My Inner Witch

My body was plastered in wicked lime green paint and I’ve never felt more beautiful.

It was the opening night of the Wizard of Oz at Wishing Star Theatre. Every seat in the audience was filled with eager attendees holding flowers and “congratulations” teddy bears. The eager attendees were parents watching their prepubescent children. Wishing Star Theater was a children’s play production located in a warehouse building outside of Chicago. The year was 2010 and the theater closed a few short years after the final show of Wizard of Oz.

I was a fervent middle-schooler who wore Maybelline cover-up over her inflamed skin; who, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, always beamed “an actress,” holding onto the s for too long, pupils carving into stars.

My big break was the moment I read my name under “Wicked Witch” on Wishing Star’s casting page and my mom took me out for Portillo’s french fries.

As I stepped onto the stage to chant my prologue, followed by the barbarous laugh I’d practiced hundreds of times (to my older brother’s demise), not a speck of nerves seeped from my green pores. I am the Wicked Witch of the West. I was the Wicked Witch of the West.

Like Wishing Star’s budget, my acting career slowly dissipated into thin air.

As the pimples faded, so did my personality. My best friend since the age of three likes to reminisce on how I’d walk up to strangers at Subway — her favorite: a six foot biker wearing stereotypical black leather boots and tattoos of fire-spewing-dragons — and chat with them like they were my grandma. Tracing forward to my freshman year of high school, my stomach left my body and dived off a cliff at the thought of asking my track coach to use the bathroom. So, I put on a persona of naïveté and acted like a child the following years because I didn’t know who I was as an adult.

I was sporting black leather tights and a red “Camp Rock” tank top the last time I was on stage. I remember opening up the thick velvet curtains to peak at the audience — my favorite pre-show ritual. When my eyes met a row of girls from my school a year old than I (mind I was now in seventh grade), my eyes dipped behind my shoulder blades and hid in their ridges. My posture mimicked the part I was ashamed to play: a backup dancer. My infatuation with popularity rested in those girls’ spectating gaze. I ran backstage and smoothed my bouncy brown curls and touched up my red lipstick — the thought of any red residue on my teeth pasted stones in my gut. The Wizard of Oz was only a year before Camp Rock, yet my confidence dried from Demi Lovato to a mere Scarecrow.

In combination with my lack of self and lack of maturity, I proved to Wishing Star’s owners why they assigned me the part they did — my notorious vitality blurred to mediocracy. My lips never opened wider than a small “o” during the entire performance.

One could observe that I looked more stylish in my rocker attire, and therefore I should’ve internalized that as confidence. Looking back, I know I felt the most me in the pointy black hat because I channeled an inner power in myself that made me feel valued, assertive and unique. Within just a year, I ingrained how teenage girls should behave in my headspace, and let it fog my inner witch, my inner badass.

Red is the color of beauty and confidence, yet I’ve never felt less radiant. My name was never found on a casting page again.

In the time I would have spent at rehearsals, I ran. I could easily run half marathons with my imagination entertaining my attention. Runners can be shy, runners can be in their head, and runners have beautiful bodies — this became my mantra. I’d create stories of long lost cousins falling in love with each other in my mind while inhaling suburban forest air. If I went a day without running, I’d sit with pattering feet and a mind fogged with disappointment.

Two stress fractures and a debilitating case of tendonitis later, my running career was finished by my junior year of high school. My calf muscles and abdominal strength softened having to recover and slow the water down. But the stories lived on inside. I could no longer run away from the self-discovery journey the universe was trying to track me on.

The first poem I ever wrote resembled a shape that I hoped would distract from my lack of lingual direction. I was reading a novel I can’t remember the name of and I used a purple sharpie to trace over lines on the page. I was left with what I believed to be something: a start.

I was

yelling, running, climbing swinging

chasing   I was

      a piece of chalk on the blacktop

 and I did my best to ignore the bruises and bumps

   It was the end

I need the peace, the retreat from

our lives that discomfort

  pain, sadness and hatred so

frequently felt. Love and contentment do

not protect me the strongest one

can      sense the more violent fear, hate

It was the end

It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I learned a pen and paper could give me the same confidence acting once did. I no longer wanted to perform the stories, I wanted to handcraft them. I honed my skills and they evolved each night in my journal, and eventually onto the blog I created the summer before college.

Writing makes me feel valued, in control, the most me. It allows my inner sorceress to shine — and I found beauty. I feel beautiful following my passion. My fashion sense may not mimic that of a celebrity actress and my body may not look like an avid runner’s, but I feel at peace with myself, which has allowed my passion to shine through everything I do. Validation from the row of girls at my final performance could never offer the internal acceptance I have by staying true to what makes me feel the most me.

Sometimes I’ll let a Wicked Witch cackle escape my lips when I’m in search of inspiration to write — my most intimate creations always evolve then.