High School

     I graduated in 1974 and have not attended a single high school reunion.  This is not just because all the early ones were glorified keggers, but because I spent all four years of high school feeling like a guppy swimming in a piranha tank.  There were a lot of us guppies, but we were hardly in a position to overpower the piranhas.  My main goal in high school was to disappear, blend in to the background as if I was just another tile or locker.  This worked so well that both times I was called to the front to receive scholarships my senior year, I heard people all around me saying "Who's she?".  I was never asked out on a date, which was just as well because that actually meant "Wanna get drunk together?" I had one, very shy, friend my last two years of high school and lost contact with her after my sophomore year of college. I don't feel sorry for myself, this was just the reality for us guppies, but neither do I have any desire to revisit those years, so I don't attend reunions.
     My husband is on the board of the Christian school my children attended and where my niece and nephew now attend so we are invited to several functions through the year.  While I am enjoying the concerts and programs, I find part of my mind wandering, wondering how my sister and I might have turned out if we had spent those important years in a supportive environment instead of a piranha tank.  Would my moderate vocal ability have been accepted in the choir?  Would my musical comprehension be better if I had been able to play an instrument?  I emerged from high school feeling like something that had been crumpled and squashed in the mud and it took years to shake away the dirt and find my confidence.  I spent my freshman year at the University of Montana where the atmosphere of indifference was a relief.  No one cared how you dressed or what you did, but they also didn't care when a drugged or drunk coed was screaming in the student union.  Indifference was a relief but it was not enough.
     My sophomore year I transferred to Bible college.  After the barbarism of high school and the indifference of the U of M, the tangible atmosphere of love I felt at Western was healing. It was there, through the influence of Christian friends, that I began to believe in myself, to recognize that my nose was not that big, that I was not entirely unattractive, that I had gifts worth sharing with others, that God does not make junk.  God had a plan for me when he put me at Sentinel High, Christian school wasn't even an option back then, but I can't help but wonder what it would have been like to understand and accept myself before I was 19 years old, and to realize that we are not all piranhas or guppies.