To my high school

CHAPTER 5

To my high school…

You made this whole experience a lot harder, you didn’t believe me. You didn’t make me feel safe, accepted or supported. From the first day I came back to school after my first accident, almost 2 months later, you didn’t even care enough to be correctly informed. You told my teachers I had fallen off a horse. You completely missed the mark and because of that, I was the girl who made a little thing into a huge deal. It was only months later that I realized everyone thought I had fallen off a horse. A kid I didn't know, walked up to me and asked me why I was riding a horse in the winter. I had no clue what he was talking about. I was only in school every couple weeks because my brain, body and soul couldn’t adhere to a day to day schedule. A year later, almost exactly to the day I stood in your gym class taking down the score of an unimportant basketball game and got hit by a basketball aimed right at my head. I ran out and since then I have never been the same. You never asked what happened, you never spoke to the person responsible and you never believed me. My teachers would say "people have headaches all the time and still show up for work" and the classic "you look fine"; I'm sure that if my 14 year old self had answered 'yes but I'm dying inside', they would've thought I was being dramatic. I was your problem child, I drained your energy and I forced you to re-examine the way you did your job. Unfortunately, only some of you were up to that task. My parents threw money at you and you just put it in your pocket and walked away. In 11th grade, my last year in school, I couldn't even show up to class anymore and you were supposed to sign me up for homeschooling. We left for October break and you insisted my mother not hassle you with emails anymore because '“everything would be taken care of”. We came back from vacation and your email subject read ‘oops, we got overwhelmed by the break’. Yes well, "oops" wasn't going to cut it because that was my education. Your "oops" could've cost me the rest of my academic career. My mother hounded you with emails and I would come every week, twice a week, to school to check on your progress even though, my body was definitely not up to it. For every day that I had to come and make sure you were doing your job, I needed weeks to recover. Every hour I spent worrying about the future of my education, meant my health was slowly deteriorating. You finally signed me up for homeschooling a day before Christmas break and from then on, I worked through all my weekends, all my breaks, all my days and on my way back and forth from hospitals, doctors appointments and health tests to make up for the time you cost me. On June 5th, 2015 I graduated a year ahead of plan, no thanks to you.

Although, you weren’t much help, I’d like to thank the few teachers and staff that did help me. Like my English teacher who on grammar Wednesdays encouraged me to write, the math teacher who let me sleep for 3 hours the day I passed out from the pain in class, the lady from administration that would always check and make sure I was ok, and the vice principal who made sure that it would never happen again. Most of this made my life harder and more painful; however, seeing my youngest sister go through this school as well, it seems like my situation really shook you up because you’ve been making some progress in helping injured students, students with learning disabilities and students that have been dealt a harsher hand in life.

That student,

The one with all the issues