Introduction

Disclaimer: Everything here is from my point of view, obviously. I'm biased. Everyone has a bias. All I am doing here is speaking honestly about how I felt from these experiences though the people involved would obviously have different views and feelings towards them.



June 5th, 2009 was my high school graduation day. The moment I turned the tassel, a bizarre feeling flooded me and it combined with the intense screaming of the crowd and the adrenaline from the entire damn evening. It didn't hit me that high school was over until sometime past 4 in the morning and I cried for... something. At first, I was crying out of relief because the past five years have pushed and pulled me in every goddamn direction that I could have gone in, but then I started crying because I began to notice everything that brought me to that point and how I got out of it all.

If I had to chose one single event that changed my life forever, it is Nicole's death. Hands down.

Nicole is my sister, and she was older than me by 7 years. She was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma as a teenager and was in a battle for about 2 years. Dad shaved her head before chemo could claim her hair, and it had to be him to do it. Nicole went on to describe this experience by saying that mom "has some sort of emotional attachment to my hair, and Skruffie can't do it because she's Skruffie..." Skruffie was the nickname given to me due to coming home from school every day with holes in the knees of my jeans and my hair in complete disarray. I'd have sand in my shoes and grassstains everywhere, and rocks in my pockets from a compulsive rock-collecting habit that carried on for several years.

Anyway.

Nicole passed away on April 30th, 2001 (AKA "the worst day of my life"), which is also two days before she was going to turn 18. I was 11.

This event... though it has been over 8 years, it is very much part of who I am and how others have interacted with me in the past. I started middle school in September of the same year she died, and continued on through the rest of middle school afterwards: 7th and 8th.

My lack of memories is a sorce of frustration for me.

There are some snippets, like the puberty video and pep rallies. I remember running the mile every week in California heat (though if the days were too hot, they allowed us to run in the gym).

I remember my 7th grade social studies teacher saying "You can't use [Nicole's death] as an excuse forever." I was failing.

I remember my 8th grade history teacher asking me why I do not have any paper out for the assignment we were about to start. The class was already quiet to begin with and, if I can remember correctly, I might have tried asking for paper from a student or I didn't so I wouldn't disturb people.
I told him "I don't have any paper left."
A sneer crossed his face as he remarked in a very quiet voice "Tch, figures", before starting the lesson.

This next memory, for some reason, isn't as painful as the first two here but it was certainly humiliating. Now, I always remembered this as being in 6th grade but the assignment we had to turn in places this in 8th grade. This was near the beginning of the school year and we had to do a sketch of a mug that we were going to make out of clay. It was a huge project complete with learning about glazes and the kiln, and if we passed, we were able to move on to the pottery wheels.

A quick interjection though: I had shitty grades in 6th grade because I was still swarmed with grief.
I had shitty grades in 7th grade because I was swarmed with grief.
I had shitty grades in 8th grade because the teachers gave up on me and I gave up on them. It felt like they branded me forever as a failure so I gave up. I would either not turn in assignments at all or procrastinate until the last moment, and there came a certain point where I was only going to school to see my friends and buy a teeny Little Ceasar's pizza thing.

The sketch for this project suffered from procrastination and I ended up doing it in pen (mistake #1) and on lined paper (mistake #2). If I at least had a pencil, then maybe it would have been a bit better.

Well, the time came for us to turn in our sketches and my teacher grabbed mine and held it up to the class as a prime example of what not to do. I can't remember if he used the term "garbage" or not. Maybe he said "This is UNACCEPTABLE!". The paper was crinkled from him gripping it so hard and I tried to smooth it out when he gave it back to me. At least he apologized, but the absolute fucking humiliation of that might have set more of the tone of how I felt when I didn't turn in assignments in the future.

The last traumatic memory from this period is on the last day of middle school. To give more of a backstory to this, remember me saying that the teachers seemed to have given up on me so I gave up on them. The way I saw teachers for many years after middle school were as horrible people who didn't really care about the students, and people you cannot trust for anything. They will not give emotional support. They will yell and humiliate you. They will stigimize you.

Stigmitized.

That is how I felt after they decalred that I was to repeat the 8th grade. "Good students succeed in life. Bad students are like bad people. This school prides itself on good grades and we cannot put our energies into fixing the bad people, so we praise the good and get awared the Distinguished School Award for our efforts." (not a real quote, but that describes the attitude of the school faculty from my perspective perfectly)
The assistant principal pulled me into her office just as the first period bell rang (why couldn't she talk to me in the 15 minutes I was already in the library?) and said that I have 6 Fs (already knew that, but constantly hearing it made it worse and worse. It didn't motivate me.) and that I would be retained in 8th grade. My response to that was to inform her that my family and I were moving out of California to Washington and she didn't have a response to that. Even if I was to repeat 8th grade, it would certainly not be another traumatic year in that place. I think that if I had to stay in that school for one more year, I would have come out a lot worse than I had.

As it turns out, mom proved to the washington schools that I was smart enough to be in 9th grade by showing them my sylvan learning center scores. I didn't repeat 8th grade.

The damage showed and I had a repeat performance of 8th grade, bascially, but with teachers that weren't borderline abusive. It amazes me that I didn't get held back in 9th grade now that I look back on it because the "teachers don't care" attitude held on and I was absolutely unmotivated to do anything.

Hilariously though, I repeated 12th grade because the damage from not doing a lot of work in 9th grade reared it's ugly head and I lacked a few credits even though I really began to pick up the pace in the last couple of years in high school. 10th grade was a very harsh year too but for entirely different reasons I'll go into later.

So, that is the story of how school was a thorn in my side.

Thankfully I met teachers in high school that completely changed my view and I began to fully trust them in my first round of 12th grade--4 years after middle school ended. That is 4 years too many.

I completed 12th grade in a work-at-home sort of program where I'd check in once a week to turn in work but hit a rough patch around October. I felt unmotivated once again and thinking "Why bother? I'm a failure anyway." and I felt like such a fucking fool for repeating 12th grade. I felt like the middle school faculty "won".

As it turns out, the year of graduation doesn't fucking matter anyway. I graduated on June 5th and it finally hit me that I was free and that I got out of everything. I sobbed for about 10 minutes before a wonderful feeling of peace came over me as I looked over past assignments and said "I can burn it all."

No, I won't burn it though. I think I'll shred it or stuff it in a recycle bag, then send it off so all that paper could be renewed--like me.

Wow, that is a hefty intro post but all of this really shaped who I am right now and maybe who I will be in the future. More little things like interests and hobbies should come clear in future posts.