I feel like I’ve used one particular term far too often in my writing, and it’s “alien in a skin suit.” Most of the time, I say this when I’m referring to how I feel about myself, especially with regard to my well-documented social ineptitude and how I sometimes feel like I have to put on a convincing impression of a human to get people to like me (as I’ve learned, if this impression is a literal Trump impersonation, it doesn’t play as well—after all, the guy’s approval ratings aren’t so hot.)
But perhaps I’m so inclined to repeatedly say “alien in a skin suit” because one of my most formative memories involved quite literally telling everyone that I was an alien in a skin suit.
Most of you know I grew up on the Northeast, but what many of you don’t know is that I was born in Los Angeles. My memories of Los Angeles are fragmented, even with my freakishly good memory. My Los Angeles memories may be incomplete but they are specific: the wrought iron gates in my neighborhood, a fire truck play structure at the playground made of always-too-hot silver metal (I promise I have some memories that were not related to types of metals.) I recall, very faintly, my brother being born (despite my parents waiting until his birth to know his sex, I was so confident he would be a boy that I didn’t even bother to ask my dad about it when he returned home from the hospital.)
But it feels like my sentience and memory really flipped on after my family (which by then included my newborn brother and six-year-old me) moved across the country. And one of the first things I remember vividly, in my entire life, was my decision to tell my entire first grade class that I was an alien—something they actually believed.
