peterborough

When I started high school in 1991, I was nervous and excited, like a lot of kids going into Grade 9.  Coming from a very small rural elementary school at the edge of the village of Keene, walking through the doors of this 160-year-old urban high school was like a dream.  One of 50 students accepted into the Integrated Arts Program that year, I knew only two other people at PCVS, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.

Elementary school had been, for me, completely brutal.  Our family moved to the village when I was in kindergarten, and in a place where many families could trace their roots back generations, we were strangers. And from that point, until my graduation in grade 8, I was a social pariah, an easy target for bullying, a weird girl in hand-me-down clothes who loved books and knew nothing about sports.

People often speak about the idylls of childhood as though kids are innocents, and being one is an unrelenting exercise in pleasure, play, and freedom from responsibility.  I can’t identify; childhood for me was an endless round of fears, from what new taunting, theft, or physical violence was going to be inflicted upon me at school, to the ever-present money problems at home that formed the backdrop to everything else.  When I look back, I remember stress, anxiety, and depression; I retreated further into my books and was dragged resisting out of bed in the mornings to go to school.  On the walk, I would often daydream about falling and breaking a leg, the idea of avoiding school for a week so appealing that I longed for injury.   Read the rest of this entry »