Navigating the Landscape as a High School Freshman: Reflections on Cliques, Authenticity, and Unraveling Personal Identity in a Small Texas Town

It’s nerve-racking, walking onto the grounds of the high school campus on your first day as a high school freshman. The only solace exists in knowing that your friends will be there too. They were a sense of something familiar in an unfamiliar setting. The dynamic of this is something that never really goes away. I’m sure my friends and I agreed to meet somewhere on campus that morning, most likely in one of the school’s parking lots. Afterward, we found a cement bench in the courtyard under a handful of small oak trees and grew accustomed to it immediately. We would meet there more or less every morning for at least the next year, and off and on throughout our four years on campus.

I have both fond and bittersweet memories of that shaded cement bench. I was a high school freshman in ’99. A local legend named Sam Champion was my principal. He remembered the names of every student on campus that's always stuck with me. In the week leading up to spring break every year, he dumped a pile of sand in the courtyard near the office and lounged on a beach chair with an umbrella shading him from the sun, while drinking God knows what that came out of an ice chest a quarter buried in the pile of sand. Mr. Champion is the namesake of a second high school built in 2008, in our once little town. He would only be principal my freshman year (he suffered some health issues), I was lucky to have been a student there during his concluding year and to have known him. Knowing he would be there also helped to make me feel more comfortable.

I dated a girl for a few weeks who I should have devoted more energy to, and I didn’t. Kara deserved more of my time, and I didn’t give it to her. In retrospect, I can’t recall how we even knew each other, let alone well enough to date. Kara was in the school band. And band members rarely left the band hall, if at all. Sometimes I wondered if the teachers would go to them. And if they lived in the band hall, whether they came out only for town parades, football game halftime shows, or at night. Kara both entered and exited my life so quickly that if someone were to tell me that I dreamt the whole thing, I wouldn’t make a strong argument against it. It was a good dream while it lasted. While Kara and I were together, I was so preoccupied with something else rattling around in my head that I missed out on what certainly should have been a great thing.

My first year of high school inspired two considerable insights for me. The first was that I was only beginning to acknowledge the number of different cliques there are, and how significant stereotypes are to people; entire personalities are shaped and cultured by our slightest differences. I started school in Japan, while my dad was in the military. Aside from being four, five, and six years old, the effect of the inclusiveness and diversity of schools on a military base instills the impression of an entirely different set of standards than those who start their schooling in the public schools of a small, rural Texas town.

Throughout my first years of public school—my late elementary and middle school years—I would notice cliquish behavior but to a much lesser degree. It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I realized this was a deep human subconscious pull to be accepted and would extend even to hostility toward those outside of our comfort zones. Until then I perceived these little cliques as “shallow;” arbitrary, surface-level non-sequiturs. It was interesting and alarming to recognize an unconscious push to separate ourselves from one another. I vividly remember standing behind the cafeteria where several picnic tables were scattered on the grass, and just regarding the different tribes. I also remember thinking about what I had in common with them. By consciously making whatever common ground we may have had a priority I might just as easily have “belonged” to almost any of them. But I didn’t want to. I genuinely believe I had the best friend group. I watched a few of those early friends from middle school find comfort in tribes that weren’t my own, which was an interesting revelation. It’s not always so obvious what characteristics we value the most in ourselves.

I still think my friends in high school are the best people I’ve met. Over the years, since high school, living in Idaho, Utah, New York, New Mexico, and Montana, I’ve met some great people, still it was a test to find the type of genuine human beings that I befriended in high school. A large part of that was the authenticity of my friends. Most didn’t believe there was a need to be hypervigilant about emphasizing one particular characteristic to define them. I still have a hard time associating with inauthentic people. An alarming number of people will maintain bad behaviors and hide them rather than be honest and vulnerable about who they are because they are ashamed or embarrassed by that behavior. Living with it and hiding it, when you could either explore it and change or be open about it, is not something my patience was vaccinated from. Granted, in high school I wasn’t outraged by the behavior. I was too young, inexperienced, and malleable to be annoyed by developing behaviors. It was an interesting insight, however.

I was sitting in Ms. Garcia’s Spanish class one afternoon. I have a vague snapshot of the room, dimly lit behind my eyes. I sat near the rear wall, opposite the doorway, near Ms. Garcia’s desk. It wasn’t a warm classroom, the room's only redeeming quality was that it was the nearest to one of the building's entrances. There was a knock on the door, and Ms. Garcia called for whoever was behind the thick historic jail cell wood door to “come in”. Stephen, one of the most well-liked kids in our class, steps into the room dressed head-to-toe in a dishdasha, in fairly genuine Bedouin attire, and at first, he says nothing. Ms. Garcia pauses and then beckons Stephen to explain why he's interrupted her class. “My, uh, camel got a flat. Does anybody have a spare?” Stephen says without blinking, “Que?” Ms. Garcia says. “Me gusta bailar con leche.” Stephen blats, before walking out and letting the door slam behind him. I took three years of Spanish with Ms. Garcia, and the most I got from it was that I can recognize when people speak Spanish. Although I’m just as capable at identifying most languages, so for the benefit of everyone I hope schools are using The Rosetta Stone these days.

          My second notable insight was that I was expected to know who I was. I didn’t have a clue, and it seemed that most of my peers already did. In the twenty years since high school, it’s become obvious that I don’t think in the same way or share the purview of most people. Most of the side-effects of my distinctiveness I am grateful for and have actively developed, but some continue to challenge me (I’ll explore this more in future articles). I’ve known my entire life that I was a curious, eager, and happy young kid, and that sometime around first grade something happened that altered my personality (it’s a feeling and a memory that I’m still exploring). Nevertheless, it was this great influence that has shadowed me for decades.

I first recognized the symptoms of this around the sixth grade when I started browsing the concept of self-awareness (not consciously, of course—recognizing this would come later in life). Most people began dabbling with self-reflection much earlier in their childhoods than I did. There was a part of me still attached to my seven-year-old self. I wasn’t ready for encroaching adulthood. I had been anchored, comfortably to the moment, and the comfy mooring would continue throughout high school. However, my detachedness allowed me to delve deeper into introspection, and to remain there in quiet reflection for longer than most people would, another one of the many unconscious symptoms of experiencing something jarring during childhood.

I couldn’t communicate many of these emotional developments and insights to anyone because although I knew they were there, I couldn’t articulate them. If we are conscious in the womb, are we conscious about our development or solely of our existence (or neither)? And when do we know that those two things are different? I believed that my body and my emotions were trying to involve me, and mostly to encourage me to explore and work through the uncomfortable feelings I had been harboring, most people never fully realize that requisite in life at all, let alone as a teenager. I remember now, after this thing happened around the first grade, carrying it in the form of this heavy silence on that following morning, then the next day, and the next, and it eventually became a lumpish sadness.

I learned how to be happy again, but that comfort developed around the weight. By the time I was a freshman in high school, that weight developed with me, although there was no way I could associate the sentiment with the occasion. When everyone started asking me about my plan for adulthood, they didn’t realize they were yanking me from my comfortable moment. All but demanding me to imagine my world and transition into that otherwise unwelcome world. As a freshman, I had this newly seeded fear that was only nurtured with time, and although I could recognize the discomforting feeling, I didn’t know what it was, because it was just kind of everywhere.

High school was a mandatory social event, and for me, it was allowed to be because I was good enough at grasping at and recalling a passable amount of information to skate by with a B+ average and had little interest in the effect that grades were supposed to have on my life. I could not yet know that at the time my general purview was being manipulated by traumas I didn’t know existed. I don’t recall doing much homework, except for the occasional class project. I’m pretty sure that I could recognize if a correlation between our general studies and our chosen career path existed it was negligible at best. And when guidance counselors, teachers, and other adults asked me, “What are you going to do [with your life]?” And many people would sometimes unwittingly rephrase the question to “Who are you going to be?” In my head what I was thinking was, whoa, let’s slow way down, I’m not sure I even know what that means.

I have never really been able to separate the concepts of Who am I?” with “What am I going to do?” Despite witnessing early in life that people don’t always do what they love, I could never get my brain to understand why. The fact that people haphazardly do thoughtless $hit that fastens them unwantedly into a life they don’t want is bizarre to me. I was told when I was very young, “You can’t just do whatever you want,” that statement was never reasoned or designated, it was thrown out there as this blanket statement that meant nothing, yet everything simultaneously. Because although I didn’t know I was an artist, I knew I was. I loved to write, draw, take pictures, and play music. However, it was determined for me that art was a hobby, and that there was no practical application for the arts. If I could accept that writing was a hobby I would be allowed to enjoy it.

Afterward, when I sat down to write or draw, I was afraid I was wasting my time. It wasn’t long before my enjoyment of art turned to unease. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to want to do anything else, because I couldn’t separate who I was from what I wanted to do. And that’s why we’re unhappy with work. Watching the country dismiss work and process the way that we are to is like watching our undoing in slow motion (but that’s a different article). In short, people used to be convicted about their dreams, I think that’s why people ask, “What are you going to be?” People still ask that question. I think we still ask because we were asked, and maybe we’re still looking for the existence of even slivers of passion in a world where we’ve all but crushed all of our own.

We all have dreams; the meaning of life is in the pursuit and the process of realizing those dreams. Artists very much consider their passion a “calling,” and compare it even to the act of breathing. There’s a certain truth to that, sure but 1.) it’s no different than the feeling that anyone else might feel when they’ve realized their passion, whether it’s marketing, general labor, sales, or dance, and 2.) it can only be related to having an emotional staple; there’s a need that compels us toward a thing, it’s a necessity and because breathing is also a necessity we might embellish the deeply scarred emotional wanting of the tortured artist by a different standard than the deeply scarred emotional wanting of the tortured teacher, software developer, or RN.

Some people are compelled to write, largely because writing is the only expression of self that makes sense to them. In the same way that others feel they can only express themselves by painting, dancing, or photography. If we bothered to explore who we are as individuals, with greater depth we would discover that we express ourselves better through different professions. Where writing for me is something that I have to do every day, some people find the same passion and expression in marketing or management, or when practicing medicine or law. It took me almost twenty years to realize what I already knew as a toddler because someone else told me what I thought was wrong. It’s more difficult to rebuild your life from scratch when you’re halfway through it.

          Freshman year of high school was an opportunity to be the youngest of a group of kids again. And I eagerly acted the part. In eighth grade, we had seniority, so we needed to display at least a few signs of maturity, so that our parents and teachers wouldn’t feel the sting of failure, and our young emulators would have slightly older contemporaries to look up to. However, that’s not the real reason we would wet our feet in the ocean of maturation. It was because most of us wanted to. While we were ignoring the sub- and unconscious wayward emotional, psychological, and physical developments that would ultimately, and unilaterally manage our fates, what we were fully engaged in was something mystical that shadowed the idea of adulthood.

The act of creating our own lives and destinies was a powerful aphrodisiac. It felt a bit like choosing the “red pill.” Most of us on a solid untainted path toward sameness were eager to get there, but I was like, “The red pill does what now? Right, so, I’m gonna go with the blue. Do you have two blu…what is the recommended daily dose of blue pills, let’s double that. I wanna feel that beautiful numbing illusion of carelessness, and as quickly, and for as long as possible.” I was on the fence. This is funny because in years since, most people would view my life path as though I was chewing on the root that wrought the red pill. A part of me wanted to command my own life, the part that was vaguely aware that I wouldn’t have a choice someday. But not only was I at odds with the opposing emotional tides of my past but also with a conscious undertow of my directionless future. The last time I checked, those two should meet in the present, which was always today, and that’s where I was comfortable.

I was a passionate kid, and a closet romantic, but I didn’t know what to do with that passion. Years before, I would sit in the arms of a tree watching the sunset, and later the stars, wondering if Alex was looking up at the same stars, and thinking of me. “I know she loves me,” I would whisper. “No. She doesn’t…” the stars would whisper back. It’s hard to be passionate about building a life when your passions are reduced to wasteful amusements. The stars might ask, “What do you wanna be when you grow up?” and I would have responded with “Oh, yeah that’s easy, a writer, and a photographer.” the stars would whisper back, “Haha…no; your choices are an office clerk, a construction worker, or you can manage a Barnes & Noble. If you’re lucky you can go into marketing.”

Freshman year would begin my long-drawn-out exit from high school sports (not entirely, not yet but it was the beginning of the end). You may have heard high school sports are taken seriously in Texas, football especially. Our football team... Well, let’s say that the games had a lot of energy. I always had a good time at the games. I wish I had more than a vague memory of them because the aura of those things was intense as a high school freshman. And I don’t think I watched a single game. Boerne High School, and especially our graduating class, had notable baseball, soccer, cross-country, and maybe volleyball teams, I don’t know; and those turnouts were always quite a bit smaller. I’ll put it this way, most of us learned about our state championship wins the following morning during the overhead announcements.

Cross-country was my best sport, but I managed to screw up a muscle in my hip training as a freshman, and I never ran competitively again. I was disappointed because I was running a five-minute mile (that was good back then). If I matured as a runner through high school all of my unlaid dreams would certainly have been realized, every last one of them; whether they were related to running or not. I played basketball, but for whatever reason there was a misplaced switch somewhere in the recesses of my mind that would turn itself off when it mattered. This switch was the master switch for my brain. I also hated my freshman-year coach.

Playing basketball during my freshman year of high school taught me that being capable of doing something and doing something are two very different things and that in our humanity we would need a mentor to challenge us to be better and to teach us how to unlock that or to find a way to teach ourselves how to challenge ourselves. My freshman-year basketball coach didn’t do $hit. And neither did I. Freshman year was like a year without a past and a place without a future, it was emotionally complicated but remarkably satisfying. My high school career started to warm up during my sophomore year, and my memory starts to clear a bit here in the following articles...