Written Whispers

I was chatting with Xean this morning and there was something she said that made me think about the past. I was telling her about my dorky moment with Ni and Ju and she h ad said something about the wacky moments that bring friends together. It just made me think of how some of the most treasured people in my life came to be in my life.

See, I wasn’t always wacky and strange. I used to be quiet a sullen creature. I cried a lot and spoke to no one, seeing everyone as a potential threat and treating them that way. When I moved in with my adoptive family I learned, in a very slow and painful but rewarding process, that a lot of people have good in them and even the ones who aren’t so great… well, I wouldn’t be here without a lot of bad people.

When I started learning things like this and being forcefully pried from my shell I was… I don’t know how to put it. I felt like an unprotected stick standing upright in the sand while the wind rages all around me. Completely vulnerable, scared, breakable, and as far out of my element as I could possibly be.

But with every way you can fall into a hole you can learn a way to go around, over, or through it. A.k.a. coping mechanism. I don’t know how it really came about but I developed a rather odd one. See, I was still learning how to hold conversations and because I’d hardly spoke I didn’t always know what to say- duh.

So, whenever one of those nerve rupturing silences would pop up… I’d say Quack Quack.

It’s an instantaneous ice breaker. Silence scared me, giggles and ‘what the f’s’ did not. Even if you don’t know what to say I can guarantee you that if you walk up to a random person (be it someone you know or not) and say Quack Quack 8 out of 10 times they will respond with some other animal sound and then everything is rolling again.

Now here’s the real kicker and pardon my shoddy explanation of the events before hand but I’m trying to keep it short. Before I lived with my adoptive family I attended middle school A then I transferred to high school B in another town. I didn’t come back to high school A for nearly my entire freshmen year. My point being that I knew people before but we didn’t have much day to day contact till I came back from being somewhere else.

I hadn’t changed much at first but it was while I was in high school B that I’d met my adoptive family, and shortly after my transfer that I moved in with them. My old friends,… people I’d spent time with because there was no one else and people who spent time with me just because I was there… didn’t quite understand the changes. They couldn’t understand why I was dressing different, blurting out things (first attempts at standing up for myself), and asking them all to call me by a new name. My signature changed, my style changed, my hobbies and goals changed. Everything.

Alas, it wasn’t more than a month after I’d developed my new coping mechanisms that they started to tell me I was annoying. I didn’t do it all the time but I was learning that I loved talking to people so they heard me say a ot more of anything to them than I ever had before. It’s needless to say it but over the months we all drifted away…

And the ones who would quack back at me and be patient with my odd little habits are still my friends today. It really proves that true friends are the ones who accept you for who you are even if that person changes and doesn’t know quite who she is.

My little coping mechanism did more than just this though. It also brought me together with one of my best friends, current roommate and constant sister, Ree/Kei but that’s another story that- like this one, deserves a post all it’s own according to me.

On a brief side note, some other odd coping things I had was that for awhile (and occasionally today) I’d almost refer to myself in third person. Not in an obnoxious way as I see the habit in general but just as easily as I say I. I think it’s because I’d changed my name and was constantly reassuring myself that I was the person I was becoming and not the one I had been.

Odd