Never Walked In High Heels

She tells me the story with a presentation so simple, it is perfectly elegant. Her father, growing up in a communist country, figured out at the age of five that he could take penny baseball cards and sell them for two pennies to his friends; thereby making a 100 percent prophet. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s, this was of course highly frowned upon. I look at her as she retells the story, explaining everything that happened and the trouble that her father and her grandfather got into as a result of profiteering. “You should write that down and do a short story,” I say. She looks at me as if ridiculous and scoffs “Why? Two lines and you’re done. Story’s over. There’s nothing particularly interesting about it.”

How many stories like this are lost by people who assume that everyday occurrences are not worth mentioning, recording, or even refining until they are something to be passed down from generation to generation? These are of course, the lost voices of human experience, silenced only by the owner.

Often times, people think that not only do they lack the talent to adequately record a story, what’s more, that themselves and their singular experiences don’t matter in the long run of human experience. However, it is the experiences of everyday people that make up a cultural zeitgeist, not the experience of celebrities or those in power.

I am reminded of the numerous nights my friends from all over. stayed up late telling stories, either by tradition or as a means to kill the time. Amongst my friends over the past year who have gotten married, just about all of them spent the rehearsal dinner telling stories about the couple; stories that make us laugh and touch us in a way that we can’t help but cry. These are the stories that we will someday tell our grandchildren until they are sick of hearing them. And when we are gone, although it might not feel like it at the time, they will long to hear us repeat that same story over again.

Long before my own grandmother died and even before her descent into Alzheimer’s, my father had the foresight to record her telling childhood stories. Like any old married couple, my grandfather can also be heard correcting her, cutting in and out, explaining “No that’s not right” and “This is how it really happened.” They are both gone now and I’ve listened to these recordings staring up at the ceiling fan above my bed and wondering if they knew when they told me these stories as a little girl what impact and beauty the stories actually held. Stories remind us again and again that we are not alone in the human experience; that we stay connected by passing down the line.

It is perhaps one of the oldest and in many ways overly used cliché stories that has ever been written, despite the fact that it is the foundation of so many peoples’ faith. But let’s take it out of context for a moment. A man; a leader whom many individuals had their heart set on becoming king and bringing in vast amounts of freedom for their oppressed people was killed on a Friday afternoon. Of course, that Sunday morning that was soon to follow, his tomb was empty and he had risen from the dead. We pass over the events of Friday and immediately go into Sunday without wondering at all what Saturday could have possibly been like. Nobody was happy come Saturday. Could you imagine the man who you thought would be your freeing king suddenly arrested and executed in the most horrific way possible. You are known to be one of his followers and so if they go looking for more trouble makers, you are the first in line. On that particular Saturday, everyone was in hiding. They met in attics, behind locked doors, secret areas where shadows lurked in hopes that they would never be found out. It was a mixture of terror, disappointment, and rejection which filled the hearts of people who lost their beloved leader on that Saturday; and they had no idea what Sunday would bring.

To say we live in a Saturday world to a modern audience sounds great. It sounds as if there is a world full of cartoons and waffles for breakfast, waking up late and mom asking what we will do to entertain ourselves for the rest of the day. A Saturday world sounds nothing short of heaven, but this is because we know that Sunday follows Saturday, as obvious as that statement may sound, and after Sunday comes the work week where everything is back to normal. But really, even in our own lives, do we have that guarantee? Do we have a promise that Sundays and Mondays will necessarily follow Saturdays and that life will continue as it ought to if we are in a particularly good place in our lives? Do we have a guarantee when we are suffering that this will be the end of our trials and if we pass the test once we will never be expected to pass it again? Just because someone was cured from cancer several years ago, should he expect not to be tested in the future by some other disease which may also risk his life? For a world that demands biological explanation and dismisses faith and assumption as grave mistakes, we are dependant on both of these characteristics to keep our world going.

If we look around and examine the world in front of us, we quickly see that nothing is as it should be. There is an ongoing outrage brought on by pain and death and destruction that reminds us, even if we aren’t religious, this world is nowhere near perfect; we are nowhere near where we yearn to be. Saturdays when I was in college, were not particularly the enjoyable morning which I had earlier in my childhood with cartoons and loved ones to play with. Saturdays were actually the loneliest days of the week. My friends had been out partying the night before only to spend their days off in bed with hangovers trying to fight their nausea and keep down food. Relief from the classes of that week finally came with the isolation in one’s room.

To live in a Saturday world means that we are forced by one form or another to be patient. There is so much about our own futures that is undiscovered and will go unknown until we are facing the edge of them. We are, as Thornton Wilder put it in his play Our Town, “Straining away to make something itself. This strain is so bad that every sixteen hours or so, all of us lay down for a rest.” As much as we may want to look to hitch a ride and look at the end of the movie to know if the hero’s struggle was completely worthwhile, we are unable to do so. So we wait on Saturdays; a day when nothing really improves and no work gets done, paralyzed in the world that promises so much and has so much about it that is yet to be desired. We wait for the Sunday morning to find out whether or not the promises we hoped for were worth the wait we have invested; we watch the sky in hopeful expectation.

One of my best friends called me in absolute tears the other day. Two of her younger sister’s, both unmarried, are now in their second trimester. Nobody else in the family was aware that they were pregnant until this week. Theirs is a Christian family devoted to rescuing children from troubled situations. Both my friend and her mother have actively devoted their professional careers to stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in separate ways. Her mother is an epidemiologist, my friend, a humanitarian worker that focuses on getting young women off the streets and out of prostitution, by showing them their value does not merely lie with their talents in bed. But for both of these women, their immediate reaction became a circumstantial symptom of abject failure.

Many families, particularly in more faith-based circles consider it embarrassing or even representative of a familial breakdown when a daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock. And it does evoke whispers among the people who surround that family, but it’s by no means the absolute worst thing that a child can do. Yet, the expectant grandparents often blush at how others will judge them rather than focusing their effort on creating the best family situation possible for the baby to come. I’m not saying that my friend’s family have fallen victim to this fallacy, but I have seen other families in the exact same situation do exactly that.

There is overall, a negative reaction within a family that bases its foundation in the Christian faith when an occurrence like this arises. There is a persistent fear amongst such people that the actions of their adult children somehow imply people are bad parents. Often I have seen parents threaten and even out right disown their children as well as their future grandchildren as the pregnancy in their eyes is the ultimate slap in the face to their child raising skills. Some of the most unchristian qualities actually come from those doing the disowning rather than those being disowned. However, what reflects worse on parenting skills in expecting grandparents refusing love to the expecting mother and child? Surely this is less of a Christian attitude than the act of getting pregnant ever was.

It is the unexpected events in life that cause us to drop our own masks of respectability. In truth, as a society, Christians today seem to care more about how other’s struggles can reflect poorly on them than what they can do to minimize struggling for any and all. When has it ever been morally responsible to even care about what the outside world thinks? Even in the most conservative families, public approval should never act as a barometer for actions or as a means to test what is morally right.

We all know somehow that there is a right and wrong, though we disagree on what exactly the nature of that division is, no one ever says, “I am going to go ahead and do the absolute wrong thing and make my life miserable as a result.” But the best among us sometimes set out to be the least controversial which creates almost a vacuum of morality. The fact that something makes waves doesn’t illustrate the fact that it is wrong and if someone disagrees or turns their nose up at your willingness to create a little trouble in the name of morality, chances are that person isn’t worth the effort it would take to appease them.

I know we love each other because we can scream at each other without worrying that it will ruin our friendship. Despite anything we say or might disagree about, or no matter how deep the issue runs, before the sun sets it will all be fine. Secure love, the best kind of friendship there is, can survive through rough waters even when going through dangerous territory is self induced. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion, but in fact the people who you love the most are the ones you can allow to see you at your worst. Anything short of that and the relationship is built on very unstable ground.

There is of course a cliché that any couple doubtlessly believe when they first get together, and that is the idea that “we will never fight.” We hear this particularly as girls in our infancy seeing Disney movies and countless happily ever afters. All of this is infinitely harmful to our idea of what love is. More often than not, young women (and probably men, although I can’t speak from first hand experience on this one) will do anything to avoid conflict just for the sake of living up to hopelessly high expectations. Not only do they change small preferences such as what items they would normally order off a menu in order to seemingly agree with their date, but eventually it reaches into other areas as well. What they say, what movies they prefer, what books they read, and eventually what ideals they hold. All of this to be able to give the illusion that indeed, together with their mate, the two are the perfect couple.

Our idea has changed from the notion that love conquers all except for conflict and disagreement or, better yet, love can conquer anything except pure honesty. What this does is shatter our expectations of what love is. If an honest opinion is something that love won’t stand, what hope does love have to conquer any struggle?

Too often I have witnessed my female friends trying to soften the blow of truth when a situation is particularly sticky. They wind up selling half truths and reinventing the situation for someone who they are attracted to in order not to shock their potential soul mate or at the very least, to coax their lover into agreeing with their own opinions. If you have to do this, then your problem is not breaking news to someone, your problem is the entire relationship being on unsteady ground.

During one of my favorite moments in the film “Juno”, the father states “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is going to think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person worth sticking with.” His statement doesn’t sound romantic at all, but it’s true. Every relationship is going to go through periods of conflict and that is the basis for sharpening each other, making each other better, more loving, and more human than the two of you could be on your own. This is the beauty of a relationship that works.

I’ve often heard it said that lover’s quarrels are the worst kind of verbal fights around, and in many ways, true. That’s how they should be. After all, if you can’t really fight with the person you love the most while understanding that the freedom that tomorrow is another day with new challenges and testing new boundaries of your love for each other, there’s really not much hope of any relationship surviving.

When I was little, I used to love when summer was finally winding down. In June I would come home from school crying and asking, “What will I do for three whole months without school?” Back then, life followed a plan and June/July/August represented a purposeful part of that plan. Worse yet, the rhythms of the year were definite. September meant new shoes and colored pencils as I was heading back to school. Then came Christmas, Valentines Day, and when I was just beginning to give up hope, came the dreaded three months without school. Now that I have twelve months a year without school, I’m not exactly sure what the end of summer means anymore.

The truth is, without consistently being in a classroom with the dates splashed on the bulletin board, I have difficulty telling what time of year it is anymore. The holidays marked by paper cutouts with snowflakes and candy canes stapled to the wall come and go without much recognition in my own life. There aren’t spring themed words or seasonal linear graphs that turn out to be in the shape of Santa Claus. Now the months just slip by and I am surprised on October 31^st, my doorbell rings and there are children asking for candy.

This of course is the crux of the change from childhood into independent adulthood. Your life is no longer well defined. You don’t have guide posts and deadlines to set. Grades, when you are a child, are a form of currency so that your first year out of college one can’t help but be a little bit confused when they hold cash in their hand rather than a report card. There is no rhythm to the seasons; there is no plan in what you are doing in your life and perhaps most disturbingly, there are no awards for perfect attendance.

If you are working in one of the creative fields such as a visual artist, actor, or writer, the situation is even worse. The days slip through your fingers as quickly as water until you realize you have spent the entire day looking at a blank computer screen and only managed to type out a few words. Here in this adult life, one is forced to quantify oneself not by merit or test grades, but by inner thoughts and actions. It’s the conversations that an individual has with themselves and the results thereof to give you an idea of their self worth. The rest of the world’s actions are justified by paychecks. When someone is an actress or writer, there is no such thing as regular paycheck and so the end of summer. As I continue to go to auditions and look at my blank screen while attempting to figure out what comes next.

Were it not for a gradual shift in weather, needing my jacket at night, pulling out the fall fashions and looking longingly through catalogues, I might not even notice the shift in seasons. This is one of the many reasons why I consider it a blessing to live in a place that has winter, spring, summer, and fall. For me the end of summer doesn’t mean the end of free time. As much as I miss the rhythm and cadence that comes from the school year, the product of it is actually a huge blessing. Western education teachers say money is the most precious form of currency, it does nothing to acknowledge the expensive nature of the economics of time, health, and happiness. I will continue to work on whatever, even if the year is ebbing away unnoticed. Nothing reminds me of that blessing now, more than the end of summer.

Last week I was watching my next door neighbor head off to her first day of school; her bright pink backpack and pigtails almost made the entire image look like a cliché rather than real life. Even though I swore I never would be, I was slightly jealous of her returning to the structure that comes at this time of year. But most of all, I was jealous of all the discoveries that lay ahead of her within her own time.

I have learned in recent years that there are many hazards of not having a diamond ring. However, this was one that I never expected.

I was in a coffee shop the other day when a young man asked if he could sit next to me. Instantly suspicious, I stupidly nodded even though my past judgment has told me that individuals who wish to sit next to me usually want to talk to me, and such individuals who want to talk to me usually prevent me at the very least from getting my work done. However, this particular man illustrated that not only would he hold me back from work, but I would proceed to a conversation which even my best etiquette teachers would be at an absolute loss to navigate. The young man proceeded to tell me his name and states that he has been abducted to the planet Zorbon, and what I am actually seeing is his hologram android.

At first I think, he must be joking in order to seem more bizarre than he actually is, and then he proceeds to tell me that he is serious, using his laptop to pull up star charts, databases, and other information regarding the great planet of Zorbon which, forgive me if I’m mistaken, seems as if no one on earth has ever heard of.

This of course is not the first time I have found myself in a conversation which made me question whether or not I had slipped into an alternate universe. I seem to attract weirdos from every tribe, nation, and planet. This is a gene I am convinced that I have inherited from my father. My father has the remarkable ability to attract cult leaders, religious fanatics and shall we say, oddities of all sorts. Evidently during their early dating lives, these convergent flocks would hound my mother and father; making it impossible for them to go on a simple date. So I seem to have inherited this gene and although it seems to be recessive in most people, I have a pheromone that somehow attracts very bizarre people.

On the whole, I think that I am pretty tolerant of different individuals’ world views. My own views are fierce in their own right, which may be as strange to some as hailing from Zorbon. Among my friends, there are many Jews, Catholics, Hindu’s, Muslims, basically an entire diversified population which would make the BBC diversity department howl with envy. However, there is only so much a woman can take and being introduced to a hologram android is pushing the limits. The only appropriate response I could garner was, “Buddy, you’re bloody insane.”

I’m not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe being from the planet Zorbon is supposed to be particularly sexy. Perhaps in the style of, I’ll let you see my hologram if you let me see yours. But in my book, this is not a particularly pleasant way to start a romance let alone a conversation.

I have often been told in my life to be kind and tolerant to everyone and to love them exactly as they are, giving every guy a chance before I reject him as a potential suitor. These days, coffee shops are the place to meet your soulmate; and so I do my best to smile and look inviting, even when I’m only there to get a little work done. I don’t know if these rules of dating extend to people who have been abducted and replaced by androids, but after about fifteen minutes of supposed conversation, I found it best to take my work and make an exit.

I am unable to wash my hair, there is way too much of it for me to handle. When I went away to college, the major worry of my parents was not that I wouldn’t be able to keep my grades high or wouldn’t have the self-discipline to attend class, no; it was the daily task of taking care of my hair and other minute personal details. At one point I even seriously debated on shaving my head and wearing a wig at all times. However, whenever I visited a wig shop I realized that nobody else’s hair, natural or synthetic, no matter how easy it was to take care of, would ever be my own. For me, I always thought of my hair as my signature. Some women get into shoes, other women handbags. Mine was like Sampson; my hair, a symbol of strength and health; regardless of it throwing me into utter dependence.

It was either fate or providence that when I moved away to college, there was a hair salon directly across the street that was having their grand opening that first week. For four years I visited those hair dressers, talking about my problems and my potential love interests as they washed my hair and pinned it in such a way that it inevitably looked lovely, but also stayed out of my face. And then a week after I graduated, the owner declared bankruptcy and the studio closed.

At university there was a stark contrast between the students and professors always insisting on reading and having intellectual debates and those in any sort of vocational industry. It often turned into outright snobbery. And while the turnover rate of the people employed by a single salon is shockingly high. Often at my own school, people would think that the cosmetologists or other individuals who insisted on going into vocational school rather than receiving a full liberal arts degree were somehow inferior. They couldn’t stick to a single curriculum, they were fickle, gave up easily and that’s why their lives lead them to cosmetology school rather than a prestigious intellectual education such as our own.

Here’s what elitists like liberal arts students miss, and it’s taken me several years, as well as another salon I love equally to bring me to this conclusion. The services of hairdressers and cosmetologists changes as many lives and helps as many people during a time of need as any doctor or psychiatrist. My quality of life is literally improved by individuals who insist that I am taken care of and go out in public in my best possible style.

Many hairdressers and cosmetologists actually spend their weekends in funeral homes attempting to present the dead in a state of great beauty during funeral processions. It’s so that those in mourning can look at the faces of their loved ones now gone and have a permanent final memory of them looking peaceful, serene, and beautiful. Another hairdresser in London spends her Saturdays working with individuals going through chemotherapy; fitting wigs and trimming them into a style that suits each individual patient so that they will not be saddled with embarrassment regarding their hair loss. And as for me, the ability to have my hair out of my face whenever I want, is priceless, as I would otherwise be miserably fighting the constant battle of keeping hair out of my eyes. It also means with an up-do, people take me seriously as a professional, because with my hair up in a bun or braid, I no longer look like I am twelve years old or mentally incompetent. Therefore, strangers actually treat me with more respect, directness when I have my hair styled in a way that flatters me.

Its easy to dismiss the beauty industry and those in it as encouraging vanity. A kind of reverse arrogance sets in assuming that either those involved are also shallow and self serving. But beauty has its value and serves a purpose, that is: to teach us all we are to be valued, not only for how we look, be who we are and what we can do for others as well.

What is it about watching a movie or seeing a play or reading a book where the story is completely new? There are archetypes, there always are, but on the whole, you don’t know what’s going to happen or how it’s going to end. It’s in these situations that the characters, I believe, are so unexpected they almost seem like real people and you get emotionally involved and invested until the credits roll and the last page turns.

Such stories are unique and becoming increasingly rare. Recently I went to a conference at BAFTA and they started spurting out the three act formulas and inciting incidents and lists of rules every story must have in order to fit the mold of a “good story.” It’s nothing new of course; Aristotle did the same thing thousands of years ago and his outline for what a “good story” needs to have hasn’t changed much, despite the plethora of books and essays written about the “good story.” It doesn’t matter what sort of media it is and how you interact with the story; the element’s are always there.

But when I sat through this two day long conference at BAFTA literally breaking down the moments piece by piece and wondering what they need to have, I began to get very bored. A good story doesn’t necessarily just have the basic elements; like anything else in life the elements have to create some sort of harmony where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You don’t taste the individual ingredients that go into a cake; you taste the entire cake. So it must be for a story. If you were to say that the climax is most certainly the climax, you’re suddenly ripped out of the world of the story and placed back into the classroom or worse, a science laboratory, which is never a good place to be.

What makes a new story great is that like life, you have no idea where it’s going and how it’s going to end. The level of tension in the defining moments build and build until you literally squirm in your seat. It’s a physical reaction as well as an emotional one which forces you to stay in the world of the story. Actually, this is what life is supposed to be. We don’t walk around saying “This individual didn’t have a father, therefore these psychological characteristics must create personality.”

Our lives are nothing if they are not first stories; and a good story, while you may not know where it goes and what roads it will take you down, still makes you feel like you are in good hands. Likewise in life the authors of the story, whether they be ourselves or something out there in the cosmos, must also give us some element of support and confidence that in the end it will work out for the best one way or another. And so looking backwards at our lives when we get to see our stories and the elements that builds off of each other to create ourselves today. We are an essence, a piece of artwork that takes years of creation in order to flourish and is constantly evolving.

An old teacher of mine once gave me some advice which I think was meant to guide my writing; instead it ended up guiding my life. On a piece of paper he wrote: “Spin life into a verse.”  It took me a while but I think he wanted me to make my life my own story. What he meant was I was to be understanding the elements and the building blocks individually and being grateful for where they landed. But as a whole, seeing life and living it as an irreplaceable and unrepeatable which is unique in itself. In this way, when I look at an original story of fiction, I cannot help but see myself and the one great story that is the story of us as an entire world within it.

It was late at night when I finally began to think about suffering. The lights were going out and I was sitting in my favorite spot in the flat looking at the river Thames go by. On the staircase I thought “nobody likes to suffer.” Earlier that week there had been flashing lights and sirens on the bridge that crosses an area of our local quay. The road was blocked off for hours, and we had to go the long way around the neighborhood in order to visit our local supermarket and shopping centre. After it was finally cleared away, four bouquets of flowers had been tied to posts of the barricade which prevents people from falling into the river. An eleven year old boy had jumped in on a hot summers day and on the way down, hit his head against the wall causing him to lose consciousness. It took two hours for emergency crew to find his body.

A friend of mine, when he reported this to me, kept saying over and over “We told those kids not to play there; not to jump in.” I could see the frustration that comes with age and understanding dangers that children remain ignorant to or choose to ignore. I don’t think he would be as upset if a seventeen year old had done the same thing, but an eleven year old. My friend was visibly frustrated.

If you live long enough, you will be miserable. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how protected your life is. It’s a fact of the human condition; you will suffer. And you will be tested in how much you are determined that life is worth living. The alternative is that you die young, as the case of our neighbor boy. In that case you inevitably make a bunch of other people miserable and such is the depressing side of the circle of life. We love; we grow attached to people, things, ideas, places, and they are inevitably taken away and we are given the choice to clutch on thereby suffocating ourselves and the people around or let go thereby accepting the pain, accepting change and forcing ourselves to never have any stability at all.

A book I was reading not too long ago explained that a sociologist interviewed the victims who’d survived the Jewish concentration camps of the second World War to ask what effect the experience had on their faith. The findings were shocking:

“During the 1970’s, a man named Reeve Robert Brenner surveyed 1000 survivors of the Holocaust, enquiring especially about their religious faith.

How had the experience of the Holocaust effected their beliefs about God? Somewhat astonishingly almost half claimed that the Holocaust had no effect on their beliefs about God. But the other half told a different story. Of the total number surveyed, 11 percent said they had rejected all belief in the existence of God as a direct result of their experience. After the war, they never regained faith. Analyzing their detailed responses, Brenner noted that their professed atheism seemed less a matter of theological belief and more of an emotional reaction, an expression of deep hurt and anger against God for abandoning them” (From: Where is God When it Hurts by Phillip Yancey)

Suffering in any form forces us to reevaluate our ideas about the bedrock of what we base our life on. The eleven percent of people who became atheists as a result of their experience, it means taking a good long hard look at one’s own religion, turning around, and walking away. For others it means undergoing that same examination of one’s beliefs and deciding if they are worth keeping, need to be re-edited, or need to be thrown out entirely. Assuming that there is a God out there, many of us, think that it must be pretty easy being in control of the entire universe. One can look at the Old Testament as well as the Torah and characters such as Moses and Abraham who believed in an absolute God with an enormous personality. As individuals who said to their creator, “Sure it’s easy being up there, why don’t you come down here for a bit and try it out huh?”

As humans, when we think about God, we are torn between two dichotomies. The first is we want Him to suffer. We want him to know how difficult life is if He is out there, and do everything He can to improve it. But the irony of it is, if there is a God. Do we have any room in our human ideology for a God that willingly sacrifices and goes through agony? We can’t stand the idea of a God who lives above us oblivious to the concept of human pain and suffering, and yet the idea that an all powerful being that would willingly submit himself to such agony and pain completely out of love is outside our concept of what God is. We have no classification for a God who feels pain by choice. Perhaps it’s a contradiction of terms, someone who is almighty and chooses the difficult way.

I think about the family of the little boy who jumped into the water two weeks ago, how much suffering they must be going through now. The truth is not only do I hate it; I get every bit as angry as my friend. A child didn’t live long enough to suffer, and ironically, that’s what angers us all. The fact is that his life was cut short on a whim. Now his family is left picking up the pieces, asking the questions which inevitably come from suffering and searching for answers.

In this way, the child is very much like our preconception of God. We want every child to live long enough to know what suffering is and to ask questions about life himself rather than asking them in the wake of a child’s death. But ironically, like everyone else, we know that it would be much simpler if neither God, nor the child, nor anyone else had to suffer in the first place.

As a performer I often have to force myself to watch things that are immensely popular despite the fact that I hate them. I am at home today watching the entire first season of Glee; and truth be told, I can’t stand it. To me all I can see is a bunch of teenagers encouraging America to continue with bad theatre and poor acting habits. So many amateur thespians in America think that the apex of acting comes when you can smile big and sing loudly on cue, which only perpetuates those poor habits and generally bad theatre.

As I am watching, one of the teachers said to the students “Adults have to make difficult choices.” The tone in which he says it is pejorative at best. Adults have to make difficult choices? What about high schoolers? Don’t they have difficult decisions. When I was in high school, I was never able to have the world revolve around who I was interested in dating or what the cheerleaders were doing that Saturday night. A typical day in high school consisted of me putting on a three-piece suit and carrying a suitcase; worrying about making grades that were high enough that I wouldn’t be sent back into special education classes due to an over-controlling teacher who insisted that all students with disabilities be taught solely by her. Every “B” I received on an exam was a sign for red alert; and often I chose between sleep I needed to make it to the next day and putting in that extra four hours on an English paper when I was only able to type at an alarmingly slow rate. Teachers supported me, and often ran interference between myself and my school administration. Sometimes even putting themselves at risk. These are the things I remember from my high school experience.

I listen to older American women who often say of their years before college “Those were the happiest years of my life.” Really? At seventeen? All their dreams came true when they were the lead in the high school musical and they dated the captain of the football team? Looking at my yearbooks this weekend, I noticed that someone wrote “Don’t worry, it has to get better than this.” Surely that friend of mine had more wisdom than the ones who said the period between the years of fourteen and eighteen are the most precious. What about the birth of your first child or your wedding day? The time when you realized that your family is remarkable; or having your own kids graduate from high school after years of struggling with dyslexia? That outshines being fifteen, having acne, and wondering if anybody will ask you to the prom.

Due to modern technology, I am able to keep up from a controlled distance with several “friends” from high school. I wouldn’t consider them friends that I have a relationship with now, but the magic of the internet means that I can look at what their careers are, pictures of their first baby, and engagements. Overall I’m glad that my dreams didn’t come true in high school. Now these friends of mine are working for insurance companies and shuffling off to law school when at seventeen, all they wanted to be was actors and make the world a better place. I’m sure in their own way they have come to the conclusion that they are doing just that. But for someone who did have a great deal of trouble in high school, I must say difficult years early on make one much more confident and excited about the dreams that are to come.