late bloomer

Now Playing: Lolita by The Veronicas (nursery rhymes I sang in my dreams, I'm lost in the woods and you're baring your teeth)

'I'm the messed up child of a baby boomer, I was in the gifted class but a total late bloomer'

Never mind that that line is from a song called 'I Don't Understand Job' (I'm sure you can guess what that's all about).

I guess I am what you would call a late bloomer. Development has nothing to do with intelligence, almost - when I was about eight, just before hormones kicked in, I remember feeling like I had to pretend to be much more grown up than I was - all I wanted to do was play with dolls and wear dresses.

Hormones kicked in early. They just took an absurdly long time to have any positive impact. Like Phenergan. You're asleep before you're numb.

One of the many idiosyncrasies about me is that I am - or can be - actually quite childlike. On the way to school a car drove through a cable gate and I just stood there and refused to move until the cable came back up again. I don't actively pretend to be a baby - but sometimes certain things just make me regress back into early childhood. It's not entirely uncommon to see me staring in big baby-eyed awe, or to compare handspans with people (my hands are almost always smaller than everyone else's, especially big hulking seventeen year old boys).

So there's that, and the fact that I have FINALLY acquired a vaguely adult-looking body and I'm sixteen and hormones have kicked in. Or, more accurately, everyone else's hormones have kicked in. Sometimes hanging out with boys is like chilling in the lion enclosure at the zoo. Chances are, nothing will happen. But there's always potential.

Being a late bloomer is having absolutely no experience at the age when everyone just assumes you have experience, or if you're old enough to behave in a way that might imply something about your past that you actually totally missed out on because you were geeking out over Star Wars or something. You miss a lot of bases, and everything gets a bit extra-chronological and incongruous.

But it's cool. It's exciting. You fill in the gaps with imagination.