Just some thoughts

looking back, my senior year of high school was the hardest i'd experienced in my seventeen years. but at the time, it didn't completely make me collapse. i think that it was some subconcious mechanism in my brain, trying to protect me from the hardships to come.

in grade school, i excelled in reading and most other studies. but, as with most kids, middle school was a bit of a shock. i have a hard time remembering seventh and eighth grade, even though i didn't drink or do drugs or anything like that. i was a good kid, but i had a troubled family life. i went to one school for seventh grade, and moved again just before eighth grade.

at home, i was the only-child of a single mother who worked as a bartender trying to make ends meet. even though my parents were never married and broke up a year after i was born, they remained friends. my dad was a severe alcoholic, and during middle school, he lived with my mom and i. most of the time, he was so drunk he was more like an irritating sibling than a father. i'd been dealing with his alcoholism for a long time and I knew (for the most part) how to handle it.

at school, most of the kids knew eachother because they had the advantage of going to the same grade school together. i didn't, which meant i didn't have any friends. and nobody wanted to get to know the sickly girl with a lisp. and while my grades were great in grade school, they dropped dramatically in middle.