Rachel Pirrera

Modern Pierrot
Rachel Pirrera

“Everyone gets anxious,” my mom muttered. It’s true, but other kids don’t cry in the middle of class over their vocabulary quizzes. Other kids don’t get bullied for being crazy or mental. Other kids don’t have to see this old bald social worker every Thursday for therapy.  

“Mom, I’m not normal. Why am I like this?” I replied with tears bursting out of my eyes, lining my face with the clown makeup I was about to need for my upcoming performance.

“You’re normal as anyone else you know, you just aren’t feeling great right now,” she told me in a sympathetic tone. 

It was the worst reply she could have given me. The way I got anxious was not the way the kids in my grade did, no other kid got too scared to play the xylophones in music class out of fear of messing up. 

I didn’t want her to tell me I was already normal, I knew that was a lie. I just wanted her to tell me how to be normal. My oddities came as naturally as laughing when I was happy or gasping for air after spending too much time underwater. So then, how did everyone else become immune to these things? In the past, they would scrape their knees on the pavement and act like they had been penetrated by a bullet or scream and stomp when they didn’t get to be the line leader in the past. However, one day that all stopped. After scraping their knees, they would all rub some dirt on them, run right back to the huge game of tag at recess, and settle for second or last in line once we got back in the classroom. But no matter how hard I tried, I never grew. I would squirm at every minor obstacle and have to attend group therapy lessons with the guidance counselors for one lunch every week. 

 “You’re your own normal,” my mom would say. As if my brain hadn’t been crushed under the weight of a million thoughts already, the landslide continued regardless of how hard I screamed. That defied all of the logic I had ever hung onto before. How could someone be considered normal but also as something separate from the norm? How could an object be moving both forward and backward? How come I couldn’t swat the fear away like a fly on my shoulder? My fly wasn’t like that. My fly was always on my shoulder constantly whispering vulgar buzzes into my ear. My fly was so large it could consume me whole if I even thought to push it off. 

Even if I was whatever my “own normal” meant, it wasn’t like it made me special, it made me an outcast. There had to be a reason why I had a four-person table all to myself while the tables that circled me were so overcrowded. Nobody wants to be the clown in the middle of the circus, they want to be the people eating popcorn and snickering whenever the freak falls over. And regardless of how morally wrong it was, I wanted to be in the crowd as well. I wanted to be that girl who told me that I looked like a walrus whenever I cried. I wish I was one of those kids who would sit next to me at lunch to be seen as a hero, but then leave a minute after realizing I was a bit far gone in comparison to what they were used to. It was obvious to all that my depths went down a little too far for comfort, even for Superman. 

No matter how hard I would scrub at my face, the clown makeup stayed as pigmented as it was since the day I was born. My limbs grew into the curves of the cramped clown car I tried so hard to distance myself from and the tomatoes from the audience rained down from the heavens to my body like the rocks the kids at camp would pelt me with from time to time.

All these hectic words and ideas made me feel lost in my own mind. I was at the point where all I knew how to do was cry into the warmth of my mom’s torso. She held the broken pieces of my mind but she still couldn’t fix it. She just stuffed them all back in and told me to go to bed because it was getting late. I didn’t blame her. After all, she was normal. I may have closed my eyes some nights but I hardly slept. Hell, I feel like I never rest. After all, with a shattered mind, no signals are sent to tell you how to relax. 

The only thing that stuck with me was my undying craving to be normal, after all, being normal is being superior. To create a magnificent painting each element must work with the rest, every person in the crowd must fit together. However, just by attempting to squeeze into a crowd, I already ruined their spectacular model of perfection. That’s why they shoved me away and in turn, that's why I admired them. I swooned over their ability to exterminate insects like me without a moment of hesitation in order to craft a flawless image.

So, mom, sure, everyone gets anxious and everyone has issues. But what is different is how they handle them. Others handle it with divine grace, swiftly scratch off any pesky fly that gets in their way and stride confidently to wherever life takes them. Mom, I’m still sitting and watching to see if one day I can learn from them or you. I know I’m not normal and I know it’s common sense I never will be, but I’ll keep trying until I can get somewhere near it. But to be truly honest with you, I am not sure if I will relax in an audience member’s chair and view a freakshow. I was in the circus ring for so long, but also I can’t bring myself to keep acting as the clown.