By ‘scrolling’ all the way back through my blog to the story of First Kiss, a clear picture will emerge as to what caused my self confident social life to fizzle so surprisingly after my family moved from city life into the suburbs just before junior high was about to begin. In truth, my new classmates were not offered a preteen, junior high experience being that the whole district was made up of one, quintessential, two story red brick schoolhouse, which served kindergarten through eighth grade.
Why only one school? Well, when my father built his three bedroom, two bath dream house, in 1954, our suburb was so new as to have been undeveloped. In fact, our prestigious corner lot was the first to see a building crew while all my eyes could see while looking over the rest of the entire square block, was one empty lot after another. That situation was short lived being that by the time we’d moved into our new home, a building boom had exploded, and machinery necessary for the excavation of basements was seen wherever we looked.
By the time I was ready for high school, our suburb and those in close proximity had become hot spots of new home construction, and as such, my high school experience proved atypical for this reason: Following my eighth grade graduation (circa 1958), a brand new high school was ready to enroll students; however rather than creating two separate, four year schools, the board of education decided that the freshmen and sophomores would populate the new school building, situated in another suburb, while juniors and seniors filled every classroom of the original campus.
Upon reflection, this decision on the part of our elders re-created a junior high experience for my age group by separating under classmates from the older teens, offering a disjointed social experience for both groups, most importantly, where dating was concerned. How could upper classmen date younger girls whom they’d never met … in fact, frosh and sophomore boys were too young to drive, not to mention the fact that within that age group, girls are classically more mature than their male counterparts.
Throughout the first three years of my high school experience, the school board’s short-sighted decision—which was by no means student friendly—did not affect me, personally (until my senior year) for this reason: During my freshmen year, my inclusion within one of two popular girls’ sororities had offered me that aforementioned ready-made social life unlike anything that I’d ever expected to fall into my lap.
Unlike Woody Allen, who’d quipped that he’d never join a club that would stoop so low as to include him in its membership, my inclusion within this coveted sisterhood saw my injured self esteem floating on a wondrous cloud of disbelief pretty much throughout my entire high school career, so trounced had my self image become during my preteens.
While outwardly shy with boys, I’d felt secretly insecure with most of my new girlfriends. I say secretly, because my sense of self-doubt spent all four years of high school shadowing the ready smile of my perky persona (whose existence I was unaware of though she’d held my hand wherever I went, based in the fact that I’d been a natural leader from kindergarten through fifth grade until our move to the suburbs offered up three experiences, causing my budding self confidence to shatter, thus creating a many-pieced puzzle of my character traits, which has taken me a lifetime to reassemble so that, the bigger picture of the complex personality that stands before my full length mirror ‘wholly’ makes sense, today).
And just as the story of First Kiss (posted early on in my blog), reveals one of those three experiences, which proved so confounding as to extend my confusion concerning my social standing from 6th through eighth grades, the story of Bully For Me details the primary reason as to why my distorted body image continues to plague me, today.
As to the third pre-teen trauma, mentioned above, I’ve not yet mustered the courage to detail that story, though dark shadows of that experience, which dogged me for decades, began when I was five and saw me struggling, unawarely through episodes of PTSD until, at the age of sixty-three, I had the good fortune to connect with a psychologist well-versed in EMDR therapy.
🙋🏻♀️Annie
No comments:
Post a Comment