In the fall of my senior year in high school I suffered a deep psychic and emotional wound. For most people, I doubt that what I experienced that October would have had the same effect, but for me – a 17 year old with zero life tools – this one traumatic event started me on a twenty-year road of almost complete emotional and spiritual destruction. And even though I was eventually able to choose the path of health and to recover myself though years of hard, inner work, fifty years later the effects of that one event continue to haunt me and to cast a pall over my life.
My school, a girls’ school, held an annual May Day celebration. The entire student body participated. One senior girl would be elected as May Queen and one senior girl would be elected as Maid of Honor. As a seventh grader I set my sights on being selected as the Maid of Honor my senior year and spent the next five years being a model student. And I mean a truly model student. I even planned the timing of my senior chapel talk to precede the student body vote so that my name and face would be familiar to the younger students.
That October several of us were nominated for both positions by the senior class. Then the student body voted. There ended up being a run-off between me and a classmate for the Maid of Honor position. I remember sitting in French class the morning the votes were calculated and hearing screams of congratulations erupt from the adjacent classroom. I remember my French teacher catching my eye with sympathy at the sound, because she and I knew what the screams meant. I remember sitting in the foyer next to the gymnasium using a pay phone to call my mother. I cried and cried making that call. I may actually have had to leave school for the rest of the day. I just don’t remember. I was completely and totally devastated.
Why was that one, seemingly trivial event so traumatic for me? I believe there were many reasons, all of which coalesced into the perfect storm. The conditions for this perfect storm had been building for many years, but unaware of the dangers, I had forged blithely ahead without a life vest. When the storm hit, it took me under.
No one had told me that no matter how hard one works to achieve a certain goal or result, sometimes it just doesn’t happen. It’s no one’s particular fault. It just happens for reasons beyond one’s control. No one had taught me how to handle that kind of disappointment. I, however, had been indoctrinated with very different messages - that money was the most important goal, that money bought influence, that money and status were what counted the most. So, when I lost that election to a girl whose family was socially prominent and wealthy, I took to heart the lessons I had been spoon fed by my parents.
That year I became seriously depressed. I was one of the photography editors on the annual staff. I did nothing. I was in a select literary club. I never attended a meeting. I withdrew from all but one or two friends, and even with them I began to build an outer shell. I went through the motions and plastered a smile on my face. Near the end of that school year the assistant principal lectured me, telling me “We are so disappointed in you”.
I went to college that next fall and continued to struggle. I dropped out my second semester with a serious health issue that took months to diagnose. Although I ultimately returned to college, graduated and then completed law school, all of my life decisions were weighed against my new goal of attaining status and wealth by any means possible. The decisions I made in the first ten years after that October day my senior year in high school resulted in terrible and painful consequences that took another ten years of experiencing before I hit a spiritual and emotional bottom.
Next month I will celebrate thirty-five years of healing. The healing didn’t happen all at once. It took years of work, acceptance, understanding, onion peeling, sorrow, forgiveness and reflection. About 18 months ago I was shocked to experience two PTSD attacks associated with trauma that had happened to me as a result of some of my bad decision-making in the 1980’s. That occurrence reminded me that my healing continues, and that perhaps I will never be completely healed. But that is ok.
Why am I writing about this? The fact that my 50th high school reunion is this year has brought the precipitating event front and center for me, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that, about that young girl, about how badly she hurt, and how I am not that girl now and haven’t been for a very long time. But the first sentence of this essay came to me when I woke up around 2:00 this morning from a dream about the Coronavirus. The dream faded, but the sentence remained, letting me know I needed to write.
The picture which accompanies this essay is my senior yearbook picture. It was taken the summer before school started. That girl had so many hopes for the future. She had no idea how difficult the road she was getting ready to walk would be.