My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.

By the time I was 15, I felt totally and completely trapped. Sometimes I felt so paralyzed that I couldn’t breathe. I was already a crappy student and I’d been tagged a “troublemaker.” My teachers had stamped my file “class clown” and told me at every opportunity that I was “wasting my potential,” whatever that was. Every adult around me figured they had my number, and I had no reason not to believe them. My life would had already been set in stone: just a long march down a hall with no doors to a room with no windows where I’d wind up getting some office job if I was lucky. Then I got into the theater program at South Carolina’s Governor’s School for the Arts and I went away for 6 weeks to live with a bunch of strangers and I realized I could reinvent myself. I shut up. I listened more. I didn’t feel a need to fight with everyone in authority. I was still myself, but better. It changed my life because I realized that I didn’t have to live up to, or down to, anyone’s expectations, including my own. I could just decide to be someone new. That’s the joy of moving, it’s the thrill of starting over, the way you can leave everything someone’s decided about you behind and reinvent yourself. It’s the same impulse that turns Laura Ashley girls into goths, or jocks into Juggalos, or dentists into drag queens. It’s one of the best parts of being alive: if you don’t like who you are, you can become someone different overnight just by deciding to do so.