I’d have this tattooed on my inner arm…or maybe my wrist.
If I was the 22 year old today that I was back in the day, I absolutely would have tattoos. Not sleeves or twee ones like flowers and angels. Being that words are my métier, I would have sayings and quotes and hyroglyphic symbols. Because that’s the kind of 22 year old I was back in the day.
I had the shortest skirts, the wildest shoes and I brought Carnaby Street, or at least my vision of it, to the much more prosaic streets of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I thrived on pushing the envelope–and got in trouble a lot for doing so.
In college, I was on academic probation a lot (again). My idea of studying for an exam was to take uppers and pull an all-nighter memorizing someone else’s notes. It had to be someone else’s notes because even when I was in class, I was somewhere else in my mind.
Was I a bad kid? No.
I didn’t do drugs (okay, there was that brief experimentation with marijuana which ended badly). I always threw up before I got too drunk (someone named me the IBM machine because I would drink beer until I couldn’t drink anymore, go to the ladies room, throw up, and return to drink some more). And I lost my virginity at 18 to the boy I then married at 23.
Still, I was often the bane of my mother’s existence. Her first daughter had been mild and shy and obedient so she wasn’t prepared for the likes of outspoken, adventurous, don’t-tell-me-I-can’t-unless-you-want-to-insure-I-will me.
I think of all the trouble I could get into today if I was 22, and I wonder if I would push the envelope as much, seeing as that envelope is so much larger. I probably would, but maybe the inherently nice girl my mother raised would protect me from a Lindsay Lohan life. Even at 22, there were certain avenues I didn’t venture down. I had a friend called Ricka, an artist, who was maybe a year older than I and light years more experienced. When I was with Ricka, I got a taste of the wild Bohemian life and, frankly, it scared me.
Thinking about that now, knowing what I do about myself, I see that my wild acts were born of curiosity and daring, not of an urge for self-destruction. I never wanted to go too far over the edge to where I couldn’t get back. I wanted to be bad-ish, but not dead.
