When I was Born

Do you remember the hippies from the late '80s and pre-grunge '90s? Even though those were my tween years, I was one of them. We snubbed our noses at Paula Abdul, The New Kids On the Block, and listened to the Beatles, the Stones, and Janis Joplin. But now, for some reason, whenever I hear '80s U2 or '80s Edie Brickell I think of what it was like to be a hippie in those years. In an odd way, it was really liberating: it was like, I don't have to follow all these lame trends because I should've been alive in the '60's, I'm just displaced, an alien, and proud of it.
Now, I mentioned I was a tween. I was not a member of my generation who did drugs and had sex before high school. I was simply a remarkably free-spirited (if only I could get that back), dreamy, artistic budding adolescent who liked to wear her mom's clothes from college. It was a pretty sweet deal: how many budding adolescent girls do you know who are free-spirited? If I had been into punk, I probably would've been a riot grrrl, because I was a feminist, but I didn't get into punk and thusly riot grrrl until kind of after the fact.
When I was a hippie tween, I was the only hippie I knew or was friends with. My friends were mostly quite preppy. I was confident that in high school, I'd find people exactly like me. When that didn't happen, I thought it would happen in college. That didn't happen either. Oh, of course I met hippies. But I've found over the years that I just don't fit in with crowds. I deeply cherish my few close friends as well as my many and diverse not-so-close friends, even though I don't have a crew of people who all dress, act, and think the same way I do. I never have had a crew like that, and to tell you the truth I don't think I want one. Does anyone have a group like that, outside of bad teenage movies? You can answer that-- it's a real question.
Right now I'm feeling pretty damn near content. I know it's because of my husband. We're both two square pegs who found each other. It was a hard pill to swallow when I found out there wasn't going to be that magical place filled with people "just like me," and maybe I was naive for thinking that would happen in the first place, but once I accepted it-- with the help of real friendships not based on what music we listen to or where we buy clothes or even what books we read-- a whole new world opened for me. You could say it was then that I was born.