What did you want when you were 14?

Yesterday in class, John gave us this rush-write prompt and asked us to email him our response so that he could get to know what a 14 year old girl is like, what she wants. This has something to do with a book he is writing. I wrote him my response tonight. It was rather humorous to me, so I thought I'd share. I want you to respond with what you wanted when you were 14. I bet you were not as neurotic as me. I hope you enjoy.


When I was 14 I wanted to be the daughter of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder on The X-Files. I'm serious. I was obsessed with the show. I stayed up until 2 a.m. every Saturday night so that I could record it on TV. I have a cupboard in my home bedroom brimming with VHS tapes full of episodes. I wanted to play their child in a movie. For some reason I didn't see it as a regular fixture of the show. Probably because they weren't yet together, and I thought of it as some sort of this-is-what-the-future-will-be sequel to their first movie ("Fight the Future"). I stood one day in my dad's bathroom (called so because none of the kids nor my mom ever seemed to utilize it regularly--maybe because it was very, very small) and clenched my jaws while looking in the mirror. I figured my red hair was what I "got" from Agent Scully. My nose was too big to come from her, so it became appropriately big in my eyes to be from Agent Mulder. When I clenched my jaw hard enough my muscles bulged out my cheeks and I believed I became quite similar to Mulder. But this made my teeth sore. I decided I would have to have short periods of filming everyday, so my jaw didn't get too sore. Last night I did this again for the first time in years.

I have mirror faces--faces that I make whenever I look in the mirror, or see myself in a window, or my reflection on shiny surfaces. I change the angle of my head, I hold up my tongue so my chin doesn't sag, I unclench my often cringing eye muscles. I do this out of habit and unconsciously. I don't think I knew I did it until I noticed my sisters do it. My sister Lucy pulls in her cheeks and slightly pouts her lips. She always was a meticulous reader of the J. Crew catalogue when she was 14. My sister Rosi's face goes coldly blank. Her forehead tightens, her eyebrows raise, and her lips slacken. She never looks like this if not looking at herself in the mirrow. When I was 14 my mirror face was to bite as hard as I could so that my jaw muscles would swell. And I practiced moving my eye brows individually. Dana Scully could do this exceedingly well. She had a face she would make when about to cry--the left eyebrow went up and the right dived nose-ward as the right side of her mouth arched up, almost as if trying to meet it. When she was acting skeptical, her left eyebrow would raise, but her mouth would winch up tight, her chin down. I watched her in the early black hours of Sunday mornings and memorized her faces. I mimicked them on my own in front of my dad's mirror. Only my eyebrows never got very good at moving on their own. So I never really ran out of things to practice, I guess.

For a few years I even became obsessed with fingers and fingernails, convinced that mine were sorry specimens. I was conflictingly envious of Dana Scully's perfect manicures, and yet horrified at having anything but closed trimmed nails. My thumbs were always shamefully wide. I met people at church and looked immediately to their hands. When I watched TV or movies I eagerly waited until their hands were shown and I could compare mine with theirs. I delighted when I deemed others' inferior to my own because it happened so rarely and because I saw it as some indication of overall worth. Toes and toenails were another problem that I eventually solved with socks.

I think I was very jealous and paranoid. I wanted praise and attention from parents and older people. I wanted boys to notice me. But I'd dropped out of Jr. high after Spanish class, so it wasn't going to happen there. My only interaction with boys my age came at church. But I was too embarrassed and awkward and socially incompetent to make friends with them. I think I created a pathological sense of the importance of obscure body parts--thumb nails, eyebrow raises, even red hair--and obsessed over them, comparing mine with others. To some extent on some level I valued people based on these characteristics. I based my acceptance and liking of them on it to some degree. I am fairly certain those who scored high in good features fared pretty poorly in my esteem, because I saw them as competing and winning in getting in others' good favor. I am stinking relieved to say I am not obsessed about fingernails anymore. And I don't hate everyone who I think is prettier or smarter or more interesting than me. But I still have some serious neuroses when it comes to red hair and the name Bess. I prickle when I meet other red-heads. I get pretty near out-right livid when I even hear of other Besses in the world. Both of these are mine. I claim them.

I think that being 14 had to do with a lot of unwitting Intro to Craziness 101 stuff. Unfortunately I didn't know this until I was thrown into Crazy 230: Your First Complete and Total Meltdown during my first year at BYU. Oh, the joys.

P.S. Six months ago today: walking to church in the pouring rain, Bess wearing Liz's thermals because her skirt was soaking and therefore see-through, dancing and making dinner in the kitchen, Jordan burning rice, John Bennion playing with umbrella in kitchen while others dance, and Jordan playing a most memorable medley of How Great Thou Art and Turn Turn Turn on the guitar.