The Ugly Duckling

Before the 8th grade, my grades were perfect. Every test I took, I knocked out of the park. However, the change of events in my home life started spilling over during the day at school. Living off sugar had a terrible impact on, well, everything. My breakfast of candy bars and skipping lunch left me sleeping through math and everything past 1 pm. I had a little bit of energy in the mornings for PE. Not that I wanted to have the energy for it, because it was my least favorite class. My eye-hand coordination was so bad that I was the last person to be picked for any team sport. Heck, anything involving a ball. If I was on your team, you were sure to lose. If you didn’t participate in group sports, you had to work out in the gym on the equipment. Naturally, nobody taught us all how to correctly use anything, so we would go over there and do idiotic things that made us hurt a lot later. I didn’t like weights either, so I started pegboard climbing, which was great because nobody else wanted to do that, and I had it all to myself. I became so good at pegboard climbing that I started competing against other people and schools. What is pegboard climbing you ask? It is a flat board mounted high on the wall filled with holes and numbers. Without using any of your lower body, you climb from one spot to the next, or you swing your body over to a number called out. When your body gives out from exhaustion, you fall to a cushioned mat below. My upper body strength became insane, though I was only about 90 lbs, so it wasn’t like lifting much. This was the closest thing to a sport I’d entertain. Unfortunately, after the 8th grade, I never saw a pegboard again.The worst part of my day was changing into and out of gym clothes. I would rush to the locker room and try to beat the rest of the students there to slip into my gym outfit without anyone seeing me naked. That sometimes didn’t work, so I would fake that I needed to pee and change in a toilet stall. After class, the toilet stalls were often full, so I mastered the art of changing my shirt without anyone seeing anything. I’d put a shirt over the shirt, and then, like a magician escaping a straight jacket, I would wiggle my way out of the dirty gym shirt. Sometimes I would just leave the gym shirt on because it was a nice grey color and well, f**k it. I had less of an issue being in my underwear, but I didn’t want anyone to see my chest or lack of one. I was flat as a board.My friend Katie however, had the most beautiful breasts ever, and when we changed, I would look over at her and peek. If I had breasts like hers, I would walk around naked in front of everyone like she did. I was in awe of them and filled with envy. In the 8th grade, she was easily a D cup, and her body was small in proportion, so they stood out. I didn’t understand that I was not just curious about Katie but attracted to her. She was in my mind, the perfect girl, and she reminded me of Snow White. If she ever cosplayed as Snow White, it would have been perfect. I loved sitting next to her and watching her put her makeup on after her shower and loved watching her get dressed. She made PE worth going to.She and I also had one other class together, which was speech and debate. She chose me as her partner most of the time and invited me to her house to practice our lines for performances. Her place was excellent compared to mine, and when I went over, I loved being a voyeur. I now wonder if she knew that I stared at her because at her house, she’d change out of her school clothes in front of me, and she had this rack in her closet that had her tank tops neatly, no perfectly folded on them. She’d pick one out and slip it on, and I would stand there looking at her perfection.I didn’t yet realize that girls could be into girls, so I shrugged it off as fascination with her beauty instead of attraction. If she had understood it and held my hand, I think my mind would have exploded. I’m not sure what I would have done because I was still in the fairytale land of finding the perfect boyfriend and the ideal hands to hold.About halfway through the year, I started ditching school with my friend Connie who lived in the nearby cemetery on the NAU campus. Her parents were groundskeepers, and if I wanted to go to her place, I often had to climb the cemetery fence and run as fast as I could to avoid their dogs who’d chase after me. I have an active imagination, so I also imagined zombies chasing after me as well. I’d have to work up the courage to see her, so I would usually beg for her to come over to my place. Hanging out with her didn’t have a lot of substance. She mostly liked to talk about eyeliner and boys. While I liked boys, I didn’t want to talk about them. I wanted to be with them and do “boy” stuff.So, if she weren’t down for ditching, I would head out with my pal Aaron Vyvial. Aaron and I became locker-mates when I decided to make a move out of the gifted hall. I moved out because being over there seemed el

Sometimes after I write one of these posts, I have to think about it for a long time afterward. The last one was tough to write and relive, but I also had the realization that it was the first time in my life that I had to make a profound moral decision on my own without guidance. It was the first time I had to navigate life by “gut” feel. Every ounce of my body knew I had to say no. If a physical book ever comes of this effort, I think it starts in the cab of my mother’s red Ford F150, on Butler Ave. in Flagstaff, Arizona. Interestingly, I had to write this much to figure out where to start the darn thing, but that was a decisive moment.So, I think it would be fair to say that my 8th grade is when I started to discover myself. The world was confusing, and we didn’t have cable tv at home, so I wasn’t following current events. At school, they announced the United States was heading to war. The government used confusing words like “Operation Desert Storm” to make it seem less “warlike,” but it was a war.This war impacted several students in the school whose family members served in the military, so it was the first time I was in proximity to something where I felt government impact other than school itself. I don’t remember much about the Gulf War other than student’s tears and now and then seeing images of planes dropping bombs not terribly far from where my step-father was born. He was no longer a part of my life, but he was a part of my heart, so I thought about him and my little brother often.My mother enrolled as a student at NAU full time and started working multiple jobs. She wasn’t home when I woke up or when I went to bed. Occasionally, I’d hear her come in late at night. When our schedules crossed paths, we fought, she threw objects at me, or she kicked me out. I avoided her as much as I could, but in the tiny family housing unit that I lived in on the NAU campus, it was impossible. Collisions would eventually happen. I would wander the streets or head to a friend’s house and sleep under their beds.Shortly after starting school, I made two friends, Deb and Bonnie. During my short time as Derek’s girlfriend, they came up to my locker and asked if we were dating. I looked them up and down, their pants covered with NKOTB written all over them with Sharpie pens. I asked them what that meant and discovered it was a boy band of some sort. They asked questions about my skateboard photos and what kinds of bands I was into. I found later that they weren’t interested in being my friend when we first met but instead to gather intelligence about Derek, whom Deb was deeply interested in dating herself. I guessed they liked me and decided to hang out at some point because we became inseparable, and they were my refuge from any storm at home. I’d sometimes spend a few days under Deb’s bed until I was caught by her mother, Rosie, who would feed me a fantastic meal and then send me home. Sometimes I was picked up by the police and taken to a detention center or a girl’s home. However, all of these roads eventually landed me back in that little tiny home in front of my mother again, and the cycle would repeat.My mother decided that I must be depressed, which was the furthest thing from the truth. I didn’t know then what I know now. I was malnourished. There wasn’t any breakfast, lunch, or dinner on most days. She decided to put me on medications to help with depression, hoping it would prevent us from fighting when she got home. I took the meds for a month and noticed some disturbing changes in my eye and hand coordination, so I flushed them all down the toilet and refused to take any more. The punishment? A hairspray can to my head.I can’t say I was a saint, but I can say I was a child. The more she threw at me, the more I defied her. I couldn’t come up with any rational reason to listen or respect anything she wanted me to do, so I did whatever it was that I wanted to do, and the whims of a 13/14-year-old are not the most mature or rooted in the best morality if you don’t have a guide.While I knew it was wrong to put an innocent man in jail, I didn’t realize that stealing was wrong. I somehow thought that stealing from small businesses was wrong, but anything at Wal-Mart was fair because f**k corporations. They were evil. They were evil because I needed them to be to justify the things I was doing. Stealing from a small business was terrible because those people were barely making it, but big companies? They could afford it.I would go into Wal-Mart and load my bags up with candy and anything that I could sell at school for money. I'd turn that money into meals. I wish I could brag that this was an entrepreneurial endeavor, but like the pecans I stole from our fridge and sold to neighbors in the 3rd grade, I didn’t have permission to take these either. However, I did like to eat, so I came up with any excuse to make this seem justifiable in my mind.Kids don’t buy healthy food, so I bought candy bars and sodas. I’m p

She's a punk punk, a punk rockerPunk punk, a punk rockerPunk punk, a punk rocker. - RamonesThe Ramones tape I found on the ground? I must have played that until it suffered the fate of most tapes - eaten by the tape deck. My mother didn’t mind the Ramones, but she freaked out over my dual interest in hip-hop, and by that, I mean The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She would go on and on about how it was a gateway album to the NWA. I hadn’t heard of NWA until she ranted about them, so naturally, I had to check them out. A friend at school had a tape that they let me listen to at lunchtime. I loved the irreverence of the music as it felt like a different kind of punk rock. Like the Ramones, there was a tension you could feel in the music, and it was beyond the lyrics, it was built into the energy of each song. If you accept the invitation, songs can tell you things even if you erase the lyrics. I started the 6th grade and discovered that not only did I love skateboards, but I loved skater boys. There were two in 6th grade that I would stand near at lunchtime so that I could gaze at them. Gabe and Will. They both wore these impossibly baggy pants and shirts that had logos on them that I didn’t understand. Luckily, on a trip to Gallup, I found a copy of Thrasher magazine and learned all about the brands they seemed to like and the skaters they looked up to. I skated to school until Tamar wanted her board back, so I started begging my mom for a skateboard. 6th-grade life was a rough transition. Going from class to class and managing a schedule was challenging, but the nice part about it was that I had a chance to see a cute boy at every hourly change. I had become boy crazy. When I wasn’t paying attention in class, sometimes I’d see one of the boys I loved walking by the door, and I remember feeling this rush of happiness. My clothing style, I would later discover, was called “preppy.” I wore whatever my mother bought for me, and because we went shopping once a year, there wasn’t much I could do about my wardrobe. My pal Tamar gave me some alternative clothes I could put on once I got to school. Mainly, some baggy pants. I would change back into clothes my mother would recognize before I went home. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with these boys if I could manage to get their attention, but I knew holding their hands would be nice. Unfortunately, it seemed that I was invisible to all of them. The skaters only cared about each other and skating and really didn’t pay attention to any girls. The other guys I liked stared at their feet. So, I did what all middle-school girls do in this scenario; I took up writing notes so I could profess my love to them. I started leaving notes in their lockers, but they’d be anonymous. I’d wait around the corner for them to open their lockers and find the notes and watch the looks on their faces. The thrill of a confession and remaining anonymous was so much fun. One of the boys I really liked, Robert, was in Speech and Debate with me. I chose a seat near him so I could soak up every moment near him. Gabe was in my math class and band, along with Will, and there’s Cornell who is off in high school. He was my after school crush. My crush on Robert was short-lived, as one day in class he looked at me and said, “Nice north star you have there.” and he pointed at my forehead where there was a zit. Along with all of these crushes and hormones, there were zits. I had them long before anyone else did, so I was an early hormonal achiever. I arranged to move far away from him and avoided him after that, and I also became super self-aware of my face and developing acne. My mother was overly concerned about my pimples. When I was in kindergarten, I had chickenpox, and she was so worried about future scarring that she hog-tied me and placed me on the couch with a bell I could reach with my mouth or put behind my back near my hands. I’d ring it if I needed help. She’d go to work during the day, so I would use the restroom, eat breakfast, and then I’d be tied up in front of the tv near a glass of water with a straw. If I needed to pee, I was told just to go. She put all sorts of lotions all over me and was determined for me not to have any scars because that would hurt my future prospects for marriage. Another strange Mom thing that I didn’t realize wasn’t normal until I got older and started sharing stories with friends. My mom, not able to hog-tie me for all of my teenage years, took me to a doctor in Gallup. They gave me some things that looked like Brillo pads to exfoliate with and some topical creams. They also suggested I steam my face every week. All of these things made everything worse. The Brillo pad took my skin off, the creams caused all sorts of dry and cracked skin and the steam, well, I have no idea what it did, but I think it just made everything angrier. So, I took to wearing makeup, which also didn’t help, but at least hid some of it. Every day I would put on my mask and head to sch

In the summer before the 6th grade, I experienced many transformations. I was moving on from elementary school and into middle school, where I’d have a locker. A locked compartment was something I was incredibly excited about because I perceived it as a little slice of privacy. I didn’t have any privacy at home, because I couldn’t hide anything, but in a locker, I could hide all sorts of things and have a secret life. My mother bought me some shelves to put inside, and I found a bunch of magnets so I could hang up posters of things that excited me. My interests during the summer radically changed. I went from Cabbage Patch kids to skateboarding and officially put what I considered “little” behind me. It was time to “grow up.” My step-father had a friend who I think was a math teacher, and he wanted to leave for the whole summer but needed someone to look after his dog. The job would pay $1 a day, and I was ecstatic to land it for the summer. There was one catch, though; his dog wasn’t an ordinary dog; she was a wolf—a beautiful, gigantic, silvery-grey-white wolf-dog named Wolfie. Well, wolves don’t like staying inside houses or yards, and instead, like to roam the lands and gather up stray dogs to run in their pack. My job was to go over to the teacher’s barrack and open up the door, then grab a steak from the fridge, microwave it, and then crack an egg on top. The freezer had a bunch of steaks, and the refrigerator was filled with eggs. If I needed more steaks, there was a deep freeze. Wolves don’t show up when you want them to, so you place the prepared steak on a plate in the middle of the kitchen and wait. Sometimes it would take Wolfie hours to show up, and sometimes she’d come right away. I was told not to touch her or approach her but to stand back and let her sniff around, eat, and do whatever it is she wanted to do. I also couldn’t turn the tv on because that spooked her, so I would have to bring something to read with me. When she came in, sometimes I’d be sitting on the floor in the living room, and she’d stare at me with piercing intelligent eyes. She’d walk near me and then run back towards the door, never quite sure about me, but she was definitely curious. She came close to me that summer probably two times, and it gave me chills. I was small, and she was massive, and it was clear that she could have me for lunch if she wanted to. When I ran out of things to read, I started looking through everything the man owned. Most of it was boring, but some of it made me wonder about him, and I tried to piece together his life. One day, I decided to nap in his bed, and next to the bed there was a stack of magazines. The magazines at the top were science or travel based, but as I dug down deeper, I discovered something profoundly amazing—Playboy magazines. I picked up a magazine, and when I looked inside, I felt a rush of happiness when looking at the beautiful women. I folded out the centerfolds and gazed at the women with amazement. I remember staring down at my chest, which was still flat and hoping that someday they would grow into breasts as I saw on the pages before me. Before this, I only had this feeling when I looked at the Sears catalog underwear section. If you are my age, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This was a whole other level as the bras were off. I didn’t have to use my imagination. I didn’t bother to put anything back where I found it that summer, so I’m positive that the man came back and saw the evidence of my Playboy discovery around his bed, and if he knew, he certainly didn’t tell anyone thankfully. When I was done with Wolfie, I would head out skateboarding. My friend Tamar got me into it that summer, and she let me borrow her board as I didn’t have one yet. I skated around happily, or I rode my bicycle. This summer is when I also noticed my first cute boy - Cornell. He lived across from Summer and Cindy, and he was so hot. Sadly, he was in high school and didn’t notice me much. I would ride over to see Summer, but really I was hoping to catch sight of him in his yard. Occasionally he’d wave at me and say, “nice bike!” or something small, and I would feel instant butterflies. He, like many Navajo boys, had long, fantastic hair that he tied back into a bun. Cornell loved to wear cowboy shirts, tight jeans, and traditional belt buckles covered in turquoise. Summer, Cindy, and I started two construction projects this summer. We built a treehouse on a tree that was nearby my place, and then we decided that the summer would not be complete without a swimming pool. We scouted around for a suitable spot to build one and found the perfect place over at the middle school. There was a courtyard with a decorative display of rocks in it, and miraculously, it was next to a garden hose. We had everything we needed there and got to work. We spent weeks building our “pool.” We dug a huge trench and then stacked the rocks up on the sides layered with mud in between. It was probably thre

Towards the latter half of the 5th grade, the school opened up a computer lab, and I was allowed to visit it two times a week with Mrs. Haney. The teacher was Mr. Curran-Perkins, my 4th-grade teacher’s husband. He built a fantastic lab with Macintosh computers and in the center of the room, there was a dot matrix printer with the peel-off holed paper on the sides. Going to the lab was my favorite part of the week because what we did in there was so interesting. He taught us a programming language called LOGO, where a little turtle went around drawing shapes when given commands. I drew a house and made some music. Our teacher printed our houses out for us so we could take them home and I hung mine up above my desk. When I went to sleep at night, I would look at it and try to figure out how the image on my computer screen somehow teleported across the room to the printer. If we weren’t using LOGO, we were doing adventure games, and the time during that class went by too quickly. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, I wouldn’t touch a computer again until I reached high school. The seed, however, was planted. I knew that I liked them, and there was something special about them that was meant for me.I started learning more about Navajo traditions and superstitions. There was a shared bathroom for all of the 3rd-5th graders and one day when I was walking towards the bathroom to use it, I heard a blood-curdling scream come out of it, and a girl ran down the hallway screaming, “yee naaldlooshii!! yee naaldlooshii!!”. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but pandamonium began, and it was like a domino effect. Suddenly children all around me were crying and screaming. Buses came and got the children and took them home, and I was sent home for the day completely baffled. I asked other children what was going on, and they told me to be quiet and never to speak about it. For those of you who have read Harry Potter, yee naaldlooshii are basically Voldemorts or Minecraft Endermen. If you engage with them too long, you die. It was my first encounter with a reaction of this kind, but it wouldn’t be the last. The older we became, the frequency of these occurrences increased.We had school assemblies where both Navajo and Hopi traditions were common. Long ago, these were warring tribes, but the Hopi had their island of reservation that was inside of the Navajo reservation on majestic mesas and there’s been lasting peace. You can only visit one of these mesas as an outsider. The Hopi people have incredibly beautiful clothing, weaving, and dolls, but some of their ceremonies are a thing of nightmares. They are designed to be scary. They have something called a Nataska, which is an uncle of the Ogre people and is a device used to scare children into being always on good behavior. They go door to door asking for gifts of food and if they are not satisfied with the gifts or the children’s actions they would kidnap, kill, and eat you. Naturally, they were always satisfied and children never ended up on their dinner plates, but this was a long-standing tradition that also was played out at school. I was mortified when the Nataska came to school. Their face masks were large and scary, they carried a bow and a knife, along with a potato looking sack. Their face masks clacked and made knocking noises which added to the fear and now and then they’d gather a child from the crowd, stuff them in a sack and then that child would disappear until later in the day. The child stuffed in the sack screamed in terror. The children around that child screamed and I was always thankful they never chose me.Hopi stories, traditions, and culture are taught to each generation through storytelling, dances, and dolls called kachinas. Some refer to the kachina as a religion. There are many kachinas, but the most important would perform during our school ceremonies. We had dancers that looked like hummingbirds, snakes and buffalo. We also had clowns. Two clowns, I remember the most, the mudhead clowns and the Koshare would provide comic relief between stories through songs about spirits, animals, rain, and crops. It is difficult to find photos of humans dressed in these kachina costumes as it is considered rude to photograph them and that it steals their spirits. Generally, a lot of Navajo and Hopi people do not enjoy being photographed. There are exceptions, but I’ve found it to be rare. Below are some kachina dolls that you’ll have to imagine as people dancing. I included a photo of a beautiful Hopi girl getting her hair done into buns. Navajo women typically had their buns on the back and only one of them. Some Hopi traditions seeped over into Navajo culture, so you’ll see some of their dolls have similar themes.I grew quite fond of Hopi culture. For one, it was quite beautiful and full of rich history and traditions and two, they were generally peaceful people who had their lands taken from them and were forced to be occupied by the largest native tribe

With my sister gone and all of my parent’s attention going to my baby brother, I was by myself a lot. In the summer of 1986, I became friends with two Navajo sisters, Summer and Cindy, who lived in my compound. Up until this point, my only close Navajo friend was Anabelle from Kindergarten in Chinle. The sisters lived in a vast dwelling compared to my barrack. It was one of those double-wide prefab units with three large bedrooms. Luckily, my friend’s rooms were towards the dirt road I rode my bike on, and they didn’t have a fence around their yard, so I could sneak over there and talk to them through their windows if they were grounded or couldn’t come out to play. I’d climb up on the device used to haul trailers and where you keep the propane. If their mom walked in, I'd duck down. We loved riding our bikes together and playing with Barbie dolls. I have the distinct memory of this being the last year of my childhood, where my imagination was vivid enough to bring my Barbie to life. When I was playing with her, I would become so immersed in the experience that she seemed pretty darn real. So real that sometimes I was even taken back by it when I came out of my make-believe world and shocked into this one. Until this point, I wasn’t aware that I was even having these experiences. Still, I remember putting down a Barbie after vividly seeing her going about her day and fixing her hair and having to take in the concept of living in both worlds.Towards the end of 1987, the ability to visualize like that way was forever lost. However, something incredibly bizarre replaced it. I don’t know how to describe it, other than my body would freeze up, my face would become expressionless, and I would have a daydream, but this would happen hundreds of times per day. I could no longer map a make-believe world onto an object, but I could be hijacked by one. My cognitive abilities took a massive shift because I started becoming more of a visual thinker and learner. My mother noticed this shift and took me to see the doctor, and they were convinced I was having petit mal seizures, which are micro-seizures. The doctors put me on a bed and exposed me to flashes of light while they observed me, and the results were inconclusive. When these moments happened, I was physically aware of where my real body was, but my mind was somewhere else. Often, I was meeting with a friend and working through something with them, or I’d be on what I and the tv show Westworld like to call a “loop.” Looping is a repeating visual daydream where I replay an interaction over and over and over until I can stop thinking of every possible outcome that could have happened. Some might call this an OCD thing, I don’t know, but if I ever needed to figure something out, I would create every pattern my mind could imagine and then have a conclusion in the end. Sometimes these “hijackings” as I call them now drove me bonkers. My mother said that I had done it since I was a baby, but that it was progressively getting worse as I was getting older.If you are wondering, yes, I still do this today. Today I often go to a park and hang out with friends at a picnic table, and that table has been a regular part of some of these experiences for over 20 years. I conjure up people who sit with me, and my mind creates constructs of how I perceive these people and its an exercise of what would “so and so” do. I can’t know what they would say or do, but in this make-believe world, we work it out. Unfortunately, I have no rational way of controlling this. It would be super cool if I could.As you can also imagine, this sometimes made school challenging. If things weren’t engaging enough, I would thoroughly check out and go to my imaginary world. When I was younger, I could put myself there at will and control the environment and leave it whenever I wanted, but now I’ve lost control, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get it back. One of my greatest wishes is to get that control back, and one of my greatest fears is getting hijacked forever.When I drive, I put on music, I grip the steering wheel, and I remain engaged with my experience so that I never drift off. I’ve never had an incident in my life that involved my daydreaming, and everyone says that I’m a safe driver. I suspect this is because of my focus on staying completely present. Sure, I have moments like everyone elsewhere; I don’t remember getting from point A to B because I was deep in thought, but I am never unsafe. I still don’t understand how human minds can do that, but we can.At school, I made two other Navajo friends. Davy and Velma. Davy was so awesome. She and I liked to wrestle and roll around on the floor together. Davy was really into physical contact and was my only friend in my early life who was like that. She would sit on me and try to make me fart, and then we’d fall over laughing if she ever succeeded. Velma, a state spelling bee champion, was in my gifted program. She was the sweetest person and wore these in

My teacher in the 4th grade, Mrs. Curran-Perkins, loved to have us write in our journals at the end of every school day. I found this incredibly tedious, but later in life, that darn journal became precious to me. Somehow, I managed to hold on to it until I was 19, and then I gave it to a boyfriend who I thought would prize it as much as I did. (He didn’t)The journal had a bright yellow cover with a basket pattern on it, and my name was carefully scrawled across the front.Cyan Callihan.At this age, I was obsessed with the cycle of life, so every story she had us write, I’d recycle the same theme over and over. What was the life of a snowflake? A leaf? Dirt? Every story I’d tell was about endings and new beginnings. Snowflakes would form into snowballs; they would then melt and evaporate, form into clouds, come down as rain, evaporate once again, form into more clouds, come down as snow, and back into snowballs the following year. I was fascinated with the beauty of it all, and its distinct lack of purpose. I tried my hardest to understand why these things happened on a seemingly never-ending loop, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. This question around life persisted as I grew older but compounded with time. The problem went from why does nature do what it does to why I, Cyan, existed at all in the first place.When I was smaller, being a planned life had its psychological advantages, but as I grew older, that wasn't enough to satiate me. I also couldn’t make sense of the turn of events with my friends at school. I formed a core group of girls that I hung out with and didn’t venture much outside of that circle, because if I did, that’s when the shoving and name-calling would resume. The girls and I sat by ourselves on the playground and skirted the edges of the basketball courts. Most breaks, I would play jump rope or chase my friends Erica or Helen around the perimeter of the yard.Sometimes I would injure myself just so that I would be sent home by the school nurse. My teacher was kind, and I liked Mrs. Haney’s class, but every passing week things became tenser with other kids. It became more fun to veg out on the couch and watch soap operas than deal with whatever was in store for me at school.On Halloween, my brother Afshin came into this world. That night, I went out trick-or-treating with my sister, as she was tasked with looking after me while my grandparents and step-father went to the hospital. A few days later, he came home. In the beginning, my baby brother was kept in the room with my parents, but one morning I went to get my sister up for school, and I knocked on the door, and she didn’t respond. Eventually, I gave up and opened the door, and well, she wasn’t there. Not only was she not there, but none of her things were there either. Where there was once a bed, there was now a crib, complete with a mobile that played “Go to sleep little baby” when you wound it up. Her dresser was even converted to a changing table, and there were paint swatches on the walls for the new colors the room was about to be painted.Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to figure out what happened, and I had to get to school. I’ll never forget this day for as long as I live because when I got to school, I couldn’t concentrate, and I wrote about it in that journal. When I got home, I asked my mother where Heather was, and she told me.“Well, she ran away.”She delivered it as a matter of fact statement. She didn’t seem phased that her daughter ran off in the middle of the night and had not returned. I knew my sister wouldn’t leave me by choice, so I definitely didn’t buy the story that she just up and left, but I couldn’t figure out where she was and if she was ever coming back. In her place was a crying needy baby. I went to bed that night and held on to Asia, my Cabbage Patch Kid, and cried. Asia was with me through thick and thin. She was my only constant.It wasn’t until a year later that I figured out where my sister was. The whole time she was “missing” she was living with my grandparents in Chinle. My Grandpa gave up his private room and started sleeping in Grandma’s bed. My mom took us for a visit, and I was sitting in the living room when my sister came out.Imagine my surprise and deep disappointment. I was incredibly hurt, and this was proof once again to me that my grandparents loved her more than me. The evidence kept building up, proving my narrative I was building about myself and my father.I decided that Heather didn’t care about me either.Later on, when I was much older, I talked to my sister about what happened. Well, our mother kicked my sister out of the house out of fear that she’d hurt the new baby, and she also accused her of trying to sleep with our step-father. My sister was only 15 years old.My brother was really adorable, so even though I wanted to hate him, I could not. Instead, he and I formed a close bond. I taught him how to crawl by having him want to grab a phone book on the floor, and I sang h

Our school had a new play structure, and I was excited to run carelessly across its magical suspension bridge. With its ropes and wood slats, I thought it was reminiscent of an ancient castle. After running back and forth a few times and feeling so much joy, a foot stretched out in front of me, and before I could do anything about it, I was falling towards the dirt several feet below. Reflexively, I stretched my arms out and landed on my hands first and then my knees.“F*****g bilagáana!! Get off the bridge!”It took a moment for me to realize what had just happened. One moment I was filled with joy, and the next, I was in so much pain. My hands had rocks embedded in them, and my knees were bloodied. I squealed in pain, but nobody came to my side, so I rolled over on my back and looked up. A group of kids stood laughing and staring down at me. I quickly sat upright and knocked the dirt and rocks off my hands, and blood started appearing on the base of my palms.“Don’t let them see you cry. Don’t.” I chanted that over and over in my mind. Crying is a weakness, and I wasn’t weak. I was small and skinny, but weak? No. I nervously looked around for a teacher. Didn’t anyone see what had happened to me? The adults were all somewhere else, and I knew that telling the teachers what happened would only make things worse, not better.I rose to my feet and looked up at the kids defiantly and decided I’d come back sometime after school and play with the kids who lived around us instead of those who came in by bus. The kids in my neighborhood didn’t hit or pick on me. They knew better than to do that because my sister would kick their ass. There are perks to having a “tomboy” sister. People are scared of girls who don’t act like “girls.” My sister was tough, and really, she had to be. She lived with this kind of stuff longer than I had, and she had my mother to contend with as well. However, I knew that as long as I was near home, nobody would touch me. Nobody dared.At school though? Those kids didn’t know who she was and they didn’t care. Up until the 3rd grade, things weren’t like this. All of the kids got along, but something happened in the 4th grade that I can’t put my finger on. All I can figure is that it is an age where you start questioning things around you and where adults or older children in your life begin to shape some of your thinking. You see, little children don’t know about hatred on this level. This stuff has to be taught by example.I took myself, with my head down, to the nurse’s office. Something I’d end up often doing after this, as I was always getting tripped, poked, or having things thrown at me. These assaults often came with the Navajo word “bilagáana.”Sometimes that word was trailed with “chąą’”Which roughly translates to “white person.. s**t.”I often thought I should say something back to defend myself, but I never had anything clever to say because I didn’t understand any of it in the first place. Children I once got along with became hostile, seemingly overnight, and the abuse, well it spread like a virus. A few of my Navajo friends thought this was unfair and kept hanging out with me, but a lot of them kept their distance for their protection or joined the ever-increasing gang of kids who looked at me like I was a “white” devil.My skin became a curse, and I hated it because I didn’t choose it. I didn’t get to decide what color I was. All of the stories I told myself about being a pale Indian came under personal observation. However, I knew based on television and with my experience in Texas that there were others out there in the world that looked like me. There were even three others in my school. A majority of the teachers were also pale. We had some Navajo teachers, but not many. The skin pigment of the school faculty was definitely in contrast with 99% of the children there who were Navajo.I finally got the courage to talk to my mother about what was going on at school.“Mom…. why am I this color?” I inched closer to her, so I was standing near her at the table.She looked at me, “What do you mean?”“Well, why am I this color, and nobody else is at school?”She looked puzzled. “I’m not sure that’s all that important of a question, is it?”I shifted my feet and looked down. “Kids at school seem to think it is.” An extended period went by, and she didn’t respond.Finally, I cried.I had held in so many tears at school, but in this moment of vulnerability, my mother gave me space to let out a whole month of frustrations.“Oh dear, you are just an ugly duck, that’s all.”I didn’t know what to say to that. My mother had a habit of telling my sister and me that we weren’t pretty or beautiful, but in the context of this conversation, being told I was ugly didn’t help.I started sobbing more.She stared right at me “You know the story, don’t you? The ugly duckling grows up and becomes a swan!”Well, swans are the opposite of ugly. Swans are beautiful. I still didn’t know how a duck becomes a swan, but it se