When I was about nine, I remember sitting on the floor in front of my dresser in my room, writing in my little journal and crying about this fantasy life where we’d moved from Pennsylvania to South Carolina not coming true. We’d been going there for the past few summers, and as a family, we loved it, and my parents had started lightly contemplating moving there – and I was sold. I was convinced that none of my friends would miss me if I was gone, and I wanted nothing more than to get out and start over and remove the label of ‘the smart girl’ and let out version two that was outgoing and rode my bike around an island and wore Limited Too – and instead, I was still stuck in my little 30-person class in my small town where it was snowing, trapped in sadness and what I can now recognize as anxiety. 

I remember a lot from my childhood, and while that’s a defining moment that I’ll look back on as foreshadowing for many transition points in my future, most of the rest is a healthy mix of happiness and love and support alongside loneliness and anxiety and tears. I excelled at school early, and that was a blessing and a curse (my first grade teacher frequently pulled me aside to give me ‘special’ work when I would finish early, which was actually grading other classmates’ papers). I loved learning, I devoured books, and I had an unwavering desire to do well, but I was instantly identified as the one who knew everything. I was also instantly identified as the ‘peacemaker’ who was kind to everyone, which would also become a running theme throughout my life, for better or worse. Despite knowing how uncool that all made me, I couldn’t break the cycle of displeasing people around me, and sometimes – even then – it was hard to figure out if I was doing things because I myself liked them or because I perceived someone else did.

I spent a lot of time at school in my own little world, zoned out and staring at the other girls’ ponytails and little bendy barretts and bump-free hair, jealous and fascinated by how they were able to get it so smooth. I zoned in at recess, tucked into a corner buried in a Babysitters’ Club book that I’d read three times before, blissfully ignorant of the noise and chaos going on around me. I was conspicuously silent in class, and part of it was because I was sometimes ten steps ahead of everyone else and baffled by how they didn’t know the answer, sometimes because I wanted to give other kids the chance to speak, and sometimes because I was truly just off in my own little world and struggling to focus. I figured out early what I needed to do to learn, and I was consistently top of my class (and mortified of that). It was fine. I spent a lot of time in sports too; springs and summers were defined by softball practices and all star games and afternoons at the pool, and falls and winters were field hockey fields and basketball courts, and I was moderately good and miraculously consistently put on undefeated, winning teams, and it was something that brought me genuine joy (most of the time). My brother and I were close in age, and we played rich, imaginary games in our basement and in the woods, and we both had the benefit of a nonstop, built-in best friend.

In sixth grade things changed. The previous teacher at my small Catholic school had left at the last minute, and the school, scrambling to hire anyone, found a nice lady who was a preschool teacher and dropped her into the fire. On day one, she made the first mistake and let us choose our seats, and as we frantically scurried one-by-one to grab desks next to our friends, it set the stage for the year. My best friend was no longer in the class (she’d moved to a different school), and while I had a small circle, we were not part of the (literally blond-haired, blue-eyed) cool crowd, and they made it painfully obvious that they were actually ‘the populars’ and we were actually ‘the offbeats’. The teacher also introduced The Book, which was a giant blank scrapbook with a page designated for each day where we were allowed to write anything and everything related to things going on (it was a great idea in theory; in practice, it quickly devolved into a Mean Girls’ Burn Book, full of commentary about so-and-so’s Halloween party that 25 of 30 of us were invited to – spoiler alert, I was in the minority – or who was ‘dating’ who). Day one seemed great; by month three, the class was, for lack of a better word, a shitshow.

Within the first few months, two of the 15 girls had left, and after sobbing my way home from school in the backseat of my mom’s car winding through the farmlands of rural PA, I would soon follow. My parents had swiftly assessed the situation, and snuck me off into open houses and visit days for two smaller, private schools in the area to see if either would take me mid-year. One did, and I sailed off into the horizon at Christmas, did some catch up work to learn pre-algebra and Latin, donned the skirt version of my plaid uniform with a white turtleneck, and waltzed confidently into the next era of my life.

And – I thrived. This school had about nine girls total in a 16-person class split in two, and we had different teachers for different classes and changed classrooms between periods and played sports as part of school, and suddenly I felt challenged and appreciated and not like an outlier. Everyone was smart, and for whatever reason, everyone cared about doing well, and while I still finished out the year top of the class, I didn’t feel called out. I made friends with literally everyone quickly and for the first time in an academic setting, felt understood and appreciated and not silenced.

It did, naturally, get harder – the intensity increased, particularly in my eighth grade year where the focus became high school acceptance and our futures (which in hindsight, is so young to be thinking of), and as we all glided into body changed and emotional complexity, tensions rose – but I finished out the next two-and-a-half years and by the end, was ready to launch myself into more. 

I was excited about The Future, and after much deliberation, settled on the boarding school five minutes from my house (in that time, we’d also moved from our isolated home in the countryside to a house downtown) that I would live at for (at least) the first year. Some of my friends were going too, and I was thrilled to have them to fall back on but also eager and anxious to see who else was there. I spent the summer stockpiling supplies for my dorm room, started running a few times a week in preparation for field hockey preseason with one of my friends who was training for the cross-country team, and connecting everyone I knew in the area who was also going in preparation, counting down the days till the end of August when I would the faceless name I’d been assigned as my roommate and ship myself off, once again, into a new life.

… to be continued.