Middle School

Middle school is an experience that I never want to relive. Talk about feeling gangly and awkward. We had moved to San Clemente, CA by this time and  I was able to finish speech therapy but still had to have tutoring for classwork. I hated school and was bored. Either the stuff was boring or I was lost and didn’t understand it. My hearing played a big part of it. Middle school had 6 classes and the majority of the classroom work involved lectures. Well I had 6 different teachers and had to deal with 6 different teaching styles. Some were awesome and helped me tremendously and some were total jerks about my hearing problem.

To make matters worse I was extremely shy, one of the tallest girls in school, and had trouble making friends. I had a couple of friends but none that would be called close friendships. Some of the friends that I had are what you would call users today. But I was both shy and naive and believed that they were friends. Today I realize that they just used me and hate that kids at that age were so manipulative. Because I didn’t have many friends I didn’t have to deal with peer pressure. I did the usual experimenting with drinking and smoking pot. The first time I tried pot I didn’t have anything happen. No funny feeling, munchies, or nothing. Needless to say we got a dummy batch. It was just herbal tobacco. Talk about feeling stupid later when I realized the switch up.

During this time I went from hating my sister to having a close relationship. We grew up fighting like cats and dogs. One day it just changed. My sister was also shy and didn’t like to go anywhere by herself. Since I was home most of the time she ended up having me go places with her to keep her company. She had her own car and boy did we have some memorable times.

I would go to parties, rock concerts, and hang out at the beach with her. I learned what pot was really like. We never did any of the hard-core drugs. I never wanted to and I was happy with alcohol and pot. A whole new world had opened up to me. Funny enough the older people who were my sisters friends didn’t care about my hearing and treated me like anyone else.

We would spend days hanging out on the beach, going to Pete’s for a disgusting but oh so yummy fish burger, and go to a friend’s house to party the night away. I had been so happy there and the entire family agreed  that we should have never moved from there to the next job. We all were happy there and missed it. But then life would have turned out completely different if we had stayed. Funny how looking back a simple thing can have a major effect on your life.