I'm at an odd point in my life right now.
It doesn't feel like it's been all that long since I graduated from high school, but on June 6th, it will have been three years. On June 6th, I'll be in an office in Cleveland going through my second day of training for my internship. On June 6th, I will be even closer to finishing my final year of college. I'll be less than a year away from sitting for at least one section of the CPA exam. I'm a lot closer to being a real adult now than I am to being a child.
Being less than a year away from my college graduation feels weird. It's not weird because it's the end of my education—I really do want to pursue a PhD in anthropology in the future (for my own amusement if nothing else) so things are really only just beginning—but it's weird to look back on it. It's weird to look back on everything that has happened and how much things have changed. I've been doing a lot of reflecting recently, I suppose, and that's brought a lot with it.
I've had some truly excellent professors in college (mostly in the anthropology department). My professor for my first-ever anthro class is an old friend of my parents, and it's because of him (and my T.A.) that I kept taking classes in the field and eventually made the decision to switch my A&S major from fiction writing to anthro. I had that T.A. for a summer class, which was equal parts hilarious and intellectually stimulating, because, for some reason, I keep winding up in anthro classes that culminate in a collection of really weird inside jokes, and you can learn a lot (of both awesome and really, really weird stuff) from someone who was a coroner before they started graduate school (I'm still very sad that he finished his PhD and went elsewhere for his post-doc because the department just isn't the same).
My intro to physical anthropology professor is a generally chill person and I had him for a different seminar class in the fall which pretty much consisted of us having round-table discussions in the physical lab once a week until we ran out of things to talk about. My thesis advisor is someone that I've had for two seminars over the last year, and she is hands-down one of the single greatest people I've met in college—she's a fantastic teacher, her classes are structured really well (at least for me), she actively encourages people to pursue topics they're interested in for their assignments (and puts up with me showing up to her office hours all the time to ask questions about said topics), and she also brought snacks to almost every single one of our classes this spring, which I'd like to think speaks for itself.
As wonderful as they all are, though—as sad as I am that my time with them is coming to an end (though who's to say, because I don't know where I'll wind up for graduate school)—it's not really them that I'm reflecting on. They've done a lot for me, but it's my high school teachers that I keep going back to, which probably isn't surprising given that my high school OChem teacher told me that I seem to be one of the only people who has been genuinely reflective on my time there since I've graduated.
It's hard to not be, honestly. My academic career has been a rocky one on a lot of fronts (though not the academics themselves, fortunately) and even as high school was difficult for me in many ways, it was also the first place where I really had moments of feeling safe. It was the first place where I knew that there was someone I could go to, where I knew that I had someone I could trust to be there when things weren't going so well, where I learned how to ask for help without needing parental backing in the process.
It didn't really feel that way at the time, and that's probably why I'm still so stuck on it—I'm not stuck on it because I want to go back (as I've discussed before), but I'm stuck on it because I have distance now. I can look back on what it was and understand what it did and be genuinely appreciative of how much it taught me and how far I've come since then. When I think about high school, I don't really think about social things. I don't think about dances, or hanging out with friends (with a few notable exceptions—I don't think I'll ever forget that lost day from sophomore year).
Instead, I think about that song from Charlie Brown and the bench down the hall from the history office and the "Swarts! How's it going?" that I got pretty much every day the last two years of high school (and still get, when I go back). I think about utterly terrible chemistry jokes and how almost every meeting that I had with some people somehow wound up taking up an entire free period or hour after school. I think about the emails that I got because something reminded a teacher of me and they wanted to pass it on, that philosophy class that I sat in on senior year just because I stopped by to say hi and wound up staying the entire time, my entrance interview and the subsequent discussions about the awesomeness that is anything written by Tamora Pierce.
I was a mess in high school. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I was a mess. I was borderline losing it most of the time. Junior year was a hell that I medicated my way through with caffeine and ibuprofen because I was only getting four or five hours of sleep a night during the week and then crashing on Friday as soon as I got home and sleeping until Saturday morning. Hell Week during musical literally was hell week for me half the time. My emotional control was tenuous at best and sleep deprivation didn't make it any better.
What made it better was being able to walk into the history office during a free period with the knowledge that even if we couldn't talk that day, Mr. Weiss would find some time that week (usually a full free period) to sit down with me on that bench down the hall and help me through whatever was dragging me down at that particular time (or talk me down from the cliff that I was in danger of jumping off of, even if neither of us realized it at the time).
What made it better was that day after school junior year when Mr. Smith sat down with me and let me say whatever it was that I said (even though it ended in me crying) and told me things that he really didn't have to so that I would know that he got it. What made it better was knowing that he was going to push me to produce the best work that I could, but that if I needed to, I could go up to him after class and say "I haven't been sleeping and I can't think straight and can I please have a couple of extra days on that paper so that it's not completely awful" and get an extension without having to justify it further than that.
What made it better was telling stupid terrible chemistry jokes to Landreth in class pretty much every day for the second half of junior year, and having discussions about books with Ms. Williams (they weren't always about Tamora Pierce, but you really can't go wrong with her), and Mr. Miller's belief in my insanity due to how much I wrote. What made it better were those advising meetings with Dr. Ashworth that always began with me intending to say "Everything's good" but wound up turning into discussions of faith and religion or something interesting in the news, and his (and Dr. Sutula's) unrelenting belief in how intelligent I was even when I didn't believe it myself.
What made it better was Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers on random mornings in history, skiing videos and Christmas carols in OChem, flight simulators or weekly news quizzes or a map of the U.K. in calculus so that Dr. Ashworth could get us to try pronouncing various place names and laugh at our inability to say anything correctly (I will never mispronounce Worchestershire or Leicester or Edinburgh ever again), that one day in Advanced Bio where everyone fell silent just in time for all of us to hear Ms. Zheng say "So I don't know how to make meth, but—", and the little notebook that I kept in my backpack which contains a further selection of stupid quotes from classes because I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write that stuff down.
(A favorite exchange of mine is the following from our alcohols unit in OChem: "Ethanol can be used for several purposes, such as..." "Getting drunk!" "Drinking to excess twice or three times a month is worse for you than having one or two drinks every night, but that ruins the effect of alcohol, doesn't it?" "That's what ecstasy is for!")
I learned a lot of academic things from all of these people in high school. I learned how to ask good questions, how to take notes, how to cite things in Chicago style (the merits of which I had an in-depth discussion about with my best friend last week because we are literally that weird and that into writing research papers), how to structure an argument and write a decent essay (in a short span of time, no less, because my procrastination skills are legendary). I learned how to research in a library and how to draw chemical structures and how to work my way through mathematics concepts that I don't understand.
I learned all of that, and it matters because it set me up for success in college, but really... The most important thing that I learned was how to look after myself. I learned how to ask for help. I learned what it means to really have people in your corner who want you to succeed for no reason other than because they want it for you. I learned what it means to feel accepted for who and what I am, no matter how much of a mess I can be sometimes. I learned what it means to have people believe in me (people who aren't my family and contractually obligated to do so), and I learned how to internalize that knowledge so that it would be there even when the people aren't.
I learned that no matter how far you go, no matter how much you change, no matter how well you do, no matter how much you've done for yourself since, you will still cry when one of those people tells you how proud they are of you, and you will definitely cry if more than one of them tells you that (I have no shame).
So as I look at the internship that will hopefully lead to my first full-time job, at my twenty-first birthday, at my impending graduation and whatever lies after it, I just have to say this:
To Mr. Weiss, Mr. Smith, Dr. Ashworth, Dr. Sutula, Landreth, Ms. Williams, and everyone else from high school who gave me a push in the right direction even if they weren't aware of it... Thank you. Thank you a million times, and even more than that.
I know that not everyone says it, that not everyone comes back, that it can be an afterthought, but it isn't for me. It never will be, because I don't know where I would be right now without all of the help that you gave me. Either way, this is something that I have to and will continue to say, because I know how lucky I've been and there aren't enough thanks in the world to cover it.
I should've been asleep two hours ago. Oh well. My sleep-deprivation is self-inflicted and its current cause is much preferable to what was there in high school.
Until next time x
