NOT TO BRAG....
High School Days: Installment #1
Come back to high school with me, but this time, let’s be honest (mostly) and have a sense of humor about it. (If you're reading this, you survived!) Personal essays, stories, anecdotes, and ruminations.
“…In seventh grade, I found myself fully engaged in an anorexic battle with my closest friend.”
A lot of people ask me about why and how I skipped eighth grade. Until now, I’ve never wanted to explain, mostly because of my great humility.
I’ve never been one to brag. I truly hate to brag. So much so that I never do it.
Ask anyone who knows me: I have never bragged once in my entire life. I might be the most humble person in the world, or at least the most humble person to have skipped eighth grade. When I’m dead and buried, and people have written books about me and just how little bragging I did while I was alive (1981-?), maybe I will regret not bragging. Maybe by then, I’ll have realized that there is, in fact, some use in bragging. Perhaps my story of skipping eighth grade will be a boon to future generations.
But who am I to predict such things?
I did not skip the eighth grade because of my academic prowess. My seventh grade teachers did not say, “Get this genius into ninth grade immediately.” (Even if they did, you know by now that I’d never brag about it.) No, I entered the ninth grade at age thirteen simply because I could. Or rather, nobody told me I couldn’t. I don’t think anybody actually noticed. And this made me happy—that nobody really noticed—because I had developed, during my time in seventh grade, an impassioned desire to almost completely disappear.
This desire manifested in several ways. First, I knew I had to address the physical component of my existence, as it was this physical self (and not my mental or psychic self, for example) that was visible to me and to others. It needed to be mostly eliminated, I felt. I had been steadily—as kids do—getting bigger my whole life, and that needed to stop. So, step one: get smaller.
At 43 years old, I don’t feel all that competitive, nor do I feel very fat. But at age 12, these feelings were so intense that in seventh grade, I found myself fully engaged in an anorexic battle with my closest friend, who I will call Emily Hugo.