Once embraced within the good graces of my social club, I can’t remember whether my two girlfriends from junior high had eased away from spending time with me or whether I’d stopped calling them.
I do remember feeling amazed that my new cool circle of girlfriends had welcomed me as readily as if I’d fit their vision of a club sister with no personal revisions on my part expected, at all.
On the other hand, I’d always felt that my natural social placement as ‘a leader’ in junior high had been squashed like a bug in the aftermath of my first kiss, which had gone so wrong that an unresolved misunderstanding concerning my self-protective reaction had served to nip my preteen romance with the twelve year old leader of the pack in the bud.
At any rate, just as one insight leads to more, the same is true of friendship, suggesting that my sweet natured, new friend, Debbie, had welcomed me to enjoy her friends, Judy and Jill, identical twins (seen standing to the left of Debbie, who is at the end of the third row up from the bottom in the photo of our girls social club, below). And once Sherry, Judy and Roberta moved to the suburbs and were invited to join our club, as well, our small nucleus of friends, within the larger circle of the sisterhood, expanded to include these three teen-aged girls, whose traits seemed to match our own.
(Judy (RIP) is seen in the first row on the far left. Sherry is just above her. Roberta is the tallest of all of our friends. As to me—find me, if you can😊
As I’d naturally excelled at my studies, my overall experience as a high school freshman had far exceeded my low social expectations following my sadly perplexed socially excluded experience, during junior high (at which time my spirit’s natural expectation of social success had been crushed by the ire of my very first tall handsome, blond, blue eyed crush, whose pre-teen persona had swaggered around, Elvis style).
Just as I’d had no conscious awareness of my popular status as a natural, kind-hearted leader at my first school, I’d had no conscious clue as to what had happened to cause the budding nature of my high self esteeming character traits to repress during sixth grade). What I did know in the aftermath of our move to the suburbs was how much I’d ached to be included but was not.
I remember feeling haunted (wholly daunted) by the fact that though I’d moved to a new school, ‘I was still me’ suggesting there had been no reason (as far as I could see) for my exclusion from social interactions, which had slapped me in the face once boy and girl parties became all the rage during 6th, 7th and 8th grades. Then, once junior high had been left behind, I (having no known reason for my inclusion within my new social circle) was confounded as to why my high school social life had seemingly been spontaneously jump-started, successfully.
As a matter of fact, those utterly polarized experiences, one following the other, continued to boggle my mind until astute sessions of EMDR therapy opened my eyes to the importance of seeking out and absorbing insights concerning both sides of human nature, at which time, forgotten details, which came to mind, spotlighted dark spots of fear and sadness that began to make sense as discussions concerning years of bewilderment culminated in Aha! moments once strings of insights illuminated the primary reasons why the development of my self image (in relation to social variants) had felt too complex for my thought processor to fathom, over most of my adult life. In short—I’d held all of the puzzling pieces (details) inside my head, but could not reassemble the sum of my traits so as to make the bigger picture of myself as a whole appear on my own.
Whoops—getting ahead of myself, so back to my high school experience, we go …
With over 900 freshmen enrolled in our class, the outer walls of our suburb’s established high school (filmed in Risky Business) would have bulged to the point of bursting had a new high school not opened in time for our freshman orientation … however, as mentioned, before, rather than splitting our high school into two completely separate schools, the board of education came up with a plan that caused my high school experience to swerve away from that which, under normal circumstances, would have been considered traditional … and if my social exclusion during junior high has stunted my experiences with boys, the fact that my first two years in high school simulated a repeat of seventh and eighth grade offered a high school experience in which my first two years were not unlike those of the girls who had welcomed me to participate in every social experience that our club had planned to enjoy.
You see, our sisterhood had been composed entirely of freshmen, being that the formation of our sorority had copied those that had pre-dated our own within the sophisticated environs of the bustling big city high schools that bordered our newly built suburban communities.
This is not to say that during our first two years of high school none of my new friends had boyfriends; however, for the most part, the few who did go steady had come together during junior high, being that most fourteen year old gangling youths had not yet developed the courageous self confidence necessary to accept the possibility of rejection had their heartfelt attraction for a specific girl been revealed.
Eventually (most likely during junior year), our girls’ club had begun to arrange social evenings with boys’ clubs established within big city high schools, which led directly to—dating.
🙋🏻♀️Annie
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