Grade Eleven Revisited

This was written some time in 2002, before I dropped out of school for two weeks, then decided to go back again. I found the sheet of paper on which this was written again this morning, and I'm copying it into here because it's unusually concise and deeply felt, and because it explains something of who I am now.

Feeling completely miserable, I also feel like writing down everything (as far as I can make it out) of what I am bothered by right now.

First of all, I don't think I'm clinically sick, but in a way I have symptoms instead of an illness. I feel very hot and sweaty (probably due to the interesting humidity levels in my room), and, as in the last few weeks, I am somehow detached from any plane of reality (this does not mean that I am continuously high). I feel "weepy" quite often – about every day – and though this may be "teenage hormones" it still doesn't feel good. I am continually at unease except when I am joking or playing happily with someone else. To "do" and to "exist" are absolutely meaningless to me, and I feel like I'm dreaming all the time. The only other physical symptom is a sore throat.

At school I feel all right but as if a zombie could (and sometimes does) take my place in the same setting. I haven't done anything I've wanted to do for a long time; this pronouncement is silly because I don't mind taking care of the chickens, etc. but it seems true.

I no longer seem to be able to fit any sort of capacity as a human being. I do my homework like some clone of myself (something completely detached and superficial) and I do the chores with some sort of detachment too.

I am caught in a kind of slough of doing nothing, though in school I supposedly "do" a lot (an unmitigated lie; we do little until we reach home and do our homework).

I can't see my teachers as human beings any more either because they don't seem to meet me on that plane.

In short, I feel as if I were a function and not a being. I am not feeling like I am being given the rights of a person and I no longer understand myself as one.

I don't know whether I am dramatizing the whole thing and putting myself through an experience or whether there really is a reason why I feel like it. At any rate, I feel as if I'd never grow up and stay right in between what was my experience before and what I always thought my experience would be later on; in short, become an imbecile. I feel like I have no past and, above all, no future.

Especially amusing is the fact that, after years of counter-indoctrination, the school system is actually pushing me by the shortest path towards drugs, alcohol, and suicide (the last is rather remote! but still). It is basically telling me to seek that kind of relief. Fortunately, I have neither the means nor inclination of following up that kind of suggestion.

It is also stupid that instead of proving that my homework would be useful to me (which, I am sure, they could not do anyway) they rely on telling me that it is useful and making threats in the indirect fashion enshrined in B.C. Ministry of Education policy. Besides which, I don't believe it because that particular piece of work they ask for is beneficial only to the teachers as it has no value outside of spreadsheet fodder.

Finally, I am tired of being told that, if I don't hand my work in, I could fail. Fortunately I developed a system of logic not based on school lessons which told me that as soon as I began to do homework!

Why should I care about getting good marks if it doesn't prove anything?