Life in Stepping Stones

Today, I’m going to tell my story about why I became a high school dropout at sixteen years old. Before I begin though, I don’t want anyone reading this story with pre-concieved notions and judgements, so let me clear some things up. No, I wasn’t a lazy student. I didn’t lack motivation and I didn’t lack intelligence. I did not drop out of high school to sit on my butt all day and do nothing.

In fact, the year everyone was graduating, I was co-creating and co-producing a TV show pilot with a cast of forty actors from around the country ranging from ages thirteen to sixty, twenty teenage background actors, fifteen locations, and eighteen hour days. No one forced me to spend a year of my life working like that. I chose it. I created it. And I loved it.  But working on that production is not what I’m here to talk about.

I’m here to talk about my decision to leave high school at 16 years old with the full support of my parents.

My Elementary School Years

From 2nd grade onwards, I had a lot of trouble staying healthy. I was susceptible to any and every virus that wandered the halls and I always got it. I never faked being sick (okay, maybe once or twice in early elementary school…I’m not claiming perfection here!). My family has always prioritized health. They’d rather take care of their sick children instead of unleash their germs onto everyone else. Imagine that, right!? Wanting your kids to be healthy. Anyways, as we found out years later, my immune system was low due to many allergies my family was unaware I had at the time.

A Lack of Empathy for a Young Child

The Cherry Creek School District never supported my health issues. In 2nd grade, my teacher wanted us to walk everyday. What a monster, I know. (I kid. I kid.) That’s healthy. I understand that. However, on the day of a very cold blizzard, she still wanted us to walk. Since I was a child, I’ve always been sensitive to cold temperatures. With full confidence, I told her I didn’t want to walk that day. She called my parents and told them that I was afraid of the snow. It was absolutely ridiculous. I played in the snow all the time. I just didn’t want to freeze for twenty minutes with snow blasting in my face. I still don’t want to do that.

This caused an entire ruckus that led to my parents coming in to meet with my teacher, the principal, and the school nurse. Needless to say, my dad, who’s a world renowned doctor, was not pleased when the school nurse tried to teach him about health.  

In 5th grade, my class was going on a field trip and I realized I forgot my jacket at home. My teacher scolded me in front of the class to the point where I began to cry. She was upset at me, an eleven year old, for not thinking ahead of time about the weather and bringing my jacket to class. As anyone from Colorado knows, you can have four seasons in one day. At 11 years old, I obviously hadn’t learned this lesson yet! All I wanted was to stay warm and she didn’t care. Thankfully, my art teacher saw me crying in the hallway and brought me a jacket.  

Discrimination Against Health Issues in School

In 6th grade, I began getting sick a lot more. I was out for weeks at a time back and forth. I had piles of makeup assignments and I would spend every day working on them. One day, I went innocently into my science class to get help from my teacher during recess.

She yelled at me, told me I was lazy, and accused me of being truant. I fled from the room, tears in my eyes. I was just a student trying to get by and learn what I had missed. If I was truant, why would I come in during recess for help? Why would I care enough? I didn’t understand why I was being treated so horribly.

I believed that it must’ve been my fault in some way.

Afterwards, I sat in the hallway outside of my social studies teacher’s class. He was my favorite teacher. In fact, I visited him every year up until I moved out of state. He came out from his classroom and saw me crying. Then, he sat next to me, listened to my story, and sympathized with me. He talked to me, encouraged me, and gave me the strength to go to the rest of my classes that day. Looking back, he’s the type of teacher that I wish all teachers could be. 

It’s the Little Things

There are some stories from 7th grade, but overall, that year was a blur amongst the rest. Their was the teacher I wrote a ten page essay for, that he then had another student present at a competition. It was my work and I felt incredibly betrayed. There was also my crazy science teacher who yelled at me for hugging my friend in the hallway because she deemed any physical contact inappropriate. These may seem small compared to what’s to come, but each moment was a knock to my confidence, my self-esteem, and my emotional wellbeing.

8th Grade: The Beginning of the End

8th grade was the beginning of the end for me. I was out every few weeks, ill, and again, buried in makeup assignments. My makeup assignment folder was jam packed with a hopeless amount of assignments. One day, my history teacher asked me to come in during recess so he could explain a project I had missed. As you can understand, I hadn’t felt very comfortable doing this since 6th grade. I was full of anxiety with just the thought of speaking to a teacher. After all, every time I tried to talk to a teacher, I had been yelled at.

Teachers Are Supposed to Build You Up, Not Knock You Down

This time, I mustered up the courage to go in. What could possibly happen? He wants to help me with my assignment!

Hah. What a laugh.

I went in and instead of giving me the help I needed, he saw my overwhelmingly large makeup assignment folder and accused me of being unorganized.

Side note: I’m not unorganized. I created a booklet listing my DVDs at home by category and by actor. I am far from unorganized.

But, he took one look at this pile and decided instead of helping me with my assignment, he would sit me down for my entire recess and have me reorganize my binder.

At the end of the period, he handed me a piece of paper with information on the assignment. That night, I went home and stayed up until midnight working on the assignment. When I turned it in, he took one look at it and scoffed. When I got it back, I saw that he had marked me down because I didn’t do multiple things that he purposely left off the list. He didn’t want me to have even a chance to do well. He had already made up his mind.

Needless to say, I switched history classes that year.

Dropping a Class…In Middle School

However, because I was falling so far behind in my classes, my family decided that one class of mine could be dropped. I couldn’t keep up no matter how hard I tried. The class that made the most sense was my advanced placement math class. It was a no brainer. It was an advanced class and I could retake it in high school.

My parents emailed my teacher back and forth over this matter, explaining to her that I was dropping the class. My teacher agreed to let me read a book and work on makeup assignments during class in the meantime. That same teacher though, later went to the principal complaining that I wasn’t doing my work. She tried to get my parents in trouble.

The Most Traumatizing Letter a Child Could Ever Receive

My parents ended up receiving a letter from the school about my so-called “truancy”, claiming that I would be taken away if they didn’t get it under control.

But it wasn’t addressed to my parents. It was addressed to me.

I will never forget how terrified I felt the day I opened that letter in the mail.

I had worked so hard. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t believe that my health issues could take me away from my parents forever. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do.

When I showed it to my parents, they were furious. They knew I wasn’t truant. But beyond that, they couldn’t believe the school would send a minor such a threatening and terrifying letter.

My parents printed out the emails they had shared with my math teacher and brought them into the principal’s office for a meeting. Luckily, this is where my teacher wasn’t very smart. Everything she agreed to had been written down. In the end, I was able to drop the class and retake it in 9th grade and the school backed down on their threats.

The Calm Before the Storm

9th grade my teachers weren’t all that bad. I liked most of them. I still was dealing with being sick but overall, my teachers were supportive and I thrived in my math class that year. The only problem I had was that I never saw my history teacher. When I was sick, he was teaching. When I was in school, he was off playing golf tournaments. I literally only saw him twice that year, so I had no idea what was ever going on in that class.  

The Year I Became a High School Dropout

Who Knew I Was So Allergic to Ponderosa Pine?

This brings me to 10th grade. The year I dropped out. It was the year my family and I finally decided enough was enough. Before I delve into that fateful year, I have to explain the summer before 10th grade first. My family went on a road trip to Mt. Rushmore. On this trip, I discovered that I was suddenly highly allergic to pine trees; so much so that my body ended up covered in rashes, my ears would clog, and my throat would start closing up. Luckily, I never needed an EpiPen, just some Benadryl, which would wipe me out for days at a time.  

Why is that story important? That’s coming up now, in my 10th grade science class. Let me start by saying that for a while, I loved this class. I thought the teacher was great, I enjoyed my classmates immensely. For some time, it was my favorite class.

Little did I know at the time, this was the class that was going to cause me a complete mental breakdown.

Trapped in a Room

Part way through the school year, my class did a study on plants. We went outside and I started to have an allergic reaction to what I learned was a ponderosa pine tree, as I stayed standing underneath it. My teacher saw my severe reaction and a student led me to the nurse’s office. After this incident, my immune system was in shambles and I was out sick for a couple of weeks. When I came back, I had missed a “test” on the different plants. My teacher told me I had to take the test. Fine. No problem. She then led me into the supply closet, told me each of the plants were on the shelf and I had to identify them. She told me I couldn’t leave the closet until I was done and closed the door.

This teacher knew I was highly allergic to this plant and she knowingly, even purposefully, left me in a small enclosed space with it.

I stood in that small room, terrified. I could barely breath as I tried as quickly as possible to answer the test questions. Needless to say, I ended up being out sick for three more weeks because of my reaction.

The Group Assignment I Didn’t Want to Miss

During this time, the class was getting ready for a group assignment, one that I was really excited for at the time. I came back to class two days before that project would begin. My teacher then told me that because she couldn’t rely on me being healthy, I wasn’t going to participate. I was devastated.

My parents complained, told her she was discriminating against me for my allergies and illnesses and eventually got me in a group to do the assignment.

You would think this saga would end there. No. After a few weeks of making up all of my assignments, I turned them in ahead of the deadline.

Locked in a D Average

When the grade reports came in, I had a D because I had supposedly failed weeks of my assignments. What we found out though, was appalling.

My teacher had taken it upon herself to lock my grade. She refused to count all of my makeup assignments and hard work. At the time, I didn’t understand. I was only sixteen.

I somehow thought that this was because I was stupid or a failure. I blamed myself. I was so depressed looking at my plummeting grade. I believed that grade marked my level of intelligence. I didn’t believe in myself at all.

That’s what school had taught me all of these years. Not to believe in myself.

The Hardest Decision of My Young Life

For weeks, I could hardly find the will to make it out of bed in the morning and one day I finally broke. I couldn’t do this anymore. I remember sitting in my parents master bathroom on the floor. Tears were streaming from my eyes and I was throwing a tissue box back and forth against the wall. My mom saw me crying, put her arms around me, and asked me what I wanted to do.

The amazing part was, my parents were completely supportive. They saw everything I had been through and they didn’t want me to go through it anymore. For the rest of the year, I had dropped all of my classes except my video editing class. I stayed in that class until the end of the year because video editing was still what I wanted to do, and I felt confident doing it.

Finding My Self Esteem as a High School Dropout

The terrible truth is, it’s taken me a long time to not look at myself as a failure. Some days, I still struggle to find my confidence but I push myself everyday to build it back. I left school in 2007 and since then, I experienced so many other things that helped me regain my strength. As I said at the beginning of this, managing an entire film set was not an easy task at 18 years old. Taking charge was something I had never been able to do and it was a life changing experience for me.  

In all honesty, if I had different experiences in school, maybe I would’ve finished high school and gone to college and that would’ve taken me somewhere else in life. But to be honest, I can’t imagine a different life than what I have now. If I had finished high school, I never would’ve had that amazing experience my “graduating year” producing a TV pilot…and more importantly, I wouldn’t have the family I have now.

The Road That Led Me Here

If I had gone to college in the fall of 2009, I never would’ve met my husband on the trip to New Zealand we took instead that fall, and he alone changed my world (read our love story here). If I had never met my husband, I wouldn’t have our amazing son and daughter.

I’ve had more life experiences since leaving school than I could ever have imagined. I created a TV show pilot, I recorded a CD (listen to my music here), I owned a restaurant that I designed and we built from the ground up (read my Aroha blogs), I worked as a video editor for a small entertainment company meeting countless celebrities, and I have two wonderful children and a husband who I couldn’t imagine my life without.

When I was growing up, my grandpa would share countless stories from his youth. He’d talk about the time he joined a carnival, or the time he was a baker, or the time he spent in the military. I would always listen to him and think, “Wow. He led such an exciting and interesting life.”

Living My Own Dream

The truth is, my interests have never needed a degree. I’ve always been into the arts and I work hard teaching myself new things all the time. I dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom like my own mom, and I’m getting to live that life now. Do I have some big successful career with a title I can show off to the world? No. But what I do have is a loving family that fills my heart every day with joy and more experiences these past years than some people ever have in a lifetime.

The hardest part about dropping out of high school is telling people. Few people will take the time to listen and understand. So I want to thank everyone right now for listening to my story. I don’t want to ever feel ashamed about the decisions I made in life and I never want to try to hide this aspect of my life. This is a large part of who I am. When I say “this”, I don’t mean being a drop out. I mean the struggles I experienced for nine years leading up to that decision.

I’m not a dropout. I’m a survivor.