Introversion & Memory

[britpoptarts]

I didn't want to go on the trip with these kids, but I felt torn between my awareness that I was being too antisocial (as usual) and earning a figurative gold star on my college applications as a useful member of this particular school club. I lived a lot in my head as a teen. My home life was adrift and full of conflicting messages ever since my

Comments

[black_and_bloom]

I (deliberately) missed the senior trip to London, as well as our lovely post-grad cruise. The truth was, as appealing as London was to me, I couldn't face going with our classmates. The social stress of it all would have overshadowed any enjoyment out of what would have been my first trip to Europe.

Notes are important, but there are few left around. I'm realizing whole years are lost to me, and without photographs and bank records, I'd be totally adrift. I still have a notebook from Spahn's World History class - it's helpful. Sometimes I listen to music to bring back memories, or remember familiar locals, and things do begin to creep back. I firmly believe that I had a year-long bout with depression in 1982 that I didn't really surface from until close to graduation. My recollections of you totally support your reports - quiet, dreamy, and inward-looking, you weren't an archetype that people, me included, understood very well.

My mother wants me to move back to Savannah and send my kids to school at SCD. Hell no. My son alone would be in class with at least 10 people from our grade or immediately adjacent grades. I'm happy to have them at the multi-age hippie school here were we live instead. But I do send them to Bill Eswine's summer camp every year - he was one of the cool ones.

And I'm charmed by chipmunks too. Pity my cat kills them on sight.

[britpoptarts]

I don't remember the cruise option. I suspect I rejected it either due to finances (we were poor, frankly) or due to getting a case of the heebie-jeebies at the idea of being trapped on a boat with people who had the capacity to casually do and say cruel, ignorant, mean or rude things. Most of them didn't MEAN them that way, and I was also a bit prone to hypersensitivity. Would not have made it more bearable.

I don't know that I much understood myself, frankly, though I was working on figuring out what made me so weird or different or however you want to describe it.

The music trick doesn't usually work for me, because I still listen to a lot of stuff from high school. No era-specific memories are formed if you never quite stop listening to the same stuff...new stuff just overwrites or coexists with old stuff.

I like Bill, too. My mom still keeps in touch with lots of SCD teachers (mostly lower school ones).