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kamenkyote has been playing with a strip about The Miseries Of High School. And it's made me think about how much my particular high school miseries don't resemble what seems to be the standard narrative of high school.
First off, a bit of terminology: by "high school" I mean grades 7-12; the school I went to covered that span. Wikipedia suggests that there's a lot of variance. I dunno if I was considered to be in "junior high" when I was in the early part of that range; I never really cared.
The stuff everyone talks about when they reflect on their high school experience is alien to me. The jock/nerd dichotomy, with the former probably beating up the latter; the popularity games and the cliques... none of that really affected me. I don't know if this is because there just wasn't much of that at the magnet school I attended, or if it's because I was so withdrawn that I somehow avoided it.
Because I was pretty damn withdrawn and enclosed. My father died on my twelfth birthday, and I just completely closed up emotionally for about, ooh, twenty years or so. I'd been skipped ahead a grade somewhere in elementary school, so I think this would have been the summer before I went into eighth grade. Pretty much the entirety of those years are a grey blur of depression and self-imposed isolation. I had a tiny handful of friends, and a slightly larger set of peers: the other kids in the gifted/talented class. Elementary school had already dulled much of the love of learning by that point, and the deep depression I was in after Dad died made me pretty much uninterested in anything except escape by reading and drawing.
There's a few fragments of memories. I got pushed off the front steps of the school once by the one kid who attempted to bully me for a year. I can dig up the cavernous-seeming halls of the place if I try. I failed PE six years running due to a loophole in the rules I exploited, mostly because I really hated the way the polyester gym uniforms felt against my skin, and had little interest in exercise. Completely failed every language, too. But I don't remember any of the social games that everyone looks back on in horror; I don't remember worrying about being one of the Popular Kids, I don't even remember being aware that there were any Popular Kids. I just remember it being a long stretch of absolute boredom, with occasional headshakes from teachers and administrators who'd look at my IQ tests, or standardized test performance, and wonder why the hell I couldn't apply that in class.
I think I got sent to the vice-principal's office a lot for a while, too. Also I bit a math teacher once; I think out of utter screaming frustration when being berated for failing to cram my head full of absolutely archaic English measurements - I think we spent like half a fucking school year on exercises about converting, I dunno, pottles into greels, or something equally obscure. Seriously. (And of course this is the same kid who had boggled a college math professor who was visiting his parents when he was six or so by talking about something utterly obscure he'd picked up from a Martin Gardner collection, in a way that showed actual understanding.) Mostly, though, I just remember being bored, not really giving a damn about being on the edge of failing most of my classes, and being so far off of the social map that I couldn't see it, and it couldn't see me.
None of the fiction I'd read about the high school experience even began to mirror my experience. Except for Daniel M. Pinkwater's books.
Looking back, I feel like whatever I was supposed to learn in high school - both in terms of what the individual teachers were trying to teach about their fields, and in terms of the subtler life lessons the school system is supposed to impart about Fitting In To The Modern World - I learnt next to nothing. How much of it was the system failing a scarily bright kid (the only kind of high school experience story I ever do find some commonality with) and how much of it was me plummeting into a bottomless pit of depression, I dunno. Some of both.
Honestly, if I could go back in time and talk to myself, I'd tell him that yes, it does get better... and I'd seriously consider giving him a hit of E, as well, since I think the one time (in my entire life, so far!) I did that in the right environment really went a long way to break me out of twenty years of depressive thought.
kamenkyote has been playing with a strip about The Miseries Of High School. And it's made me think about how much my particular high school miseries don't resemble what seems to be the standard narrative of high school.First off, a bit of terminology: by "high school" I mean grades 7-12; the school I went to covered that span. Wikipedia suggests that there's a lot of variance. I dunno if I was considered to be in "junior high" when I was in the early part of that range; I never really cared.
The stuff everyone talks about when they reflect on their high school experience is alien to me. The jock/nerd dichotomy, with the former probably beating up the latter; the popularity games and the cliques... none of that really affected me. I don't know if this is because there just wasn't much of that at the magnet school I attended, or if it's because I was so withdrawn that I somehow avoided it.
Because I was pretty damn withdrawn and enclosed. My father died on my twelfth birthday, and I just completely closed up emotionally for about, ooh, twenty years or so. I'd been skipped ahead a grade somewhere in elementary school, so I think this would have been the summer before I went into eighth grade. Pretty much the entirety of those years are a grey blur of depression and self-imposed isolation. I had a tiny handful of friends, and a slightly larger set of peers: the other kids in the gifted/talented class. Elementary school had already dulled much of the love of learning by that point, and the deep depression I was in after Dad died made me pretty much uninterested in anything except escape by reading and drawing.
There's a few fragments of memories. I got pushed off the front steps of the school once by the one kid who attempted to bully me for a year. I can dig up the cavernous-seeming halls of the place if I try. I failed PE six years running due to a loophole in the rules I exploited, mostly because I really hated the way the polyester gym uniforms felt against my skin, and had little interest in exercise. Completely failed every language, too. But I don't remember any of the social games that everyone looks back on in horror; I don't remember worrying about being one of the Popular Kids, I don't even remember being aware that there were any Popular Kids. I just remember it being a long stretch of absolute boredom, with occasional headshakes from teachers and administrators who'd look at my IQ tests, or standardized test performance, and wonder why the hell I couldn't apply that in class.
I think I got sent to the vice-principal's office a lot for a while, too. Also I bit a math teacher once; I think out of utter screaming frustration when being berated for failing to cram my head full of absolutely archaic English measurements - I think we spent like half a fucking school year on exercises about converting, I dunno, pottles into greels, or something equally obscure. Seriously. (And of course this is the same kid who had boggled a college math professor who was visiting his parents when he was six or so by talking about something utterly obscure he'd picked up from a Martin Gardner collection, in a way that showed actual understanding.) Mostly, though, I just remember being bored, not really giving a damn about being on the edge of failing most of my classes, and being so far off of the social map that I couldn't see it, and it couldn't see me.
None of the fiction I'd read about the high school experience even began to mirror my experience. Except for Daniel M. Pinkwater's books.
Looking back, I feel like whatever I was supposed to learn in high school - both in terms of what the individual teachers were trying to teach about their fields, and in terms of the subtler life lessons the school system is supposed to impart about Fitting In To The Modern World - I learnt next to nothing. How much of it was the system failing a scarily bright kid (the only kind of high school experience story I ever do find some commonality with) and how much of it was me plummeting into a bottomless pit of depression, I dunno. Some of both.
Honestly, if I could go back in time and talk to myself, I'd tell him that yes, it does get better... and I'd seriously consider giving him a hit of E, as well, since I think the one time (in my entire life, so far!) I did that in the right environment really went a long way to break me out of twenty years of depressive thought.