Member-only story
My Miseducation at Not-So-Sacred Heart High School
How I Went From the Honour Roll to the Smoking Section
In my last year of high school, I was voted most likely to end up in an insane asylum. Small wonder, since I was going crazy there. We’ve all heard the sad story before. A good kid falls in with the wrong crowd, tries drugs, then their grades drop, and soon they drop out of school entirely.
That’s not my story. I was a good student until the bullying — by both kids and teachers — made me shut down and draw into myself. Then some drugs followed, mostly as coping mechanisms. But I still managed to graduate high school and go on to college.
Recently I did dome journal exercises to explore my teenage days and let that part of my psyche out on paper. One of them was to create a timeline of the main events from those days. When I did mine, I noticed there were glaring gaps in my memory. To be fair, it has been twenty years now. But there’s another reason why I don’t remember some years. I wasn’t there for them.
My Timeline
In grade eight I won our school’s French oral speaking competition and went on to compete at the provincial level. I won a writing competition for a poem that got published in an anthology. I made the honour roll at school. That summer I took a…
