High School Tragedy 2: Electric Boogaloo

As I have already stated, high school was not a happy place for me. But now my luxury of bitterness has come to end. I’ve been contacted by a couple of people I went to school with. Those, at the time, I called my closest friends. With them and the memories they bring back comes all the other conflicted emotions that have been more or less buried and ignored for the last 15 years. You’d think 15 years would be long enough, but you’d be wrong. I realized that many of the issues I have when I am reminded about those years have little or nothing to do with my fellow students. I don’t think they realized I spent about half of my sophomore year homeless. I don’t think they realized how much of a drunk my stepfather was or if he was a drunk at all. I don’t think they knew about the times I got into fist fights with my mother. I know they didn’t realize the problems I had with my own mental illness, I didn’t even know that at the time. No one is that kind or observant at 16, to see these things and I was not a part of ‘the family’. In fact, I was a consummate actor in school, only breaking character on rare occasions. I was tough, everything was fine, I could handle it. In a rural small town, many of these people knew each other from first grade. There was a grand total of 42 kids in our graduating class, give or take a few. It was a small world and I was now better then them. I doubt I was the only one in the class who had an alcoholic parent or a dysfunctional household and I didn’t notice their problems anymore then they noticed mine. Neither do I think they were any less of an actor, at the time, then I was.

A part of what I’m feeling is also grief. My stepfather died right at a year ago and memories of high school are very much tangled with memories him, both good and bad. I went back to Montana for a visit and took a friend to Lewis and Clark caverns. It was the first time I had been anywhere near there since before my stepfather died. I still have not been back to my ‘home town’ since my parents left. I’m honestly not sure I could bring myself to go back. Sometimes I wonder if talking to these people is going to help me get rid of all this baggage or bury me under it. I know I don’t want it any more, it’s too old, too heavy, and life’s too good, now.

As if I wasn’t already insecure and paranoid enough, I have this horrible thought that one my former classmates will show up at my naked reading event. That’s the sort of thing that just causes psychotic breaks. Nudity+public speaking+former high school classmates=broken. I’m not sure there’s enough medication in the world to deal with that. Luckily I’m fairly sure, none of them live here. So I’m safe…I think.