Revisiting high school and the teen me

I did a school visit today that felt a lot like stepping back in time. I went to talk with a bunch of grade twelve students at my former high school, Riverdale C.I., and it’s the first time I’ve been back in the building since graduation, eleven and a half years ago.

I’ve talked before about my time in high school, and you can get a sense from looking through the flashbacks I’ve posted from my journals during that time the various topics I angsted over and people I knew and crushed on while I was there. A lot of memories and feelings rose up when I walked through those doors. I went through the atrium, where my friends and I spent a lot of time hanging out, and then along the balcony overhead, and let them wash over me.

I spent a lot of time in the library when I went to school at Riverdale, too, and amazingly it looked almost exactly the same as I remembered.

For the presentation, the tables had been moved to the side to make room for rows of chairs. A few dozen students from the advanced English classes came to hear me talk. They were an amazing audience, answering my questions and asking lots of very smart questions of their own after I finished. Some of them are obviously starting to think seriously about getting published, and I hope I gave them both a sense that it is possible, and a sense of how much work is involved to make it happen.

Maybe in another eleven years, one of them will be coming back to Riverdale to talk about his or her first published book!


Comments

Revisiting high school and the teen me — 2 Comments

  1. I’ve often wanted to walk through the doors of my high school for the first time in 26 years, but I think I’m terrified of the fluttery sense of how fleeting time truly is might well overtake me. I’m scared to look at how it has changed because I want to remember the hallways and foyers they way they exist in my memories.

    It might be a fear of my own mortality, but I think it’s more of a fear that time didn’t stand still for me though it felt that way so many years ago.

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