Part One: Who were you in HS and College?

Thanks for all the great questions!  I'm taking them one at a time...

Pomegranate asked What were you like in high school? College?


This is a funny question for me. Let’s just say I was a late bloomer in a lot of ways. And I think it took me longer than average to figure out who the hell I was.

I hated the rich private high school my parents sent me to, but looking back, I actually had a lot of fun in those years. I played with different identities each year—the skinny, shy blonde girl in freshman year became the funky goth glam girl of sophomore year (when I fell in love with my best friend, who later left school to move in with her boyfriend, and left me a complete heartbroken wreck.) Junior year I ping-ponged into a bizarre hippy phase, of which there are very few photographic reminders, a fact that I have to say I am grateful for. Then senior year, I was half-hippy/half goth (sorta), hanging with the witchcraft crowd, getting stoned off campus between classes.

I mostly hung with the theater crowd, because that was my temperament, though most decidedly not my talent (I was always cast as the slut or prostitute in every fall play—that’s as high as my acting abilities could take me. For musicals, I was cast in the way far back of the chorus because I lack any musical talent at all.) The rich kids, the jocks, the popular kids—I hated them all.

But when my best friend dropped out, I had a bit of a meltdown, and I stopped hanging out so much with my friends in school, preferring the company of the stoners and ex-cons who hung out at the local witchcraft store. (Seriously? Yep-- you asked…) I had a lot of sex with both boys and girls, though I never identified as lesbian or bi.

Mostly I couldn’t wait to get out of that town, even though by the end of my senior year I had made some fast-and-true friends that I still have today. They have seen the good, the bad, and the really, really ugly and somehow we have all stuck together, and even now we are the same incongruous group of misfits that we were back then—just now with mortgages and jobs.

I spent my first year in college drunk. All the time. I wanted to lose myself—after the pain and drama of HS and finally finding something of a groove before I graduated, I just did NOT know how to make a new adjustment. I also didn’t really know who I was but I was pretty unhappy about whatever I did know. I had artistic aspirations, but little talent. I loved literature and poetry, but hated lit crit and those stuffy classes and self-important professors. I wanted to be liked, but I didn’t know how.

I remember just miserable flashes of that first year, but thankfully soon after I decided I had to stop drinking myself into oblivion, and I transferred to another small (student body: 250) liberal college on a idyllic little hill in southern Vermont. I started doing poetry workshops and taking rock climbing and river kayaking courses, which was fantastic. The college itself was a tiny progressive utopia, where profs went by their first names and ate with us in the dining hall.  There were no grades, and concetrations were designed by each individual student.  Our library was so small we had to be bussed to a university an hour away to do serious research. But I am grateful for having the memories there of walking in the woods, the old Yankee clapboard buildings, the quirky dorms.

Unfortunately, in my last two years there, I dated a guy who was unhealthy for me in every way. Every insecurity I had (and there were plenty), he preyed upon. He was extremely intelligent, manipulative and actually quite malevolent. Dating him discolored my experience of my last two years because every day he found some way to knock me off balance—So, ultimately I didn’t end up making or keeping many friends from college, largely because I think I was so isolated and off-balance in that relationship. There are a couple of people who I still am friends with, who saw me through that wretched relationship and forgave me for all the flailing (and failing) it brought out in me. But I am still somewhat ashamed of it, because I feel that I really squandered the time I had at college trying to be someone I thought the boy wanted me to be, and once again, losing myself in the process.

This is a bit of a downer answer, but I don’t mean it to be like that—I just want to be honest about who I was. I really didn’t begin to be an adult until after college, when that relationship ended (oh THAT drama:  think:  Bangkok, underage prostitute and my denial finally breaking) and I started doing fieldwork—chasing monkeys in various jungles around the world, and getting accustomed to trusting my feet, just thrilled to be a part of the jungle, grateful for every glimpse of the fantastic life of the rainforest. I miss that, but monkey chasing does not pay.