Best known for sparking the global wave of Ginger Pride by marching hundreds of redheads through the streets of Edinburgh, Shawn Hitchins is an award-winning entertainer. His debut collection of essays, A Brief History of Oversharing, explores his irreverent nature — from his younger years as the effeminate ginger-haired kid with a competitive streak, to a summer spent in Provincetown working as a drag queen, to being a sperm donor to a lesbian couple.
“It takes a special kind of person to write a play-by-play description of masturbation that is simultaneously hilarious, repulsive, and sweet. That person is Shawn Hitchins . . . His book is at turns bawdy and beautiful . . . He’s not kidding when he says he’s oversharing, but somehow he makes the mix of raw emotion and salty hilarity work.” — Foreword Reviews
“Thank you, Shawn Hitchins, for oversharing. Any loss of dignity you experienced from writing this memoir is a laugh-out-loud-funny gain for the rest of us.” — Rick Mercer
Read the excerpt below!
Is there anything more annoying than those viral videos of grown adults talking to their adolescent selves, spouting some gained wisdom?
The problem is that they are always from the perspective of someone who is highly successful. Someone who was short and now is a tall human rights lawyer, or the ugly kid who now looks like a swimsuit model and provides clean drinking water to villages throughout Africa.
Here are my words of advice to my younger self, as someone who took out the recycling this morning and threw it in the black garbage bin instead of the clearly marked blue bin.
Dear younger me,
Thoughts can kill. You will go to your cousin’s wedding and see your high school bully and he will not have changed. At the age of twenty-nine, he’ll still be an enormous (but attractive) asshole. After a brief encounter, you’ll realize this and you’ll whisper something to yourself like, “Fuck, just die already, you fucking-mother-fuck.” Then a month later he will drop dead and you will spend several weeks believing you have psychic manifestation powers.
Dear younger me,
Fleetwood Mac is a great band. It’s not just the music that your town’s only orthodontist plays while torturing children. Your gums won’t bleed every time you hear Christine McVie’s distinct voice. A rogue braces wire won’t poke through your cheek like it’s a string from Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar. “Rhiannon” isn’t a warning that your diet will suddenly switch to pudding and mashed potatoes. Rumours is the name of an album, not a veiled threat by Dr. Hanser saying he’s willing to tell the entire town that you have bad oral hygiene. And whatever you do, don’t break down crying after you roll over your retainer with a desk chair in keyboarding class.
Dear younger me,
Never ever write a monologue in drama class from the perspective of a plantation slave. I know that you’ve watched The Color Purple compulsively since 1985, and Whoopi Goldberg is your comedic inspiration, but that doesn’t give you permission to write in what you imagine to be note-perfect vernacular. It doesn’t matter that your teacher gave you an A+. No black slave working in a cotton field under the threat of death has ever stared at a tree branch and thought, “I remember apple pie.” For millions of Americans, trees do not conjure fond memories of dessert. Please, whatever you do, don’t give this monologue to the only black girl in your high school as a way of bonding. Just don’t.
Dear younger me,
Bragging that you went to Yearbook Camp where you met other yearbook editors from across Ontario and made a yearbook about your time at Yearbook Camp is not a high-level status card. Nobody cares about “trapped white space” or the pica as a unit of measurement outside the context of Yearbook Camp. Also, don’t tell that age-inappropriate blond joke to your uptight teacher on the car ride home from Yearbook Camp. You don’t fully understand what it means, and she will be offended (but you tell it really well).
Dear younger me,
Puberty will hit very late. You don’t need to go to the doctor every week and ask for a pill to “speed things up.” There’s no way to induce puberty; just enjoy singing the role of Christine from Phantom while you can.
Dear younger me,
The cafeteria lady is not your friend. Millie has a gambling problem and comes to work after being at Casino Rama all night. She’s stealing chocolate milk and rationing portion sizes of lasagna to the students so that she can take home the leftovers because she lost her paycheck to a slot machine. Don’t cover for her while she goes for a smoke; it will set up a lifelong habit of doing other people’s work. Listen to her cure for insomnia because it works. You can fall asleep while imagining you’re eating a giant head of iceberg lettuce.
Dear younger me,
Go a bit easier on your grade eleven math teacher. She didn’t realize that you would take it as a challenge to flunk her course when she told you on the first day that you weren’t smart enough to be in her class. She didn’t know that you’d use her class time as a study period for other subjects; she didn’t know how to react to your mother calling her a “rich bitch” during parent/teacher night; she didn’t know that on your final exam you’d leave the pages blank but write a note saying, “You were right. I could fail. Just as you predicted. But I was right too. You would fail to teach.” It’s not your fault she transferred schools the next year.
Dear younger me,
The cactus lamp you built in shop class is ugly. Your mid-thirties homosexual self hates you for it. It doesn’t even look like a cactus. Don’t cry when you get a D on it, because you clearly failed to capture what a saguaro cactus would look like with a brass fixture and a sixty-watt bulb crowning out of it. Accept the defeat and please don’t try to remake it to spite your teacher.
Dear younger me,
Your friend Jen will take you to the Upper Canada Mall to get your haircut at Joseph’s Coiffures. A woman named Shauna will introduce you to Joico hair products and texturizing scissors, and she will give you the best haircut of your life. Unfortunately, this means the end of your relationship with Debbie-To-The-Door, the woman who has cut your hair in your mother’s kitchen since birth. When you feel bad about this, just remember the time Debbie buzzed MC Hammer tramlines into the sides of your hair that were an inch apart.
Dear younger me,
You don’t have to unplug the stereo or any other recording device in your bedroom before going to sleep. You won’t accidentally blurt out in your REM state that you are a giant homosexual, and it won’t be automatically recorded by electronic equipment. (Similarly, you may also drink alcohol without fear of spilling the beans. Responsibly consuming alcohol will not cause you to blurt any of the keywords: homo, me, dick, oral, or gay.)
And finally . . .
Dear younger me,
Always remember this . . . it gets redder.
