At the age of twelve, I was finally finished with elementary school and moving on to Grade 8 and high school. I was pretty scared about the change and somewhat bewildered too. High school was where the big kids were. The world just kept getting bigger, but I felt as small as ever…

During this time of my life, I spent more time than ever in my head, worrying about my family, and wondering about the world around me. I was vaguely starting to visualize my possible future place in it.

Killarney Secondary was a large high school with maybe eighteen hundred students. The world around me seemed bigger and stranger than ever, and I just felt separate from the people around me. I really didn’t realize how introverted my personality could be sometimes or how years of dysfunctional home life might have affected my ability to socialize.

How could I foresee the ways that life would challenge and strengthen me? Was I starting to form an image of who I wanted to be when I grew up?