Last night I had a weird, anxious and intense dream that lasted all night. Probably part of it is anxiety, finally system clear of narcs and any other aid to help sleep or maintain my mood.
Wolsey and I had moved to what looked like Seattle, a large city in a rainy area. We met up with some of the people that lived around there and it turned out a lot of them were people I knew as a teenager in Bellingham. Not any of my closest circle of friends, but all people I interacted with regularly.
Side note – when I was a teenager, I went to five high schools. There was a combination of homelessness, drunken Vietnam Vet/underworld shit along with our family having a contract on our head and the first year of repeated moving was literally due to avoiding having another attack on our family.
If I get brave I might go in-depth about it at some other time. If my childhood was a tv show, it would be a bad “gritty drama” because people would think no way all that shit happened, but it did and it shaped the core of who I am.
I finished off the last two years of high school at Bellingham High School (yes that means I went to four high schools in two years before). I had a couple of friends I considered really close, and it is also when I met hubby. I never fit in with the high school crowd though.
I suspect part of it was that I had grown up in a lot harder position than almost any of them. The other, and probably bigger part, was that I was new to Bellingham, I wasn’t a local and I hadn’t at least lived there in middle school or earlier. Bellingham and all of Whatcom County were extremely insular then. People had lived there for generations and the only real new people in town were usually just going to school at Western Washington University, then they would leave.
It meant the friend’s cliques were already established and I ended up on the outside of all of the established groups that were involved high school-wise. The one advantage though is that I interacted with almost all the groups because of it. I wasn’t considered “the enemy”, just someone that was around school.
I spent most of the night talking with people like Clark and Boris (last names withheld to protect the innocent). We got along in high school, and to be honest, Boris was always really nice to me. For whatever reason, though they had a weirdness about them towards me during our discussion over lunch that time and distance didn’t create.
I didn’t know that reason was at least until I realized that I looked like I do now while I was in the dream and all of these people I haven’t seen since long before I started transition.
The rest of the dream now has faded mostly. I talked with several others and left the area feeling uncomfortable and saddened for an unknown reason.
I was going to post more about the dream, there were some fine details, but I wanted to make sure I was right that it was Clark that was in the dream. So I went onto classmates.com and found I was right.
It is also when I remembered I don’t have a picture in the senior yearbook for 1989. At the time I was too poor to afford a color photographer and they weren’t offering the black and white packages to seniors so they told me I couldn’t get my picture in the yearbook. They also somehow left my name out of it, that is a negative side effect of not being in any group.
That is the end result of joining up in Bellingham High School as a junior and being poor. At the time I wasn’t angry about any of it. We had just avoided dying, being homeless and to be honest I think I was too much of an adult in too many ways (but not in all the ways that you need to be) that I just sort of pushed through it.
I think I am angry now. Not really any one thing that I can define at the moment. I do think it might have gone better if I was able to come out then. Actually it was the 1980s that shit wouldn’t fly so no it wouldn’t have changed anything, just gave it a different taste I suppose.
Oh, and I just found out that Boris is an author/artist and his stuff is still as different as it was in high school. Good for him!
As for anyone reading this, it sort of went tangential and then off the path completely. Sorry about that :).
A Girl U Should Know 