Reflection

Last weekend I attended my fifteen year high school reunion. It was an amazing time where I connected and reconnected with many people from my past. I had an amazing small world moment that I'll write about later but today something else is on my mind. I couldn't help but hear everyone discuss how much they have grown and changed since high school. They were all better and different people since then. I had to agree. Many people had grown--some still haven't--but a lot had hit their stride in their lives.

This made me think about how that time in high school is when so many people are forged like steel. They are burnt and tested, and for that, they become stronger. For some people, this event happens later--in college or careers after high school. For some, I could see that it still hadn't happened. For myself, it happened much earlier. I was forged, tested, burnt, destroyed, and rebuilt at time in my life that helped me to almost be solidified by high school.

When I was going into the fourth grade, the Anchor Bay School District in New Baltimore Michigan went on strike. Well, this did not sit well with my parents. The school district was going through many changes as it was and they wanted me to be somewhere stable. So, in September of 1984 (the year the Tigers won the World Series), I was enrolled at Our Lady of Impending Death.

Okay, that's not the real name of the school but in my eyes, I think it's the most fitting name. For five years, every time I walked into that building, I wanted to die. In fact, I probably would have paid someone to kill me. Dying a thousand painful deaths would have been a million times less painful than what I endured every day.

Over my tenure at the school, I was ridiculed and demeaned by almost every student in my grade--not including the ones directly above and below us. Nothing I wore was right. Nothing I said was right. I didn't live in the right place. I also wasn't healthy enough. What's worse is that this didn't only come from the students but also from the teachers, staff and principal. Sometimes I think that the teachers even fed into some of the student's behaviors.

I must say that the picking started during my fifth grade year. In the fourth grade, I was invisible--a non person. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than being the screw everyone turns. I mean, at least that way people interacted with me. No one interacted with me in the fourth grade. That made lunch--and more importantly, recess--a horrible time for me. It meant one hour of total solitude.

At least at lunch there was something to do. I could intently eat my lunch. I could concentrate on making every bit count. At recess, I watched everyone else play. For thirty minutes, I watched everyone else have fun and I walked. I had my own circuit that amounted to a big box. I would walk up the sidewalk and past all of the playground equipment and then turn left onto the blacktop. I'd walk to the end of the playground and then back toward the school, making a big box. Most days I could do ten or so big boxes before the bell rang. Every once in a while, I'd stop to talk to the nun on playground duty but she always made excuses to walk away from me so I walked by myself.

To this day, I don't think that children of that age are meant to be that quiet and that alone. It does things to them. It forces them to find ways to cope--to find ways to fill the time. At first, I would spend a lot of time thinking about how I would play with my friends, who all went to public school, when I got home. Soon, something happened and it's something that has changed my life.

To fill my time, I started telling myself stories. I started creating characters, places, and events in my head. I began to entertain myself by making my own worlds. I think if I wouldn't have, I would've gone crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only 9 year old that ever thought about committing suicide but I was one of them. So these stories and these places gave me somewhere else to go.

It's funny because I still rely on this. I'm an insomniac and I know that if I start to tell myself a story, I'll be able to lull myself to sleep. If I'm in a crowd of too many people, I mentally work on something that I'm writing because no one can attack me or hurt me if I've pulled inward. It's still how I cope.

I'm not going to say that nothing good ever came out of attending Impending Death. I have one friend who I still keep in touch with. Our friendship really started during the end of our time at the school but it's still precious to me. I also have two people that I try to keep up with by exchanging emails here and there. Other than that, I'd be happy to have the rest of my memories just vanish. Tabula Rasa.

By the time I got to high school, there was no way that anyone could say or do anything that could destroy me more than I already had been. I mean, someone put a plastic rat in my desk. I had heard that I was disgusting and horrible. I had had people who I thought were my friends repeatedly stab me in the back. What could happen in high school that could be any different?

What happened was that I grew. It's taken me fifteen years for me to realize that high school was a healing time for me while everyone else around seemed to feel like they were being remade.