Walking through the crowded halls I often wonder what it`s like to be normal. Like really normal. I wonder what it`s like to not be trapped in your own head and the descriptions of your intellectual achievements. How is it to go home and have your mom comfort you after you fail a test? What`s it like to not have to live up to anything? I know it can’t be all great but, what if for a moment, it`s better than being me.

I`ll admit I`ve never been “normal”. I`ve never been able to do what other kids do. I`ve never been able to be worry-free, or smile and laugh with friends. Actually, I`m not even sure if I have friends. I can`t connect with people like others do. I can`t feel what other people fell. At least not on the same level. Maybe it`s because I was sheltered, or because I was a smart kid, always too good for the normal crowd.

But I crave it more than anything.

It always came at a wonder to me how people live there day to day lives. Like this girl I see in the hallway all the time. She’s a blonde, blue eyed, long legged volleyball girl. Her eyes are always rimmed with dark eyeliner. She looks tough. She`s not. But she`s also a smart kid. At least that`s how you would see her if you didn’t know her. Secretly she`s a gang w***e. The ringleader amongst all the men she`s had to sleep with to get to the top. She`s dirty and unstable, but people love her.

It makes me wonder how you can live with yourself when you’re a w***e. How are you not in complete and utter shambles? Have you no self-respect? I knew her once when we were younger. Her mind was shattered and her heart torn. Is this what happens to broken people? Does the darkness eat their heart and the depression shred their mind until finally, they are a shell of who they were? Is this what’s going to happen to me?

Back in junior high, being depressed was normal. Which was weird, but maybe it`s because everyone was. I know I was. Still am. All the time. That`s when I was reunited with one of my best friends. She`s not a smart kid. She actually has a learning disability, but unlike mine, hers actually gets in her way of learning. Mine gets in the way of living. The smart kids have the world in the palm of their hands they say, but here she is. We`ll call her Kay just to give her an identity. Kay is so happy. She went from a depressed punk to one of the most beautiful people I know. But that`s not how it`s supposed to work. Only the smart kids are supposed to be happy and have a bright future. The normal kids aren`t supposed to have that luxury. But as far as I see it, Kay`s future shines brighter than any light I can even imagine. While mine, the smart kid, has never been dimmer. I can`t see past the next couple of hours let alone my future. How does one hold the world in the palm of their hands when they don`t even have the will to even fathom reaching out and trying to grab it?
Body image and mentality are important. People are always worrying, killing, and starving themselves because of it. Although normal kids get this too, it becomes so much more when you’re a smart kid. You don`t get to be depressed because you have the whole world ahead of you and you have no reason to be. You don`t get to cry and be hurt because nothing ever goes wrong for you. Body image is something that shouldn`t even cross your mind because your brain makes you perfect. You are way too smart to starve yourself. Everything falls into place for you without fault, so you don’t get to wish you were dead.

But I hurt and bleed like it doesn`t.

Mental illness and the smart kid mind are almost as fatal as wolfsbane. It slowly shuts down your systems until your lungs stop working or your heart stops. To be smart but sick is a prison. Another smart kid, a girl we`ll call Rai, fights so hard against it. She was once so skinny and beautiful, not that she’s ugly now. Rai is a schizophrenic bipolar nymphomaniac that happens to be in all AP classes and countless after-school activities. Her mind doesn’t let her trust people and her personality makes it hard to make and keep friends. On top of all that, her need for sex makes her a threat to any girl she tries to get close to. Cause what if she steals their boyfriend? Her mind works miraculously but the details get shuffled and warped into things barely understandable. She gets by because she’s been piecing her thoughts back together her whole life. But now what bears on her more and makes the voices in her head so much more unbearable, is the effect her birth control has taken on her. Rai has gained 25 pounds at the most that have all gone to her thighs and under her chin. The voices won’t leave her alone. The people won’t leave her alone. Every doubt in her mind racks at her brain. But Rai is always smiling and cheerful. Because the smart kids aren`t supposed to be crazy. They aren’t supposed to be suffering inside. So the fact that the night it all became too much and she tried to overdose on heroin resulted in her just regretting it didn’t work isn’t a surprise. After all, smart kids aren`t supposed to want to die.

Surprisingly though, half of us are already dead. Inside at least. It brings me back to a poem I wrote when I was younger. It`s a poem I wrote about a friend of mine.  She is a musician, an actress, and holds one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. But her life wasn`t easy. Her father pushed her while her mother taught her twin brother how to gracefully dance his fingers across the ivory keys of a piano. Pat`s piano is amazing. Never in a million years would I ever have thought that his rough touch would glide so smoothly and so softly over the melodies. But this isn`t about him. It`s about Kate. Kate and her golden voice and enchanting viola. She puts me to shame, but all she feels is shame herself. The poem was sad. It spoke of a depressed girl that killed herself. The girl ripped up her music and ate it before breaking apart her instrument, cutting herself with it and leaving a message on the wall in her own blood, and eventually killing herself by stabbing her own neck with the splintered neck of her own instrument. But Kate never came to that. Kate realized that even though she`s suffering, music could never be her end. She loves it too much. It brings her hope.

Pat, Kate’s twin, is a smart kid. He`s a different kind of broken. Pat is socially isolated and disconnected from people. He doesn’t know how to talk to people.  He`s awkward and silly. But his pain is so obvious in the way jokes. It`s reflected in his eyes and the shadows within. To be the smart one, but the one who isn`t the pride and joy of the family isn`t what it means to be a smart kid. At least not in the standards the world sets.
But sometimes the smart kids don’t make it, and that`s a travesty to the world. One of the brilliant minds that was never supposed to feel pain, became overrun with it and never came back. But it`s a pain that is all too real. Dal. He was 18 and fresh outta high school. He was my mother in a way. He protected me and looked after me. He strutted in his high heels with pride. The scratch and sniff stickers on his dashboard could make an orphan smile. His mind was a creative muse like no one I had ever seen. His fashion ideas were ideal, his style impeccable. But smart kids aren`t made of steel. Smart kids bleed like normal ones do. The night that he died, I cried myself to sleep. Our conversation came to an abrupt stop as he fell asleep talking to me, making promises on our future. The next morning his mother informed me his heart stopped in his sleep. He fell asleep talking to me and never woke up. But it wasn`t because of the brain that gave him the twenty-two-hundred-dollar scholarship to Columbia college that he slipped away from the world, or the dissociative identity disorder that wreaked havoc over his life. It was his heart. The very heart that bleed over the loss of his boyfriend and longtime best friend two weeks prior. Dal died of a broken heart. But he died peacefully. A smart kid finally free of his racing mind and troubled life. Because even smart kids can be gay and abused.
Normal kids die too. Normal kids hurt and bleed. They get depressed and suicidal. But it`s not something you expect from the smart kids. We aren`t supposed to be like this. We are supposed to be perfect. But we aren`t. Most of us are broken and incomplete. Most of us have lost a piece of us along the way. Like I lost Dal. Like Dal lost John.