I can still remember the first time someone told me I didn't fit in. I was age 12, living in Tulsa, Oklahoma and sitting in a circle in a living room with about eight other slightly older kids. No parents supervised us, and someone had stolen a can of beer that they passed around for everyone to take a sip while we banged our heads to Black Sabbath's album "Heaven and Hell."

"You don't have to drink it," my friend Brandy said. She was a year older than me and liked to look out for me. But I didn't hesitate to take a sip. Our conversation drew the attention of another girl with long stringy brown hair and a black Alice Cooper T-shirt, who scanned my rainbow tank top, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Lip Smackers lip gloss and said, "You're not into heavy metal are you?"

Her comment was devastating to me, and pegged me as uncool to this crowd, judging by the smirks around me. Worse, the implication that I didn't fit in was crystal clear. And the injustice of it? I was into hard rock-heavy metal's cousin-thanks to an older sister whose Camaro's speakers had been blown out by classic rock like Deep Purple, Ted Nugent and Led Zeppelin. 

Being an outsider was nothing new. I'm the only Okie in my family. My mom, dad, sister and extended family were all born in Pennsylvania coal mining country, the New Jersey suburbs, or Queens, New York. We never had the Oklahoma accent, speaking instead with a kind of nasally Yankee accent that I tried to drop whenever I could. We said pop instead of Coke, we didn't eat biscuits with gravy for breakfast and we didn't go to summer tent revivals or bible camp. If someone asked if we were saved by Jesus, we just answered "we're Catholic" and that usually ended the conversation. 

I couldn't wait to leave Oklahoma after high school. I had decided I would live in one of the big cities: Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. I tried them all and settled on Los Angeles, where I'm now writing fiction and non-fiction.