What I owe to the Academy

I had a dream about my high school the other night.

I was back in my plaid skirt and embroidered white polo, (my high school was Catholic, all-girls and uniform-wearing) and I was sitting in my newspaper advisor’s room in the black leather chair that always sat in the corner between the dry erase board and the wooden bookcase. I was talking to my high school friends about high school things: where we were going that weekend, the football game at the all boy’s high school. 

In terms of a malaria medication induced dream, it was pretty tame. 

What it did do, when I woke up under my mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside, was get me thinking about what had brought me to a place where I was waking up under a mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside.

I did not have the normal high school experience. I was awkward. There are many parts that I wish I could go back and do-over. I choose to believe that those two things are normal feelings for people after graduating high school.

But there are also things that happened to me in high school that made me the person that I am today: I learned how much I had been given; I became obsessed with Woodward and Bernstein; I drank my first drops from the fountain of feminism and my first cup of coffee; I was shown the power of words; I was first challenged to re-evaluate the person I was becoming; I had teachers who showed me the kind of person that I wanted to become.

I choose to believe those things changed me for the better.

I’ve always understood my high school experience was different than most. It wasn’t until college that I began to appreciate what those differences meant. I’ve thanked the Academy many times in college application essays, in final speeches at banquets and in my head. What surprises me is, almost 5 years out, for how much I still I have to thank the Academy.

There are so many places, people and experiences that brought me here, but I know that path started with a plaid uniform and an embroidered white polo.