Adolescent Effusive

The theme of today was insecurity.
During Spanish today, I felt like a complete asshole because I kept getting puntos for my team. Everyone was like, "You're a Spanish machine!" I don't know why, but this made me feel really uncomfortable. I felt so singled out. I felt like everyone thought I was some big arrogant egg head. That's the last thing I'd ever want to be. Besides a criminal.
Creative Writing came along, and after two days of avoiding reading my story aloud, I had to. Miss Corbett kept calling it a novella, which, again, made me feel like I'm some asshole egg head who doesn't do anything by school work. Then I actually had to read it out loud. Yes, it's about a stuffed cat named Zappi and his owner, a 31 year old raver/ecstacy user. I felt like such a weirdo that I chose to write about life as a stuffed cat. 75% of the class wrote about dating. I was reading it and I sounded like a total idiot because I kept stumbling over all of the words that I so carefully chose, and laughing at my own jokes because I'd never heard them out loud before and...oh my god. I hated it so much. I just stopped in the middle and said, "I hate reading. *insert summary of the rest of the story here*"
Miss Corbett said, "Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Mary Kate's brain." She meant it as a compliment, but it just made me feel like a freak.
I rarely get really embarassed, but I was dieing. Everyone was laughing and said they liked it, but I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. I felt so completely different from my peers and really hated it.
Of course, it was more awful because I couldn't stop being flustered for like 10 million hours after it and Alex completely called me on it. He was like, "I've never seen you so self conscious. My shyness has rubbed off on you!" At this point, I wanted to be at home, under my covers.
I tried to explain that reading what I write out loud is pure torture for me. I said something analagous to the fact that it makes me feel like I'm bearing my entire soul in front of people I hardly know. He said he didn't understand because my story was really good.
Am I wrong to not want to share something that I worked really hard on, something that contains so many different peices of me, with complete strangers who know nothing about me?
I think this is all stemming from the fact that I'm not over the fact that basically my entire class plus tons of other people heard me speak at Zac's funeral and saw me play his part in the play. Both of those things were done for such private reasons, and I can't stand that people know that about me.
I feel completely vulnerable. Like everyone knows what my achille's heel is, and I have no control over what they do about it.

posted by M.Jazz @ 2:38 PM