Partly because I did not finish high school in the traditional sense. I dropped out in 1990. I should have been part of the Wheat Ridge High School class of 1994 in Colorado. At the time, I was still more girl than woman, but already beginning to feel something I would carry for years: the sense that I did not quite belong where I was.

High school taught me that friends were few, relationships could be thin, and being different was not always welcome. It also taught me something I would only understand much later: adults are often carrying burdens of their own, and sometimes those burdens spill outward in ways young people remember for the rest of their lives.

One moment from that time has stayed with me for decades.

I remember being stopped in the hallway by my math teacher. He looked at me and asked, “Why do you bother?”

I remember feeling stunned. I think I said something like, “I’m sorry?”

And then he said it more plainly: why do you even come to class?

At fifteen, a question like that lands hard.

For years, I carried that moment as proof that maybe he had already decided what I was worth as a student. Maybe he had. Maybe he was frustrated. Maybe he was tired of my inconsistency. Maybe he saw someone who could do the work but would not connect to it, and he did not know how to reach me. Age has taught me that both things can be true at once: it hurt me, and it may have come from a man who was struggling in ways I could not see.

That does not erase the sting of it. It just widens the frame.

The truth is, I struggled in school in ways I did not understand at the time. I knew I was not stupid. In some subjects, like math, I could do very well. But as I got older and wanted more independence for myself, I started drifting farther away from the structure school required. I ditched some classes. I pulled away. I acted like I had somewhere better to be, even when I did not fully know where that was.

I remember walking the halls with that strange mix only teenagers seem able to carry — insecurity underneath, attitude on top. I did not feel connected to my peers, but I also did not want anyone to know how much that bothered me. It felt easier to act separate than to admit I felt out of place.

I was fifteen — old enough to want freedom, young enough to misunderstand nearly all of it.

I did not know then what I can see now: I may have had a learning disability, or at the very least a learning difference that went unrecognized. Something was not connecting. It was not that I had no mind for learning. It was that I had not yet discovered how my mind learned best.

That revelation did not come in high school.

It came later, when my son needed more from me than instinct alone could give.

When I went to college for psychology, I wanted that education fiercely. By then, life was no longer abstract. I was no longer learning for curiosity alone. I was learning because I needed to understand more, do better, and become someone my son could depend on.

Somewhere in that process, I figured out something that changed everything: I have to hear it.

I learned that reading silently to myself was often a struggle, especially once I became more honest about my eyesight and my comprehension. I had spent years underestimating how much effort it took me to process written material the “normal” way. But when I shifted into auditory learning, everything changed. Once I started listening, repeating, and absorbing information that way, I thrived.

The girl who could not seem to fit the frame in high school eventually made it to graduate school.

That matters to me.

Not because it proves anyone wrong, though maybe it does a little of that too. It matters because it taught me something deeper: struggling is not the same thing as lacking ability. Sometimes it simply means you have not yet found your way in.

High school was also one of the first places where I began to realize that people were living in very different versions of the world. The distance between child and adult was starting to blur. Not just in me, but in the way I was beginning to see other people. School expected one version of me. Life outside of school was shaping another. I did not have language for that yet, only the feeling of standing in between worlds.

I did not belong in high school in the way many others seemed to. I struggled academically. I struggled socially. I often felt more connected to the adult world than to the one I was actually standing in, which is not the same thing as understanding it. Mostly, I was a young person trying to define herself before she had enough life to do it well.

So what did I learn in high school?

I learned that not everyone finds their footing on schedule. I learned that being different can feel lonely long before it becomes meaningful. I learned that adults do not always know how to speak to struggling kids. And eventually, much later, I learned that taking a longer road does not mean you were incapable of arriving.

I found my way.

Not quickly.
Not neatly.
Not without bruises.

But I found it.

At fifty, I can look back at that younger version of myself with more compassion than judgment. She was not lazy. She was not worthless. She was not a lost cause. She was a young person trying to navigate a world she did not yet understand, while not yet understanding herself.

That is becoming.