hi friends. if you’re receiving this email it’s because you were once subscribed to my former travel blog called in case you missed it. i have since rebranded! you can read more on the about page of my publication. anyways, here’s my first train of thought too long for a normal conversation. i hope you stick around for this new era!
I envy Taylor Swift’s ability to romanticize what every late teen and early-twenty-something regards as some of the worst years of their lives.
Exhibit A: The highlight of my senior year was making it out alive while hers, famously, was winning a CMA award. Where my memories are plagued with awkward school dances and unrequited class crushes, hers are decorated with touring in arenas and catapulting into decades of stardom ahead of her. Anyone could conclude that we had wildly different high school experiences, no matter how I yearned to relive the You Belong With Me music video. It’s no wonder that she muses about the highest of highs, while I have to scavenge about the lowest of lows.
The older I get, the more I realize how little I knew about the world as a teenager—which I admit is nothing groundbreaking. It’s a criminally normal realization to have. My four years attending Portsmouth High School were nothing short of a fever dream in which I operated on autopilot. Who was E-Bo? Who is Emma Bowen? Someone somewhere convinced her she was right on track and now she’s gone with the wind.
I no longer relate to the girl who spent hours in the choir room rehearsing harmonies that would be lost forever to the abyss known as iPhone Voice Memos. I no longer talk to the friends who saw me through my first date or last math class. I even spent three-quarters of high school as a blonde until I had a Carrie Bradshaw-esque hair transformation. I buried the girl who roamed the PHS halls with purple shampoo and a prayer, and I guess she took every memory before graduation with her.
And while I struggle to recall who I was pre-college, I sit in quivering fear for the day that she rises from the ashes—the day that everything I have learned and experienced over the past two years dissolves into nothing.
Does regression happen overnight? Will I wake up one day oblivious to every lesson I have ever learned only to be a dumb teenager stuck in a twenty-year-old body?
I often grapple with this fear of regression. Just a week before leaving the Netherlands, I met with my travel writing professor for our final conference. Rather than talking about my writing or my future, I spent thirty minutes reeling over how afraid I was of losing this “European sense of self” forever. Europe captured my heart and refused to let go of it, so much so that I couldn’t picture a life without stroopwafels and alpacas down the street. I refused to accept a reality in which I didn’t have the world at my fingertips. The life I made for myself across the ocean looked meek compared to the life I could build here.
“When I felt that way, I just moved here,” my professor told me. I groaned and then looked up how to move to Europe as a broke college student.
Returning home after three months in Europe is an especially painful slap in the face with the thousands of identities I’ve shed since high school. My dozens of postcards have no place amongst my regional playbills and all of a sudden my closet reeks of the middle school awkward phase. I have spent the past two months feeling like an alien in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by iconic musical theater quotes and dance motifs that remind me of the ten-year-old who painted her room Tiffany-box blue, not the twenty-year-old who painted her world with new cultures and experiences.
I’m scarcely myself here, but I’m not fully myself there. My soul is now fractured into a million little pieces. Part of it is in Portsmouth, while another part found solace in the bustling streets of Boston, and the newest splinter hunkered down in Well where it keeps the horses company and queues up The Sound by The 1975 at the bar. I miss her the most.
I finally went on a date with my quintessential high school crush: the sweet guy on the baseball team I had third-period chemistry with in junior year. Come on—we had CHEMISTRY together! Tell me that isn’t serendipitous. I felt like a total lunatic, chasing after an athlete as the mediocre theater kid with hot pink hair. I’d force my friends to relive every interaction we had, multiple times, to decode whether he was actually into me or just entertaining my schoolgirl crush for the ego boost. After two years of dancing with each other at prom and an ambiguous hug at graduation, I made peace with the fact that I may never know if he liked me or not.
I can’t recall whether it was the fall semester of my freshman year in college or at some point last summer, but random late-night texts revealed that my unrequited crush was not so unrequited. Had I known this a year earlier, I think I would have required resuscitation, but the revelation fell flat to my now-exercised heart strings. I made so much “peace” that I was utterly unaffected.
I had once spent months and months daydreaming about the boy who whisked me away at prom, only to be totally indifferent at the prospect of going out with him. When he asked me out to ice cream, the absolute dread of having to go on a date stifled any rosy cheeks or butterflies you normally would expect. It felt like a disservice to my high school self to have written off this excursion before I even went on it. Three years ago, I would be flipping my lid at the opportunity to go get ice cream with this guy. Now, I couldn’t have cared less if he showed up. I didn’t even notice he texted me until days later, and now it feels inappropriate to follow up.
me: hey, i didn’t forget about you, my inner peace is so strong and prevalent that i didn’t care where this date went or whether we ever talked again
him: what the fuck
DISCLAIMER: The attitude is exaggerated for dramatic effect. I would never say this to him. He is very nice. #nohate
There was nothing wrong with him. Maybe something or someone severed the tether between my brain and my heart and I can’t compute crush-like feelings anymore. Am I broken? Or is it just the demographic of the dating scene I’m working with? I’ve spent a handful of pool days with my mom reiterating the fact I refuse to date anyone from my high school. Whether it’s the constant reminder of exactly what I was and what I wasn’t, or the ultimate aversion to the breed that is New Hampshire boys, the notion makes me sick to my stomach. After multiple occasions of showing my girlfriends my latest muse and in return, them staring back at me with wide eyes like I grew two heads, there’s only one conclusion: I’m never going to find my Prince Charming in the 603.
I suppose this date was doomed from the beginning.
I realized halfway through my date that the most interesting topic of conversation became pointless high school lore drops. I cared most about what his friends thought of me or what went down at the house parties I viewed through the grid of every popular girl’s social media. And I hated it! I felt so gross, digging for more about whether more people had secret crushes on me and what really went on behind the scenes of the absurdly large group photos. I left the date with nothing new learned about myself or him and a sour taste in my mouth that was reminiscent of the years 2020-2022.
I’m not sure if it’s my painfully outgrown childhood bedroom or the fact I relived the last two years of high school in a four-hour-long car date, but I have developed an impending sense of doom that I will never escape the high school mentality. Why was hearing about years-old drama in a friend group I had no association with so invigorating? Do I carry the traits of a good journalist or a nosy busybody?
Did I peak in high school?
When I catch myself indulging in conversations regarding people I went to high school with, the same phrase arises: “That’s so high school, just move on.”
And then I backtrack: Am I the one stuck in the past?
I’d like to think that isn’t the case, and that I’m not making up dirty looks or fake greetings to reaffirm my main-character-victim-complex I’ve convinced myself I have, but I could very well be an unreliable narrator here. It’s not fun or exciting or inspiring to rehash high school over and over again—It’s indisputably quite the opposite. But once I’m home, there’s this awkward period between the end of school and the true start of summer where the only topic of conversation that doesn’t feel like a five-pound weight falling off my tongue is old high school stuff. When did high school become a taboo subject of conversation?
Maybe New Hampshire isn’t ready to accept the fact I’ve outgrown it. Maybe I’m not ready either.
this is so beautiful and i know the feeling too well