this essay and thought I'd share. Also, it's been too long since I've posted and I want/need to get this bad boy up and running a bit more. #FlashbackFriday **

Stranger Danger

by Courtney Trowman

      Stranger Danger! That is what we are all taught as children, which makes perfect sense. Children are not only vulnerable but completely honest which potentially could put them in harm’s way. The only problem is that many people tend to subconsciously carry that mantra into adolescence and through to adulthood. This is my theory anyway, that the belief matures as do we. Unbeknownst to us, it develops from a fear of being abducted on the playground to one of being exposed while say, in line at Starbucks. As Annie Proulx remarks in The Shipping News, “We’re all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.” Somewhere in our youth, be it elementary school, middle school or even at home most of us were taunted for being authentic, innocently revealing an aspect of our personality that someone else found different and consequently, strange. It’s those early years that can really drive home the sheep mentality. Head down and follow the herd. It’s a baaaad decision….ok, bad joke but nonetheless true.

      I think about my grandmother, Dorothy. I was never close to her because even as a child I could tell she belonged to that greater herd. She seemed to be living the life that was expected of her. She went to the right college, married the right man, had a beautiful and popular daughter, belonged to the best country club and dutifully attended the right church. I can’t remember seeing her dressed in anything but a knit suit, heels and all her best jewelry. It looked like she was ‘doing’ Dorothy rather than ‘being’ Dorothy. I could never shake the thought that she wasn’t just disguising her strangeness and charm but that even she didn’t know what it looked like. As if Dorothy was a stranger to herself and subsequently scared to talk to her. Maybe that’s why I could never get past the surface with her.

    From a young age, I was always distrustful of the disingenuous and it seemed a waste of time and too much work to be anything other than myself. I like Oscar Wilde’s credo; “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” As I’ve gotten older and have learned how to validate myself, I’ve no problem putting all my cards on the table. As a kid I was often labelled as weird, but I came to wear that name tag with pride. Owning my authenticity has helped me find other members of my tribe. I met my other half on a night out where I was completely stripped of any pretense and at my most raw. I actually chewed up and spit out the first guy to make a go for me. I was in no mood to pretend to be Little Miss Suzie Cream Cheese or apologize for it. He was unfazed by my exposure, or rather he was completely pulled in by it, and we soon discovered our spirits to be kindred.

     My theory then reminds me of the Shel Silverstein poem:

She had blue skin.

And so did he.

He kept it hid.

And so did she.

They searched for blue

their whole life through.

Then passed right by –

and never knew.

Beautiful and poignant as it may be, this poem breaks my heart because I know there are too many people with blue, green and/or purple skin passing right by one another. People who don’t know themselves well enough to embrace their colors or those that do but are owned and operated by that sense of stranger danger. People like my grandmother. The only glimpse I ever caught of my grandmother’s blue skin was hearing her confess once that Pretty Woman was her favorite movie. Emily Post loved a hooker with a heart of gold?!  Imagine what other gems she might have been hiding!

     If we’re all strange on the inside, then essentially we’re all the same. Why would we try to hide that or disguise it as something else? It seems to me that if we spend our lives harboring that early fear, first of abduction then later of exposure, we can become strangers to ourselves.  Lucky are the ones that recognize this and summon the courage to take off the mask, finally introducing themselves to the world as the person they were always meant to be proudly wearing the name tag that reads, “Hello! I am….” 

"Always be yourself, unless you can be a unicorn... then always be a unicorn"

XOXO