Guitar Hero
“Am I tuned? Oh my god, I don’t think I am in tune. Where is my tuner? Oh my God”
While I choked over my own saliva, my friend nonchalantly laid down on the dim lighted stairway and waited for our turn on stage. It was the Winter Art’s festival and I had never felt so out of place.
See, I come from a conservative Bangladeshi Muslim family. My parents have never awkwardly held Barbie and G.I-Joe dolls and given me the sex talk. They have never talked about a special concert they waited all night to get tickets for or about a time they ditched school to go to the movies. In fact, if there is a kissing scene while we are watching television, I sometimes change the channel because it is too awkward. So somewhere in my upbringing, I too became conservative like them. I stopped making funny (or lame) jokes out loud. I did not act like a goofball or sing the German alphabet loudly in class. In short, I was an introvert.
So why was I waiting backstage with a shiny electric bass guitar – worse, an electric guitar that looked like a medieval battle axe. I didn’t know the answer.
I told my friend that I couldn’t do it. “I can’t jump around and bang my head and look like a rocker.” I was going to march right back home and sit under my bed covers. I explained that I was a coward. I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with guitar. I talked a lot and very fast.
To my surprise, my friend said nothing. Instead, he suddenly began to laugh. I stared and he laughed. He continued to laugh and I continued to stare. Doubts crept up on me.
“I was just kidding,” I said. I must have sounded like an idiot. So what if my hair was immune to earthly combs, or if my sweaters were always a few sizes larger than my body. I didn’t need tattoos on all four of my limbs to play guitar. I was afraid of what might happen if I suddenly began to act differently. But it’s better to take that chance and be my self.
I learned, that night, that it does not matter how many piercings a person has. It does not matter whether a person is a quiet intellectual or if he/she is the life of the party. People don’t live by only one label. I could be shy and conservative, but I could also make jokes and make girls swoon with my groovy bass lines. It does not matter how other people think we should act and how we should be. All that matters is that we remain true to ourselves.