Socially Awkward Girl's Guide to Life: an introduction

As my mother would have you know, I came out of the womb awkward. You were such a strange looking thing. Growing up, my strangeness was generally embraced and I reveled in my talent of making my parents laugh with my incessant chatter. But then I started pre-school, where my "teacher" (I'm pretty sure it was just some old lady with a house) didn't appreciate my imagination and neither did the idiotic 4 year olds. We started off every afternoon in a circle for story time, going around telling stories about our morning. If you've ever listened to a 4 year old try to follow a train of thought, you know what an unintelligible snooze-fest story time was. I tried to spice things up. My ingenuity was met with trouble, as the teacher eventually spoke to my mother IN FRONT OF MY CHUBBY INNOCENT FACE to say that I straight up made shit up during story time. In her sketchy preschool teacher eyes, it was time for an intervention. I was a little liar. I didn't have the vocabulary at the time to stand up for myself, but what I was thinking was: Bitch, you never specified that it was NONFICTION story time. Don't get it twisted.

On the drive home in our embarrassingly large grey van (as if being awkward and unpopular wasn't enough), my mom merely said, before turning the tape up, "Hanna, quit lying through your teeth," a phrase my 4 year old self had yet to hear, but was sure to repeat again and again while solidifying my status as the weird girl while I sat in the corner playing alone during subsequent play times at that hellhole called preschool. From that day on, I kept it real during story time, delighting my fellow four year olds with lame visions of me waking up, combing my bowl haircut, eating Crispy Rice (not even Rice Krispies!), and finding my hypoglycemic sister, yet again, eating fists full of sugar under the bed.

By the time I got to kindergarten, I felt ashamed of my doughy self enough times that I retreated inward and never said anything out loud in public again. I amused myself in my head, occasionally accidentally talking to myself out loud while walking alone in the playground as the other morons, I mean girls, pretended to be cheerleaders. My teacher had a conference with my mom and asked, "Does she talk at home? She never speaks in class." To which my mother roared with laughter as "Hanna, do you ever shut up?" was a common phrase in the household. I juggled two personas -- the painfully shy, socially awkward child at school and the strange, hyper loudmouth at home. This went on for years.

As a living, wheezing socially awkward success story, I have several books worth of solid, unsolicited advice to offer fellow spazzes. But Hanna, you have no friends.... And you write in a blog, you might say, to which I respond (in my head) through red cheeks, belieing my so called yet ephemeral success : Eff you, my husband is a hot doctor. I'm starting to write (again, in my head) The Socially Awkward Girl's Guide to Life, with topics ranging from Talking to Peers (Step One: Don't Say Peers) to Surviving Girl Scout Camp When You Look Like a Boy to Losing Your Virginity Before 30.