“Because I’m not normal,” I said.
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing, Percy. But you don’t realize how important you are.”
Page 39, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Two things happen to coincide this year: it’s my last year of high school and the final Percy Jackson book comes out this year. Ultimately, those are two completely unrelated occasions. But, for me, there’s a certain poetry to it.
Riordan’s books have been with me for most of my schooling. I’ve read and reread them so many times: every time a new one was released or when I simply needed the comfort of something familiar, which was often. High school has not been an easy journey by any measure. There have been tears, there have been laughs, there have been epic failures and soaring successes. There has been heartbreak and fast love, lost friends and lasting friends. It has been a story that I could not get between two covers if I tried.
We’ve aged.
I came out at the beginning of high school as bisexual, then I was sapphic, then I was genderqueer, then I was agender and right now I might be demiboy or in some queer space where gender exists and doesn’t. I made friends I believed would last forever that I no longer speak to. I am absolutely in love with people who I didn’t even think I could hold conversations with three years ago. I played the piano for hours on end, and now I haven’t touched a piano for a month. I wrote angsty poems in a Typo notebook, and now I post writings that have been sitting inside me forever, on the internet, forever.
Nothing is the same and there is not a thing that I would change because I finally feel like I’m going somewhere that I choose. My life feels like my idea.
The Lightning Thief starts with a line that makes me smile every time I open the book:
“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.”
Page 1, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Didn’t. Did not. Past tense.
Percy did not ask to be who he was and resents it for a long time because who he is brings so much loss into his life.
I didn’t want to be queer because I didn’t want to figure everything out. I didn’t want to need to write because it made me anxious to do it and not do it. I didn’t want to be me because I didn’t want to explain everything.
I still have many issues that need to be addressed and resolved. I still have many complicated relationships. There are so many things that go wrong every day, but on most days, I can look in the mirror and be proud of the person who’s looking back.
“At that point, I probably should have been terrified. The strange thing was, I felt offended.”
Page 313, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
As I write the final chapter of high school, I wait for the final chapter of the Percy Jackson universe. There are terrifying challenges ahead of us, things that make us want to stay under the covers and wait out the year. There are people, including ourselves, who doubt that we can make it across the finish line.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to prove them wrong.