[ This is “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey to give a bit of soundtrack to the fourteenth and final excerpt of The Worst Writer Ever. If you’d like, here are the previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Thanks for reading, it’s been pretty great.]
As a Summer Person, I wanted more than anything else to belong wherever I was but having never spent a full amount of time in either Lake Placid, New Jersey or, later on, Connecticut meant I could not completely become a part of those societies.
My psychologist, when I had one in my late twenties, deemed this important because spending summers off somewhere else as a child rather than where I went to school meant I never really had a summer where I could bond with my classmates. And never spending the school year in Lake Placid meant a similar result. As classmates it created a bonding experience via the school system, but being whisked away as soon as school got out never allowed my peers to get to know me outside of school. Not just that but changing places like clockwork—the same time every year for eighteen years—meant I had to adjust my behaviors to become a part of that society and since I did not have that school bond with anyone in Lake Placid it created an air around me that said I didn’t quite belong.
A friend, probably just before high school ended said, “Well it must be summer because Dave Press is here.” He meant it in a good-natured way, but it stung me, because I knew that I wasn’t really a local like I wanted to be, but just a fair weather person. This situation created this hodge-podge of personality conflicts that I tried to assimilate to fit in creating—I don’t know—this non-person of conflicting identities. One identity did not mesh with the other and I was holding back on something else depending on location. I’m not explaining this well, but I tried latching onto identities I wanted to be and all that really did was create this fraudulent coat on the surface of my skin that was glaringly obvious. I was never truly myself; myself being this vessel of personalities brought on by a desire to belong in every plane I existed in. In other words, I was no real person, but a collection of people that don’t really like each other.
