I said at the end of my last post that I would take a bit of space to discuss high school and all that went along with it. Let me clarify my intent behind this for just a moment. I DO NOT want to be the type of person who never gets over the hurts of my childhood or sits at a tender pre-menapause age bemoaning the girl in 9th grade who "did me wrong." If you ever see me drifting towards that potential geographic area please give me a SHOUT OUT and a SMACK UPSIDE THE HEAD. The interesting part of this experience is that I'm now at a place where I'm so over it and just want to move on and appreciate people from my past I may come in contact with, for the awesome women they ARE NOW, not who they were when we were 14-18yrs old. That being said, I'd be lying if I said that there aren't some feelings about my high school experience. I will glance upon them this last time, without malice.
I went to an all girls private school directly from my private grade school. The summer before I started high school I had to get uniform skirts to wear to school, along with regular clothing to wear for the first on casual days. When I went to the high school I was slightly embarrassed to find that I was so big that I needed to have my school uniform custom made. Luckily the uniform manufacturer was located in San Francisco so one mother-daughter road trip later, I was properly attired for my foray into the somewhat elite world of private girls education.
If you've ever seen the movie MEAN GIRLS, you'd have a somewhat accurate picture of what girls can be like. For me, it was basically the same except we all dress alike and had this terminally exhausted look on our faces from the perpetual academic competition that our school fostered. While I was not picked on specifically because of my weight, I was for the most part ignored by 80% of the girls in my class at St. Francis. It's my personal opinion that being invisible is almost, if not more difficult, than being the object of ridicule.
It was durning this time in my life that I started to get small clues that my size was abnormal in relation to others. There were some classes where the desks where too small, my legs and feet would fall asleep during litiguries when she had to sit on the floor of the gymnasium, and during a choir trip to Canada my junior year I was always a half a block behind everyone else because I couldn't walk as fast as everyone else. My shame and embarrassment kept me from asking for help in any significant way. It's only now that I can look back at that girl with a great deal of compassion and empathy. I wasn't so kind to myself back then.
Luckily I made friends with some girls at my school during a youth group retreat in the winter of 1990 and I remain friends with them to this day. I was able to let them get to know me outside of the school environment and it was much easier for me to be myself and not try to impress them. I also became friends with a girl in my senior year english class and we were able to laugh our way through the last semester of our high school experience. Graduation couldn't come soon enough for me on one hand, and I was also nervous and unsure on the other. Despite what I thought were my mediocre grades and lack of desire to move away from home, I was accepted into the music school of the local college and had decided to stay home to attend college.
In my next post I'll relay the fun and challenges of going to the same school where BOTH of my parents worked. Thanks for reading!
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