Middle School Reflections

As I’ve been processing different memories recently, I’ve been thinking about a specific time in my life. In sixth grade, I went from being homeschooled to attending the local public middle school. I would describe this transition as difficult, but attending public school wasn’t traumatic in itself. What I’ve been thinking about specifically is whether, now that I know about my disability, I view any of these emotions or experiences differently.

I’ve noticed that adults like to joke that middle school is cruel to everyone and that no one is having a good time there. I don’t ever say anything when my peers say that because I don’t want to negate someone else’s experiences, and at the same time I wonder if everyone felt as lost as I did. When I observed the other young women my age, they seemed to form gangs or cliques and then pick on me or others who did not meet the standards of sleek hair and whatever else. For the longest time, I thought I didn’t like other women my age, so I had a lot of guy friends. The guys I was friends with tended to be more blunt and didn’t mind me being a bit weird. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to love female friendships; they tend to be with women older than me. I craved platonic female companionship, but I just couldn’t figure out how to communicate with them in middle or high school.  

Middle school was the first time I felt the need to conform to a universal style. When I homeschooled, many families were obsessed with “modesty,” which meant different things to different people. I had skirts I wore, especially in the winter, that aligned with this ideal, but I wore them because I felt comfortable in them and liked how I felt. Other days, especially in the summer, I wore shorts and no one bothered me. Middle school was a whole other animal.

I used to think I escaped unscathed from participating in the gauntlet of wearing fashions one doesn’t even enjoy to fit in. I did not. I wore skinny jeans from middle school through high school, as far as I remember, and I might have stopped in my senior year because it became too much. I didn’t wear them in summer; I still don’t know how anyone can bear to wear those monstrosities in the southern heat, but I did try to wear clothes that would help me fit in. I was never allowed to wear Abercrombie. My mother said that their commercials were inappropriate. By the time I got to college, I decided that the jig was up. I was told that I would never find a romantic partner if I didn’t wear attractive outfits to class. I decided I didn’t care. Running shorts, hoodies, sweatpants, yoga pants, and T-shirts filled my drawers and closet.

I was also told to wear makeup regularly. I take more care in what I wear, clothing-wise, now, but the makeup I don’t think will ever be a permanent fixture in my life. Middle school was the first time that I was directed more externally on how to dress and present myself than internally. My hobbies and character remained internally driven, but there was more conflict. I’m surprised at how much of my middle school self remains intact. I would sneak off to the library to read when all my schoolwork was done because being in a loud classroom was too much. I still like spending time by myself; now I spend more of it at home, but I still like the quiet.

If I close my eyes, I can see the face of my sixth-grade assistant principal, the stage in the cafeteria, and my sixth-grade homeroom teacher. There were so many adults who kept me afloat emotionally and psychologically in my first year. Middle school was the first place I experienced growing up in many ways. The tug of war between who I want to be and the constraints the world can place on a person—maybe that’s the journey of growing up, or maybe it’s the journey of learning that feelings are a piece of the puzzle for making choices, but not the only piece.

Not knowing that I had autism back then, I’m proud of how I navigated all of the many challenges that came with going from homeschooling to public school. While the public high school courses I took there were challenging, I wonder whether my education would have been more challenging and enriching if I had stayed in a homeschooled environment. There were more extracurricular activities in public middle and high schools, but it was harder to keep up an accelerated academic pace.

It’s a topic that I’ve discussed with someone who became a parent less than a year ago: the balance needed in a child’s education. I believe it’s a balance that I continue to have to find in my life as an adult. I’ve always been achievement-driven and enjoyed checking tasks off a list. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized there are important skills that cannot be mastered and checked off a list, such as learning to get along with a difficult person you have to see on a day-to-day basis, conversing with someone with whom you disagree, and what to do when you want to escape back to the life you  had but that life has disappeared forever. Maybe the first lesson of my adulthood is that something worth doing is not easily achieved and could be painful at the beginning. I’m not referring to the bus ride with the bullying, but to the clubs I ended up joining and enjoying, the friend I made, and the classes I took with the teachers I learned a lot from.

I definitely enjoyed high school more than middle school, but I had to get through middle school to get there.