Let's see how far we've come

I saw Meridith for coffee this afternoon with bubbaloo Jack (gimme a break, willya?  He's cute as hell and baby talk is rather in order, I think), and among the many things we talked about, she mentioned that there is a website for our high school's graduating class rounding up folks for a 20 year reunion.  It goes without saying that I am shocked and horrified that said anniversary is less than a year away, but more disturbing still was my visit to this website.

For at least the last half an hour, I've been utterly speechless.  Without words.  

Despite the fact that in my adulthood, I've opted to live in Northglenn again, a mile from my parents' house, and I can see the high school I went to and graduated from whilst standing quite literally in my front yard, I never process this in any real way.  I walk my dog around the baseball field and can hear the drum line of the marching band practice in August and up through October.  My daughter attended the same schools that my siblings did, and will go to this high school next year.  I admit that it's cool that I have such a sense of place in the world at this point in my life and I find the aforementioned comforting in an abstract sort of way.  I still have friends from those teenage years (in fact, people like Charly go back to the 8th grade; Meridith, 10th), it feels like an entirely other life that I have to force myself to remember and most times cannot.  Said website has my senior picture, and when placed next to my current one, like the one on this very site, it is impossible that these two are or have ever been the same person.  The revelation is that they aren't the same person; not by a long-shot.

I read others' accounts of "life in the last 19 years" and I have no idea how to account for this kind of time passage; furthermore, I'm not sure I want to.  In high school, my internal world was so consumed with self-loathing that I don't even know that I was entirely aware of until more recently.  The inside of my head told me I was fat, ugly, unimportant, foolish, naive, etc. and I remember being so utterly shy that I couldn't speak in class, and when called on I often fumbled and once I even cried of embarrassment.  I always felt certain that I was at best average and at worst destined for total failure; I never considered myself intelligent or funny or particularly good at anything.  I so desperately wanted to be liked I tended to mimic others and do my best to blend in.  So much of what powered my life in my twenties was an extension of this lack of self-worth, and I suspect now that this happens to us all, but there are defining moments in our lives that we can never forget - things that so often drive our existences for too long and shouldn't but do.

Mine is fourth grade in Morgantown, West Virginia, when a new school was built and the two small elementary schools were funneled into the new one.  Kids on "my side" of town were normal, lower or middle class, and the kids from the other side were doctors' and university professors' kids and they had money and spoils that I never knew about until that moment.  Up to that point, I didn't know that it wasn't cool to get clothes at the second-hand store, or that Trapper Keepers were necessary, or that Nike tennis shoes and Izod shirts would be all the rage.  Up to that point, I had been reasonably happy and never considered my status in the world.  Then I met Kelly England.  That's her real name.  She was pretty and fashionable for the time, lived in a huge house and her parents had expensive jewelry and nice cars; I know this sounds like a freakin' John Hughes movie and it basically was, but the fourth grade version.  She pretended to be my friend because we had the same folder - I remember vividly that it was shiny and had a watermelon on it - and the next day at recess asked me to play with her.

Just so she and her stupid friends could put caterpillars down the back of my shirt.  Yes, that was a plural caterpillars.  I cried, and when I asked her why she did that, she replied, "because you're fat and stupid and I would never be your friend."  I admit that as an adult a part of me hopes that she grew up to be a fat, drunk, moo-moo wearing woman who lives in a shitty trailer in the middle of nowhere with 18 kids and an abusive husband who spends her time playing lotto and bingo and smokes two packs of generic cigarettes each day.  But I've never thought about it.  Really.  Kelly proceeded to make my life a living, daily hell in just such a manner for the following three school years, the pinnacle of which was in seventh grade when we had to change clothes for gym class and she made it a point to make cattle sounds every time I shed an article of clothing in the locker room.  Ah, good times.

But how that statement haunted me - still haunts me.  It doesn't matter how many good friends I had after that, because all I ever heard was that I was fat and stupid.  I know it affects me still because no matter how many years I teach and how many students I've affected positively, and no matter how off-the-charts my student evaluations are on a regular basis, it only takes that one student who hates me to say it, and I'm spiraled down into a pit of "what's wrong with me?"  But my skin is getting thicker; I no longer read those stupid things and there are at least two years' worth of unopened evals in my desk drawer as we speak.  Ever heard, what you don't know can't hurt you?  There's something to that statement.

But I digress.  I hate who I was in high school in a nutshell.  I am in no way still that person; so much so that I think I've repressed a great deal of the experience.  So much so that I don't want to bother explaining to any of these people (except for those who already know, of course) who I am now.  I don't want to reminisce or relive any part of it, not even the good stuff.  Even looking at the website, I feel that fat and stupid girl with the bad hair gasping for air under the heavy pile I've buried her in.  And all this while I thought she was dead.