With every year of high school, I have more and more events to recall, but most of them are associated either with journalism or Eurovision. When you’re performing a caricature of a real person, you tend to stick with what you know. That’s what makes my adoption of Destination Imagination so peculiar, since it was an after-school program that was geared toward problem solving and creative performance. I participated in it all four years of school, and I remember that I cared about it as much as anything else, but it felt so far outside my comfort zone.
Well over 20,000 words into writing all of this, I can’t connect this back to any threads that exist with the same grandeur that I can the other things that have happened to me. In that sense, I suppose it’s just the exception proving the rule, that sometimes we just have good experiences to balance out the bad. I got the chance to work with others, grow close to our advisor, Ms. Maloney, and to do good for the community and perform for people. There might not be a bigger point to it than just that.
My time in DI is notable for breaking up the rest of my high school memories, and it’s something that I wouldn’t ever trade in, but it’s self-contained. And I’m grateful for that, since it means I have less baggage to carry with me now.
Unlike virtually everyone else, high school ended up saddling me with far less baggage than junior high. I liked all of my classes, my teachers, my activities; I had virtually nothing to complain about, in that regard. I even started making friends again, although they were always at an arm’s length. Going forward, that was kind of the expectation rather than anything else; I never really anticipated that I would have much of a life. I just kinda thought I would exist indefinitely.
There’s a pretty well-known episode of Spongebob where Squidward starts traveling through time and breaks the machine, ending up in some liminal space that’s just an eternal white plane, that ultimately fills with different stylizations of the word “alone.” That’s kind of what my life felt like; detached from any real progression of the world and the faintest ideas of the future appearing as ghostly paintings against the white backdrop. And as soon as I tried to get a glimpse at the detail, they’d vanish.
It took about three or four years to grow comfortable with that idea of the future, but I eventually did as a survival mechanism. One fewer fight I had on my plate would always make a difference, since it felt like all my existence amounted to was a collection of difficulties, a hurdle race along a track that just kept adding hurdles to the end. After a while, though, something began to change.
I graduated from Burges High in 2013, at the age of 17 and exited the stage at the arena into a murky future. A month earlier, I’d formally rescinded my own acceptance of a generous scholarship from Seattle University - where I’d planned on pursuing a degree in Global Communications and Media - to instead research art schools to pursue a graphic design degree. To fill my time, I took up a job in my mother’s dental office, assisting and ultimately replacing two of the ladies who’d worked for her since she opened the practice in 2006. It was an odd changing of the guard, an odd new dimension to my relationship with my mother, an odd time in general. But one thing did change; I didn’t have to perform as much, and so the quality thereof began to decline.
Since I was around people who’d known me and, more critically, cared for me since before Little Nick died, I didn’t have such a high standard of performativity, and as a result, I was able to take some of that fight off the table. I also didn’t have my AP-level workload from school, my college applications, or my extracurricular work to contend with anymore. In one fell swoop, I cleared like five or six hurdles. My outlook started to change; it started to get more overtly worse.
The nadir of this came in October of 2013, when I got into an argument with my mother over the course of the three-minute drive to work. I can’t even remember what it was about, but I do remember that we yelled at each other and she ultimately said “If you hate being here so much, then why don’t you just go home?” and so, I did. I had no license, so I walked 20 minutes along the street with no sidewalks to get home. I passed my old high school, my old junior high and elementary school, and I observed it all in silence. It hit me as soon as I got home and the door shut behind me; this was fucked up. Everything was fucked up. But it didn’t have to be that way forever.
On the screen sphere that the world saw me through, the first dead pixels flickered and burnt out.
Naturally, upon realizing that life could be better, I turned to the one thing that was primary to my life now: Eurovision. I’d been silently reading a fan blog for three years, but had posted only a handful of comments until that point. I decided that I’d start to actually engage with that community It’d be the first time that I ever truly engaged with them, and only the second time I’d actually engaged with someone through Eurovision. The first person was a blogger from Australia, Jaz, whose site I commented on frequently, and our comments and replies spanned paragraphs at the bottom of her posts.
Those first steps into connecting with people as something other than the perfect projection of a person were thrilling. I don’t ever recall feeling any fear, as I just figured it was the normal thing to do, now that I wasn’t trying to make everything look squeaky clean in my life, and that I’d finally accepted that, against what I’d planned for myself, things were a bit of a gigantic dumpster fire. And I desperately needed that experience.
Like a lot of my peers, the internet had been omnipresent in my life, and like I alluded to before, my use of it was almost entirely passive. Screens mediating screens was never going to allow for any real connection, but I finally got a taste of that toward the end of 2013. I was writing full reviews/recaps of old Eurovision years, I was playing in pretend Eurovision-style contests online, I was engaging with the community at large on Twitter; it was the first time that anything resembling Little Nick had treated him kindly in years. I’ll never forget the joy of discovering so many people who were just decent people. And I owe them so much for those experiences, since they finally gave me a footing to start tearing down the screens.