I am whatever you say I am: My confusion.

I just felt the need to use Eminem lyrics for the title. I thought they fit. Plus, its a very catchy song. Anyhoo, on with business.

I do not have a label. I am not goth, prep, punk, emo, or any weirdo combination. I am Sruti. Yet, since I was 11 years old, I have wanted a label. I can't quite explain it. When I was 11, I began to use the internet and started becoming a junkie, a process which is now complete. The very first message board I ever went on was the-n.com

I first went on there with the username 4evagrl. Don't ask. I saw a lot of people posting poetry and I'd been writing for three years by that time. I posted my own. I browsed the forum and played games. On the forum, I saw a lot of arguments. Girly girls vs. Tomboys. Goths vs. Happy people. It was very generalized.

I didn't think I was any of those things. I wasn't a girly girl, but I couldn't exactly call myself a tomboy just because I played video games. I knew I wasn't Goth but I also knew I was annoyingly chipper. I was just annoying. and I was annoyed.

My poetry was eschewed in favor of other poets' work. Dark things with metaphors I neither liked nor understood, people claiming to have a million piercings and me being ignored when I weakly added that I had two piercings in each ear. My stories about talking cats and magic diaries were booed while stories about boyfriends and betrayals were praised endlessly. I began to think that whatever I was was wrong and that I should be like all these people. I tried desperately to put myself into one group.

I tried to pretend that I liked boys who made fun of my shoes and wrote poetry about despair and darkness, devoid of any sense or rhythm. I filled my diary with thoughts that weren't mine. I finally found friends in school but I didn't know what to make of myself. I talked about anime with one of my closer friends, but with another close friend I couldn't relate to her obsession with Friends. I didn't even watch anything other than Cartoon Network, Nick, or Disney. My entire seventh grade year was just me being fake to myself.

People online debated over Simple Plan and Good Charlotte and I'd never even heard of either. I never turned on the radio. I just listened to my Britney Spears CD over and over. I was sheltered. My parents sheltered me and I am immsensly thankful that I was not spoonfed MTV as a preteen. But at the time, it made me feel screwed up. In eighth grade, the faking continued. I discovered Green Day, Evanescence. I had a Good Charlotte CD.

I was playing piano and veena. I was writing more and more, reading more and more. People online talked about preps and teenies now. They said Green Day were posers and that Billie Joe sounded awful. People formed Anti-Green Day threads and Anti-Anti-Green Day threads. I didn't know whether or not liking certain bands was acceptable. People online, I don't know why I stayed on that stupid website, called me deaf for liking Chronicles of Life and Death. People in school made fun of me for carrying a picture of Billie Joe and dynamite around in my binder.

I learned a garbled definition of punk and learned, to my horror, that people did drugs and sliced themselves open. I learned that people cried at night like I did and that some trashed their rooms instead. I wasn't very sure of anything. Towards the end of eighth grade, I stopped reading stories and poems on there. I didn't want anything to do with that writing. I found new online friends who agreed with me that LP and Evanescence should do a collaboration, friends who didn't call me a poser for liking Green Day after American Idiot. My friends in school got to know me better because I got to know me better.

But people still carried labels and I wanted one. I'm odd like that. My friends gave me burned CDs of My Chemical Romance and Snow Patrol and System of a Down. I liked this world of music. I was...happy. I found my writing style again and continued. I stopped logging onto The N and confusing the hell out of myself. I guess my school wasn't very big on labels. I was just another kid in the hallway. Sometimes I was the fat kid. Sometimes I was the kid that fell down the stairs (long story) or the kid who dislocated her knee (another long story).

After I moved, I became uber-obsessed with GDA. I found GSB and eventually made an account. And the rest is what my friends here know. I've grown as a writer. I've grown as a person. I don't get labels and I never will. That's just me. If you say you're emo or punk or just a random schizo, I'll take your word for it because I have no clue.

I've since ripped out the pages of my diary that I knew weren't my real thoughts. I have made some amazing friends in the last two years and kept in touch with my existing amazing friends. And I feel amazing. I know how to look in the mirror and know that I'm pretty.

So if you want to give me a label, feel free. I will just take your word for it (and probably feel really awesome that I have a label).

Moral of the story: You will find labels. Girly girl, tomboy, weird, normal, etc etc etc forever. But they will always manage to confuse people to death and cause arguments and bring people together. So through all of that, I guess you just have to think your way out of the twisted tornado that you're whirled into and figure out who you are, whether or not you choose to give it a label.