Sixteen Bombs

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 6 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My subject is: You are a senior in high school again and graduation is upon you. What are you looking forward to? Vacation? College? Career? Moving out of mom/dad's house? Plans?

It was submitted by: https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

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I have had a few prompts now about going back to high school and reminiscing in that part of my past, and honestly, it's straight up not a good time, bro. I didn't enjoy my high school experience. Overall I have very few fond memories from that time and even fewer people I remain in contact with from back then. And I'm perfectly okay with that. You won't see me singing "thanks for the memories" any time soon.

It kinda feels like a downer on what is supposed to be a fairly lighthearted prompt, but who am I if not a chronic oversharer whose third favorite topic of conversation (after murderers and abolishing prisons) is her own personal trauma??!?

I surely wouldn't be me so here we go.

I didn't attend school on campus my senior year. I was enrolled in a program that let me take college courses that counted as credit for both college and high school, and even though my counselor advised against it as most students took 1 or 2, I went to college full time that year. Why, she asked...

Maybe it was the fact that I saw the person who raped me several times a week in the hallways? The person who got away with it, who stole me of innocence, killed the me that I had been? The one who had no bad memories and no PTSD and who didn't care about justice?

Or maybe the bullying? The death threats in my locker about being openly queer and protecting other queers? The fat jokes? The crazy jokes? The physical threats that used the word "dyke" like it was a dagger? Weirdo. Bitch. Lesbo. Carpet Muncher. Fat cunt. Stupid whore. Ugly. Gross. I heard it all.

Or maybe just my shit mental health from having one abusive and two mentally ill parents who finally divorced and went off the fucking rails crazy at each other and us and with new partners, having no support from either one especially ESPECIALLY for the rape and my weight and no access to mental health care on top of the rest?

No couldn't be that. I just wanted to be too grown. I needed to be a child while I could.

Guess someone should have let my parents know that 🙃

so the best part of my senior year experience is that I actually didn't have to go to high school at all. No bullshit lunches being mocked endlessly and having to stand up for my friends. No classes with the same people all day long every day of the week. No getting up early. well, except for that one physics class i took and even then i didn't go half the time. my absences there didn't count for anything unless the professor included it in their grading. It made my life a little easier, but it didn't do anything to ease the pain of everything I'd gone through until then. It just meant I didn't have to spend 8+ hours 5 days a week watching my back at school just to go home and do it some more.

I don't know what it was like for other folks, but when I was accepted to a fairly large University, my first choice and still in Georgia, that would have almost entirely been paid for by the Hope scholarship, my mom screamed and cried and threatened me about leaving her and how I must not love her if I wanted to leave. I couldn't even look forward to moving away from here. I was never going to be allowed. At least not to go to college and even now, when Im a mostly grown ass adult, the fallout from moving even within a 4 hour radius would be huge. Suicidal threats and tears...and here's the thing, it's not even about me or love for me or wanting what's best for me. It's about rejection, imagined or otherwise. It's about control, about knowing where I am. it's not the least bit healthy, and it's the boundary I have yet to be able to put up--to just pack things up and move. I'm fucking 38. It shouldn't be this way.

Here's the thing...

I cannot tell you how many times in my years at high school, in college or not (where I still got called a dyke btw), I wanted to die. That didn't stop in my senior year, and it certainly didn't give me anything to dream about or plan or look forward to. I was barely hanging on by the moment. I lived one hour at a time. Sometimes minutes.

Do you understand how hard it is to be absolutely torn down by almost everyone around you, to be damaged and beaten and assaulted and bullied, just to have your only out ripped away from you? To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that going away to college wouldnt be the last dream ripped away from you because of someone else's inability to be supportive and loving and encouraging?

What would I look forward to if I had to do it all over again?

Still breathing? I guess? I'm still here. I suppose that says something.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.BakingInATornado.com

Spatulas on Parade https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com

Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

A ‘lil HooHaa https://hoohaa.com/

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/