The Good Old Days??

I never studied and my grades showed it. I lacked any real social skills so if I didn’t enjoy going to school for learning or for socializing there wasn’t a whole lot else to go for was there?

I stayed home a lot. I convinced myself that my mother didn’t seem to mind letting me miss so much school. I remember thinking that at the time but now looking back, she really did try and get me to go. I was just stubborn. I faked sick so many times that I guess she just gave up.

In my high school yearbook, you know the part where they vote for the “biggest flirt” or the “most likely to succeed”? Mine was “Term Paper Illness”. I guess they were lucky I showed up the day they took the pictures.

I never “got” the whole high school socialization thing. I was by no stretch of the imagination popular. I had a small group of friends that I hung out with but I was usually the girl walking down the hall with her head down to avoid eye contact. At the time I thought I would have loved to have been popular but the problem was that I was painfully shy and let’s face it, teenage girls can be some real bitches(hey, I’m guilty of that as well).

I was very self conscious, always second guessing myself and I was constantly wondering if the friends that I did have were mad at me or what I had done wrong if one of my friends didn’t say hi to me in the hall.

I was repeatedly told that these were the best years of my life and I was going to regret it if I didn’t actively get out there and enjoy them. I was an angsty teenager. How could I enjoy the best years of my life when I was miserable all the time? And if these were indeed the best years of my life, does that mean it gets worse??? I was not very hopeful for the future.

So I stayed home “sick” a lot. I would skip classes and the classes I did attend, I would sit in the back of the class and do as little as possible. I had one teacher that literally gave up and let me sit in the back and read a book. I guess she thought as long as I was reading I was getting some sort of educational benefit even though the class she taught was Algebra.

Not surprisingly, I was taken aside by the guidance council at the end of my junior year and told that in order to graduate with my class I would need to take a full years classes, attend the maximum amount of night school classes and on top of that I would have to take four correspondence classes from home.

For a person that hates school, that is pretty much your worst nightmare. School during the day, school at night and then school when you got home.

I did try. For the first quarter of my senior year I did what they told me that I needed to do. I was drowning in school work and I knew it was my own damn fault, but I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m sure it comes as no shock to you that I dropped out.

I was only 17 at the time so I needed to get my mothers permission. I sat her down and explained everything. She obviously didn’t want a drop out for a daughter so she did some research. After finding out that there was no difference between a high school diploma from my school and a night school one other than the person that signs the document, she agreed that I could drop out of night school as long as I enrolled straight into the next starting semester of night school classes. Not graduating was not an option. Neither was getting my GED. I was to graduate and that was all there was to it.

At that point I was already taking the night school classes along with my full load of senior classes and those horrible correspondence classes so I jumped at it.

It took me three times as long to graduate but I did eventually get my diploma in 1995.

My social skills finally developed around age 19 or 20, and I know now for sure that my teenage years were FAR from the best years of my life.

Having said that, I always wonder how different my life might be if I could go back and attend high school knowing what I know now. I don’t think I would view the teachers with nearly as much hostility as I once did just because they were “authority figures”. I for damn sure wouldn’t care so much what people thought of me and walk around all day wondering if so and so is mad at me and why. I would definitely try to have more focus and actually pay attention in class. Make an honest effort to try and learn instead of sitting in the back of the class thinking how horrible and it all was.

But then I think that all things happen for a reason. All the things I have gone through in my life have shaped me into the person I am today…and I gotta say, I really like that person.