High School Embarrassment? Don’t Get Me Started

Know Yourself #25

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Let me just kick things off by saying that I’m really not sure anyone’s qualified to comment on ‘an embarrassing high school experience’ until they have sat, in the 1990s, at a wobbly Formica table in a school cafeteria in the North of England and unpacked — at a table surrounded by kids all tucking into heaped plates of chicken nuggets, doughy pizza slices, and slightly cold fries — a family-sized metal Thermos flask of lentil soup, and a brown paper bag full of pieces of homemade rye bread.

That “whole-room-goes-quiet” thing? It’s not an exaggeration. Pin drop, etc.

I started school for the very first time at the age of 12, in the mid-1990s, having been home educated until that point (on a small farm in the middle of nowhere) by my mother who was deeply embedded, at that time, in a strict religious cult.

Because I was twelve, I went straight into high school, bypassing all the infant and junior parts. Turns out, the infant and junior bits are important because that’s where you learn to fit in. I didn’t get any of that.

Now, I’m grateful. Then, it was horrific.

I had begged for years to be allowed to start school, and I was extremely excited about it as I clambered onto the bus on my first day. I was…