Day #79: The Ugly Kid

When I was in junior high school, I determined that I was the "Smart Friend."

In any group, I would be the "smart friend" and I was...sort of okay with that.

Then I got to high school, where there were many people smarter than I was, which meant being the "smart kid" was off the table, and the thing about being the "smart kid" is that, even though nobody explicitly points it out, you're also "the ugly kid."

The other side of being the "smart kid" is that you're also the "ugly kid."

But now, I wasn't even the "smart kid." Now I was just "the ugly kid."

So I was determined, instead, to be the "funny kid."

The problem was, I wasn't very funny. I couldn't tell a joke to save my life. I didn't have any good stories. Wacky things didn't happen to me.

That left me with one option:

I could be mean.

I could make fun of other people and people would laugh and I would be beloved because that's how high school works.

You can either be pretty and loved, or bitchy and loved.

I had to live with the latter.

Then I came out my senior year, and suddenly I didn't have to be the "mean/ugly kid" anymore, because now I was just going to have to be "the gay kid."

And believe it or not, I didn't actually mind being the "gay kid," but as it turns out, being the "gay kid" meant I was still expected to be "the mean kid."

Once I got out of high school and started dating, I found that I was no longer "the gay kid," obviously, but I was still the "ugly kid" and occasionally the "funny kid" but only if I was being a bitch.

To this day, I laugh off jokes about my appearance, or what I wear, or a bad haircut, but if you want to know what feels like a knife to the heart, it's when somebody makes me feel ugly, and it doesn't take much.

Sometimes people don't even mean to do it. They say something like "It's so nice to have friends you're not attracted to" or "You're so smart."

Okay, obviously, that last one shouldn't signal to me that I'm ugly, but you have to remember, ugly kid equals smart kid.

Hey, what am I telling you this for? You all went to school. You know ugly kid = smart kid. That's just how the Universe works when you're twelve.

Sadly, twelve sometimes stretches all the way to twenty-six.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but there were times when I would have given up everything else I had inside of me to make the outside look undeniably great for just a day.

It seemed like the people who were attractive didn't need to do anything else, whereas I was always pickling my soul to drag a few laughs out of the pretty people just so I could hang out at their lunch table for another few minutes.

I think I'm starting to understand a little bit more about who I was when I started this project seventy-nine days ago.

I was mad at myself.

Oh sure, people think you can write. Some people think you can act. Maybe a few people find you charming or sweet or, at best interesting, but face it, Kevin Broccoli, nobody on this planet thinks you're attractive.

I think up until now everything I did was in an effort to change that.

I pimped out my writing, and my acting, and anything else I could to try and make myself seem more appealing, because Billy Joel is not exactly a gorgeous guy and somehow he wound up with Kristy Brinkley.

Well, not "somehow." When you write "Piano Man," you wind up with Kristy Brinkley.

Making great art is the only loophole in life. The only thing that makes non-attractive people attractive.

And I've been killing myself for two years trying to make great art, and I still feel like the ugly kid.

So maybe that's why I'm so damn angry all the time.

I'm good at being the angry kid. I'm good at being the ugly kid. I'm good at being the guy who can make eight nasty comments about one person in under a minute.

I'm good at it, because I'm scared to embrace other possibilities.

I'm scared that I can learn to be the nice guy who can write and act, but who sits in a corner and watches while all the pretty people dance.

I'm scared that I might end up accepting that.

And I'm not sure I'm ready to yet.

I'm not sure there isn't a balance between the two.

And I've still got three weeks left to figure it all out.