I was going through some old photos while I was packing today. The me in the picture is younger, it's the high school me. I was about 20 pounds thinner, my hair was shoulder-length, and I dressed in baggy shirts and jeans. It's hard for me even to remember living through that time. I've thought about it, I've sorted it out a little in my head. I guess what sticks out for me through those years is that I wasn't really happy. I accepted the fact that I had to go to school so I did. I did what was expected of me, nothing more and nothing less. I've always done well at school even when I wasn't particularly trying very hard. My parents saw me get good grades and I think they just assumed that I enjoyed school and that it really pleased me to do well, but I didn't care all that much.

It was frustrating being shy, as now, but back then it was even worse for me. I didn't know what shyness really was back then, I figured I was just a big dork that no one wanted to talk to. I was kind of in my own separate social universe, aware of the class divisions at school but never a part of them, always to myself and with a group of others like me who were kind of thrown together. You know, like Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro. That was kind of how my friends and I were.

My parents got divorced when I was in 9th grade, so there was that to deal with. I used to go to my dad's house every Saturday for visitation. Those visits were pretty awkward and I can't say I ever really looked forward to them. Even though my dad let me and my sisters do whatever we wanted, he would buy us whatever we wanted on those days, well, I spent a lot of time hating my dad at first and then I stopped hating him but just saw him out of obligation, not because I wanted to. My sisters and I went on vacations with my Dad a few times, which is when those pictures were taken, and even those I don't remember being particularly happy. Always that awkwardness, even a sense that Dad was trying to buy his way back into our hearts.

One of my biggest regrets in high school was that I didn't join something. I joined the school paper for a year, but that turned into a mess. The teacher was inexperienced and yelled at me a couple of times and I didn't return the next year. I didn't join band or sports or AcaDec or anything, really, I tried to join clubs a couple of times but by junior year I had given up. I had belonged to a church youth group in middle school but I stopped going in high school. After school I would come home, eat cookies and drink soda and watch the Rosie O'Donnell show by myself in my room. I didn't think too much about what I ate back then. I drank a lot of sodas and ate basically whatever I wanted and I never exercised outside of P.E. classes and still managed to be a normal weight. I think that if I had stuck with some activity I might not have felt like such an outsider. I had my family, I guess, and while we didn't always get along my mom was always there to support me. She never pushed me to join things, never asked about why I was such a loner or anything. Sometimes I wish she had.

It's weird to think of those years when my life wasn't really mine. It was a life mandated by state requirements. In so many ways I hated it and was so relieved when I got to college and could do basically whatever I wanted to, lead my life as I saw fit, be by myself all day if I felt like it, study what I wanted to, but at the same time I felt lost. I was so used to being told what to do. I was so good at doing what I was told that I had never thought very hard about what I really wanted to be doing with my time. I hadn't prepared myself for college mentally. I hadn't set any goals for myself and I didn't know what to choose as a career. I suppose that's why I see my time in high school as such a waste. Things that seemed important then turned out not to be. I left high school not knowing what I wanted out of life or even out of college. It was like an exercise in conformity and I passed the test with flying colors, but it turns out that conforming should not be a goal in itself.