the idea: to dye my hair pink for my summer at the Center for Talented Youth

For most of elementary school and middle school I was not what most people would consider a pretty child.  I suppose I was cute, in a baby-fat-at-double-digits kinda way, but pretty or beautiful weren’t words that I ever heard in the same sentence as myself until college.

Honestly, I’m glad.  I think being pretty does strange things to a child’s head, particularly a girl’s.  I simply was not on that radar.  First I was a tomboy, then I started wearing hippie skirts and became a tom-hippie?  A hippie-boy?  I’m not really sure.

Either way, the fact that I my mind I didn’t have the slightest hope of being pretty gave me much more room to experiment.  For example, in the summers after 5th and 6th grade I dyed my blonde hair bright pink.  I did this specifically for my three-week sessions at the Center for Talented Youth, called Nerd Camp by the kids who go there.

My weeks at CTY were some of the best times in my young life.  I wasn’t nearly the only strange child there, in fact most of us were quite strange but in an absolutely wonderful way.  For the first time I remember truly fitting in, even looking the way that I did in today’s photo.

Now I look back at photos from when I was 10 and 11 and am amazed by my own brashness.  I suppose it wasn’t good for my young self-esteem to just accept that I wasn’t pretty.  But that’s the thing, I didn’t fight it, I just accepted it, and since I wasn’t pretty I had a chance to be something much better: myself.