The wife and I have gone to a couple of high school basketball games recently. Our kids aren’t exactly overly athletic, but our youngest plays a mean trap set in the pep band. “Screw sports, we’re here for the band”… yes, we are those parents. Anywho, being in a high school gymnasium filled with high school kids and obnoxious parents (we sit on the visiting team side, because the view of the band is better, and not many of those parents listen to the whole pre-recorded message about not yelling at the officials and using good sportsmanship and whatnot… because they are assholes living vicariously through their children… did I mention my kid is an awesome drummer… there’s not a lot of yelling at officials and calling other children horrible things when you’re living vicariously through a band kid) made me realize that I hated high school.
I don’t remember always hating high school. In fact, I remember, at certain points as an adult, wishing that I could go back to high school and deal with the lesser stresses of that time. There was a time in my life where I thought that my years in high school were the best years of my life (college SUCKED) and that life was all downhill from there. But being in a gym filled with high school kids and watching how they interact and stuff, I have tried searching my memory banks for positive experiences that happened before I entered the real world. I am drawing an absolute blank. I know I had to have laughed and enjoyed myself in high school… but I can’t think of any specific times that I really had fun. Fully positive experiences, not touched by shades of gray, had to exist, but I can’t remember them. I can’t remember a single time of joy.
I remember people, and I remember liking those people. I can remember doing thing with those people, and I’m pretty sure that fun was had, but I can’t remember the specifics of the fun. There always seems to be darkness associated with every event I can remember; maybe that’s just high school?
I think I remember almost every negative experience that I lived through in high school. School dances ended nightmarishly. Losing my starting middle-linebacker spot on the football team my senior year because I was too small is something that shaped my future drastically. Being teased a lot my freshman year because I had transferred from a small, rural school to the “big city” (population about 3000) for high school and being thought of as a geeky, outsider loser set some precedents that have followed me through life. I started trying to be extremely nice to everyone because I wanted everyone to like me, and I didn’t think liking me was possible if I wasn’t super nice. I focused on being “funny”, and that somewhat seemed to work, but humor turns as bitter as it’s owner and I have probably hurt some feelings with my, at times, deeply sarcastic humor. I remember being depressed, a lot, and kind of hating myself. These few things I’ve mentioned are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I remember not having any confidence in anything about myself. So, why can I remember vividly the negative, but I can’t find any tiny nuggets of the positive that must have been. It’s driving me nuts how my memory seems so selective. I want to remember the good stuff; maybe that would help overshadow the bad.
I have never gone to any of my high school class reunions, and there have been three (one every ten years since we graduated). I always kind of think about it, but the negative thoughts just overwhelm any desire I have to be back around people and things from that time in my life (even though I know some of those people are really good people). A former female classmate, before the most recent reunion, told me I needed to go because some my female classmates were interested in meeting my wife. Apparently, there was a group of females in my class who thought I was gay, and they couldn’t believe that I had actually married a woman. Because I didn’t date or have girlfriends or seem to express any interest in the opposite sex, I apparently came off as gay. So, it appears that having absolutely no self-confidence in one’s desirability, or in having anything to offer to those he is attracted to, puts off a very gay vibe. Nothing against those who are gay, but that is definitely not the vibe I was gunning for in high school. Maybe I would have had a more positive experience in high school if I were gay, but I kind of doubt that being a gay teenager in the late 80’s in small-town Montana would have been a joyride. Plus, dudes are just disgusting and gross… I could never be attracted to that.
So, now I have all of my negative memories plus I have the confidence-draining knowledge that a segment of my female peers thought I was gay. Not surprisingly, as a straight dude who was terrified of the opposite sex through my youth and young-adult life, this knowledge doesn’t make me feel any better about my past.
Every now and then, I have a glimmer of a positive memory, but then, it’s like, “Oh, I remember how that ended… that wasn’t good.” My high school memories are just clusters of stuff not ending well. I feel like being able to recover some of the positive memories might help to push the negative memories (that constantly interrupt my thoughts) out of my way. Maybe I need to find my old high school yearbooks and look through the writings in those… but I’m going to guess that they will be filled with old buddies jokingly calling me names and making fun of me before letting me know that we were going to have the “BEST SENIOR YEAR EVER!”. Or maybe there will be some handwritten gems from female classmates alluding to a homosexual future that I didn’t understand or even know that others were expecting from me?
Yeah, maybe I should just let sleeping yearbooks lie. Besides, college was way worse…