A Wonderful Distraction

Like all of us, at 15 I was struggling to find myself. I could also be described as weird.

For the most part, this manifested in my unique wardrobe choices. On a typical day, I donned excessively bright knee-high stockings (often in pink argyle or blue stripes) with pants rolled up to just below the knee, black faux-leather spike collar and cuffs adorned my neck and arms, and a wallet decorated with blue flames was always attached via a chain between a bluejeans loop and it’s home in my right back pocket. I dropped most of this stuff my senior year of high school, except the chain wallet-- which I am almost embarrassed to say I carried proudly until I was 25. To be honest, I probably would still wield a trusty chain wallet if purses weren’t so incredibly convenient.

I was an odd duck, but I was proud of it. I didn’t want conventional apparel to tie down my unique snowflake of a soul. I was my own brand of punk rock, damnit. I didn’t want to fit in with my peers because I had none. I was weird, and I was going to own it. What better way than to dress the part?  I didn’t feel like I fit in with the crowd, so I made myself stand out even more. It required a bizarre sense of confidence that I find myself lacking these days.

I had a number of friends whom I had met through county 4-H. We lived across the area, some home schooled, and one attending the faraway other high school. We didn’t get much chance to hang out outside of 4-H events until TROUF.

TROUF was a wonderful distraction. We poured ourselves into the characters and stories. We were clumsy writers, but our imaginations made up for it by taking off in the world we had created. I would spend my waking hours doodling scenes, or thinking about what I wanted to happen next or how another person would respond. The world was ours. We could do anything we wanted, and we could trust the others to go along with our plans. It brought a powerful sense of belonging I hadn’t felt outside of sitting around a council circle fire at 4-H camp.

We started pushing each other to make it into something else, something more. We started meeting regularly at the public library, trying to make the story into a book. To this day I don’t know if the book would have worked out. It had too many characters, far too much conversation, and in the three years we worked on it, we didn’t get very far in our ultimate quest. To make a decent book, we would have needed to cut some of the characters and some of the world we spent so much time creating. I don’t know that any of us could have allowed that. It would have been like losing a chunk of our history together.

During my senior year, the administration had decided to fight back against my odd wardrobe choices. I was no longer allowed to wear the spike collar I had worn since Freshman year, nor could I use the chain-wallet. Both could be used as a weapon, they argued. With my wardrobe went my sense of purpose, and with my sense of purpose went TROUF. I don’t know exactly what happened to make it fall apart at the end, but it’s folly to assume my spike collar was holding us all together. Lauren had left for college, I was next to go, and responses had been slowing in our message board for ages. Sometimes even the best of friends grow apart.

TROUF might have disappeared, but I don’t think it ever fully left those of us who created it. To this day I find myself doodling a certain blonde elf with a vapid expression from time to time in the margins of notebooks. When I muse about writing children’s books during a long day at the lab, my mind lingers on the stories we worked on together. Most of all, I think back to the profound sense of belonging I felt with those of us who created TROUF. I needed TROUF. We all did. 

~Emma