I’m Still Healing From the Trauma of My Freshman Year of High School
Acknowledging the past can bring healing
For most of my adult life, I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with the word “trauma.” I thought of trauma as horrific or murderous events in a person’s life, so I didn’t put much emotional weight behind what I considered to be a few tough times during my younger years.
Recently, however, after a series of difficult events, I enrolled in a healing program that required excavating some personal history, and I uncovered the root of unconscious beliefs that have been driving some of my decision-making— some trauma. This trauma was not a single event, but layers of cascading experiences that happened back in my hometown of Oklahoma City the year I was 14.
Fourteen is the year that I learned that men lie and women should not have feelings about it.
There are five layers to this story, each one diaphanous, not of tremendous importance as a singular layer, but with greater impact as a collage that made up a pivotal year of my life.
LAYER ONE: Brad.
Like me, Brad was a high school freshman but had come from a different middle school, so he was new to me. Brad was almost immediately an outcast. In hindsight, I’m sure he suffered from some developmental delay, but this was 1986 and such things were rarely discussed. Brad also appeared to be very poor as he wore the same out-of-style clothing nearly every day. He had very large, thick glasses and was quite overweight.
I felt very sorry for Brad. Out of pity, I made sure that I said “hello” to him when we passed in the hallway.
One day during freshman biology, he sent me a note. “Will you be my girlfriend?” followed by two boxes, one with “YES” the other “NO.” We were in high school, and this childish note filled me with embarrassment. Because I have a hypersensitive nature, and a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, I would never have said anything to hurt his feelings. Instead of checking the NO box, I wrote: Let’s just be friends.
That seemed like the right thing to do.
What I did not know at the time was that for Brad, the offer of friendship was the first such offer that he had ever received, and he took me up on it. He started waiting for me at my locker between classes. Then he called me at home — the school regularly provided a “directory” of student’s phone numbers. I could feel that his crush on me was growing and his attention toward me was too much. Way too much. It made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t know how to deflect it. Plus, I soon found my very first boyfriend (more on this below) which made managing his feelings even harder.
I finally worked up the courage to ask him to stop calling, and I was riddled with guilt over it. And yet, he kept calling. Every night. Then many times every night. My parents eventually intercepted these calls, and curtly told him to stop calling. He called anyway.
He then started showing up at my home, so often that I was afraid to answer the door. Listening from the hallway, my parents sent him away. Still, he came back.
The summer after my freshman year we moved (more on this below). We kept our address unlisted to keep Brad away, and yet somehow he found it and appeared at the new house. My father met him at the door and told him he was forbidden from reaching out to me ever again.
After that, he never returned, and without my new phone number, all his future communications occurred via mail. He sent me hand-written letters professing his love. One included a large drawing of a heart — a real, human heart, with blood and protruding veins, which was pierced through with a sword. Filled with guilt, I believed it was an expression of his feelings of rejection. My parents warned me that it looked like a threat.
LAYER TWO: We moved
The drama of Brad was like a slow steady drum under my entire freshman year, but at the same time there was lightness; my older sister was a senior, and our family made several trips to visit potential universities. As she and I looked at brochures in the back seat of the car, I can remember my father reassuring her that, not only would he be able to pay for it, she didn’t even need to bother applying for financial aid.
Her expectations were set, and so were mine.
By mid-year, she was elated to receive an acceptance to her top choice — Baylor University. Change was in the air and we were thrilled with the romance of it all — my sister was living her dream.
One Sunday that spring, in the midst of the anticipation of her graduation, we returned home from church as we did every week. We were in my mother’s car, a Crown Victoria, and as we turned onto our street, suddenly my mother gasped. My father’s car was no longer in the driveway, where it had been when we left that morning. It was gone.
My sister and I were ignited by this event, convinced that the car had been stolen, and we were eager for my dad to call the police. My parents' cool reactions were surprising at first, however, we soon learned why they were not more outraged. Later that day they sat us down and informed us that the car had not been stolen at all — it had been repossessed.
This was my first realization that such a thing could happen. That the bank could just come and take your car while you were away. But the news only got worse — not only had the car been repossessed, but our home would also soon be repossessed.
In one day, the secure foundation of our middle-class life was shattered. Our home with its many bedrooms and the pool out back, my sister’s ability to go to an expensive private university, our car — It was just a façade.
My father had invested in a “deal” and lost everything. My parents were already in the process of declaring bankruptcy and informed us that they were preparing to move our family to a rental home on the opposite side of the city. Worst of all, my sister would no longer be able to attend Baylor University.
That summer, we moved. In a time before email and cell phones, I lost all contact with my childhood friends, and since my phone number was now unlisted due to Brad’s unwanted attention, and with the other problems I had going on (more on this below) my efforts to reach out to them and stay connected were weak.
My parents, with their PhDs and a list of professional accomplishments, had nothing, no savings, no retirement, not even life insurance, and had accumulated a mountain of debt. Since that time, I have continued to learn more about my father’s addiction to get-rich-quick schemes. “Deals,” as we called them. He would lose everything many more times over the years.
But it was this first shocking realization of all this at age 14 that rocked me the most. My father was not who he pretended to be, and my mother expertly covered that up.
LAYER THREE: My sister
As you can imagine, my sister was devastated. Her disappointment and anger filled the house; her humiliation and betrayal palpable. She was crushed and I was a bystander to this desolation, but I had no right to be devastated myself. Her pain far outweighed mine, and I felt guilty for having feelings about what happened at all — compared to her, I had nothing to complain about.
My feelings about my sister were loaded, to begin with. For my entire life, my parents had repeatedly told the story of me being the “miracle baby.” The events that led up to my birth made doctors believe that I would be my mother’s fourth miscarriage. And yet, I survived. It was a miracle. After my mother’s third miscarriage, my parents had adopted my sister. So there we were, two siblings, one by adoption and one by birth.
My childhood guilt over this ruled me from a very young age. I tried to be small, to diminish myself so that she would not have cause to feel jealous of me for anything. The feeling of guilt was constantly reinforced by my parents and grandmother, who consistently praised me as the “good” child because I had small manageable emotions, whereas my sister had such big ones.
So in the summer that the broken promise of college ripped her heart in two, I quietly bore the guilt of it.
LAYER FOUR: Mike Perrigo
The fourth movement of my fourteenth year is the movement of my first love. I suppose I could have started with Mike, but none of what happened with him is as relevant without knowing the context of everything else.
My proclivity toward guilt made me a terribly shy child and kept me from ever admitting that I had crushes on boys. For a long time, I claimed to be a tomboy and not interested in boys, but this was largely a defense mechanism because I didn’t believe boys would ever be interested in me.
So when Mike Perrigo started to flirt with me near the beginning of my freshman year, it was hard for me to believe. He was a senior, and 18 to my freshman 14. And — he was popular.
Our flirtations continued and with his larger-than-life personality, Mike drew me out of myself. His flattery and attention worked on my timid heart — and I started to believe that he actually liked me. By January, Mike had become my first-ever boyfriend. Aside from one tiny peck at a Halloween dance, Mike was my first kiss and my first boyfriend and my first love. I fell hard.
One of the things about Mike that was so astounding was that he had been a new student at the beginning of that school year. By the time I met him, I had heard his infamous story: Mike was from Tulsa, and had gone all the way to the Wrestling State Championships as a junior at his former school. But sadly, Mike’s parents had been killed in a car accident the summer before, so Mike had moved in with an uncle in Oklahoma City, where he had to finish high school away from all of his friends as he mourned the loss of his parents. This incredibly sad story made him a high school celebrity, and my love for him was mixed with pity. I wanted nothing more than to take his pain away.
Mike wore a high school letter jacket from his former school — until he gave it to me to wear, which announced to the entire school that we were a couple.
At the end of the year, when my parents broke the news to my sister and I that we would be moving at the end of the school year, Mike consoled me. As someone who had moved to a new school himself, he made me feel brave. And I also felt ashamed of my anger toward my parents — after all, Mike reminded me, he didn’t have parents at all.
One weeknight just before the move, in the middle of the night there was a tapping on my window. In just my nightgown I snuck outside into my backyard, and Mike and I laid in the grass and did all the things that I had never done before. As a girl who was “saving herself for marriage” we didn’t have actual intercourse — but only because I refused his advances. But we did everything else.
Just before I went back inside Mike told me that the reason he had come by was because his uncle was taking him back to Tulsa for a few weeks. They were leaving tomorrow, but he couldn’t leave without saying I love you.
Through tears, he assured me that he would be back in a matter of weeks, plus once he arrived and was settled in Tulsa, he would call me every day. We kissed our goodbyes long and hard, and I snuck back into my room and thought about him for the rest of the night, and many nights to follow.
As the weeks went on, I waited for the phone to ring, expecting to hear from him. Once we moved into our new house, we had a new phone number, and I was terrified that Mike had lost it, or had written it down incorrectly. Surely that was it, that was why I hadn’t heard from him.
The weeks drudged along, and with Brad repeatedly arriving at my door, and my sister crying over school, I was absolutely miserable. I was too young to drive. I had no phone. There was no email. I was forlorn and totally alone.
Finally one day a letter arrived. I tore it open to find two pages from a yellow-lined legal pad full of his very masculine handwriting. In that letter, Mike made his long confession: His name was not really Mike Perrigo. He was Mike Nash. His parents had not actually been killed in a car accident the summer before, they were alive and well and living in Tulsa.
The truth was that he had failed his senior year in Tulsa, and had to repeat the grade. Since he was too ashamed to return to his old school, his parents allowed him to come to Oklahoma City to live with an uncle for the year, and he matriculated at the local high school. He was not 18 years old, but 19, and was about to turn 20 that same month.
Then the final blow — during his actual senior year in Tulsa, he had been dating a girl with whom he had fallen in love. The two of them had kept their relationship going long distance throughout the past year, the year that he was my boyfriend. But now that he was back in Tulsa, he wanted to give that relationship a chance. He was writing to break up with me and to apologize.
I was utterly brokenhearted. It was all too much — the betrayal of Mike, of my father, of Brad. Full of grief and shame, I felt like a fool for believing.
LAYER FIVE: My mother
Look, it was a hard time for everyone. Can you imagine my mother? She worked a full-time job AND a part-time job had two children and took care of her mother, who, by the way also lived with us. Think of the stress she must have felt, trusting her husband despite deal after deal falling through, always the promise of riches beyond measure. The disappointments must have been unrelenting.
With an older daughter wailing about college, and a younger daughter wailing about a lying boy — my mother was *over* it. In no uncertain terms, my sister and I were NOT. ALLOWED. TO. CRY.
She hotly reprimanded me anytime I looked as if I would begin to sulk, “Don’t be ridiculous! You should be ashamed of yourself — crying this way over a silly boy! Have some dignity!”
So that was what I did. I started my sophomore year at a new high school as if nothing had happened. I went to my new school, ironically positioned in the more “posh” part of town than our previous address, hiding the fact that my family was totally broke. I spent my days thinking about Mike but too filled with shame to tell anyone about it, afraid that Brad would appear, and guilty over my sister, who now lived at home and when to a local college. I was filled with resentment toward my father, but embodied the directives of my mother and said nothing about any of it.
The stress took its toll on me immediately. During my sophomore year, on a single day, I developed vitiligo. Overnight nearly one-third of the skin on my face lost all pigment. Later, I had to take nearly a month off of school due to migraines with auras that nearly blinded me. Near the end of that year, while I did not speak or cry or complain, my throat revolted — My thyroid grew to nearly twice its normal size. I had to get countless scans and biopsies and took thyroid medication into my twenties.
Looking Forward
Each of these layers was just an old memory to me until recently when my reflections upon them revealed that it was the cumulative impact that has steered many of my life decisions since. Nearly every relationship I have had has been influenced by the events of that year. The people that I tend to keep in my life the longest are people who have lied, or for whom I feel pity or guilt. *Most* of my romantic relationships have been with men who were unfaithful, while I have never retaliated with infidelity. Not surprisingly — I would be far too guilty.
In the most “fourteen-again” moment of my life — I was recently on the receiving end of a long series of deliberate and cruel lies. Still recovering from my divorce, I was an easy target. Then, as the truth slowly revealed itself, I lied to myself saying that I didn’t care.
I did care. Wounds from deception cut deeply, which is why I’m airing out this childhood story, and acknowledging it as the seed of an old belief system that has many times drawn me toward an infatuation with deception.
I cannot change those who choose duplicity, I can only change myself and my response to them. I can create better boundaries and become bolder, and talk about my experiences in order to heal from them. Where there is deception, I will leave and not sit quietly, or pretend not to notice. I will take up space. I deserve the truth, and to be truthful, and I will accept nothing less from those I allow into my life.
