confession: fake glasses.

{me in all of my bespeckled glory}

I wore fake glasses my senior year of high school.

I was telling this to someone the other day, someone who didn’t know me back then, and the reaction I was given made me realize: My old self is disappearing.

Gosh, is this what happens?

That at 25, the old you, the you from high school and middle school and elementary school, starts to slowly wind its way out of your life, like water through a drain? That only a handful of people even really know the you that used to be?

I thought I was so awesome my senior year of high school. Not awesome in the head cheerleader kind of a way, but awesome in the look-how-fun-and-different-I-am-without-being-completely-strange-like-a-Goth kind of way.

My brother, by far the more “punk” of the Butterworth siblings (I think even my usage of the term punk here denotes my utter squaredom), makes fun of the old me, the me who wore dog tags and Converse tennis shoes and a military-style bag that I covered with lyrics from the Mary Tyler Moore show theme song. (I am in tears just typing this.) The me who listened to Relient K and thought that classified as some kind of rebellion.

In a fit of silliness, a friend and I decided to buy fake glasses at the mall one day. I wanted to look older, yes (apparently I thought glasses would erase the fact that I weighed about 90 pounds and had the build of a 12 year old boy), but more importantly, I wanted to look like a journalist. You know, Walter Kronkite. Tom Brokaw. Barbara Walters. The greats.

(I just Googled all of those names and none of them wore glasses, so I’m not sure where I got this idea, but you get the point. Also, I don’t think Katie Couric ever wore glasses until she scored the nightly news gig — a far more serious venture than the shenanigans going on over at Today. So I don’t think my high school logic was entirely flawed.)

Two girls on a mission, my friend and I refused to buy our fake lenses at Claire’s — even goofy teenage girls have their standards — and instead found some at one of those carts you used to see in the mall. It’s still not clear to me why a cart specializing in faux frames and lenses even existed, but it did, and we were its lone, proud supporters.

It took us no time at all to whip our new specs out of their packaging and don them for a viewing of Tuck Everlasting at the local “artsy” theatre. (Looking back, why on earth was Tuck Everlasting even at that theatre? It stars Rory Gilmore for crying out loud.) By the end of the film, our heads ached from the frames, which I’m assuming were probably too tight. My friend had the good sense to never wear hers again.

Not me.

Nope, there I am in my high school yearbook, with a pair of glasses on my face that I advertised as necessary.

And I thought I was so cool.

I stopped wearing my fake glasses long enough to need real ones, and now I forget to wear my prescription lenses more than I actually wear them. How’s that for irony?

This is the me that I don’t want to forget.

I know I was dumb and goofy and did stupid teenage things, and I’m grateful I’m about to turn 25 and have just the right amount of goof combined with maturity (I hope). I’m grateful that those years are behind me, that I don’t live in the past, and that most people don’t even know all the truly nerdy things I did.

But there’s a part of me that thinks that girl was pretty cool, and that the world is missing out by not knowing her in all of her fake glasses glory.

So I’m letting her out of the box for today. I figure she deserves a little air every now and then.

(And now, please, do share: What is the weirdest thing you did in high school?)