Growing Up Minicozzi: School Days

WARNING:  This is going to be another serious essay.  Please don’t say I didn’t tell you.

It has taken me a lifetime of spiritual and psychological growth to overcome the mental and emotional problems I had as a kid.  I was a pathologically shy, homely, unpopular child who couldn’t stop daydreaming.  It was an attention deficit without hyperactivity.  I would check out mentally, like Walter Mitty in the famous short story by James Thurber.  As you can imagine, this caused problems and sometimes embarrassment when I missed something going on around me because my mind had been twenty million miles away.  In addition, I was so shy that I was afraid to approach other kids.  The result was that other kids ignored me and found me weird.  I was not invited to parties.  I never went to a dance.  I never had a date.  My self-esteem was so bad that it never occurred to me that any boy would find me attractive.

With one exception, I was never bullied, for which I am thankful.  That exception occurred in the Seventh Grade when a mischievous kid named Jim was seated behind me in the last seat in our row.  Across from Jim sat Tim, who, unfortunately, provided an audience for Jim when he was tormenting me.  Jim’s favorite trick was to poke me in the ribs and make me twitch, feeding him and his buddy with loads of silent hilarity across the aisle.  My Mom always told me to ignore people who were bothering me because they would stop if I didn’t give them any attention.  I believed her.  I never responded to Jim or confronted him.  It didn’t work.  My lack of response only made the hilarity stronger.  Eventually, the teacher took pity on me and moved Jim to another seat in front of the room, where she could keep an eye on him.  He never bothered me again after that.

I went through elementary school as a class outcast, but I managed to make friends with a couple of other girls who were also outside the school hierarchy, and they became my best friends.  When I was in the Seventh Grade, my singing voice was discovered when I was asked to sing a phrase in class.  My Seventh Grade teacher reported this discovery to my piano teacher, who arranged for me to be accepted as a voice student in a local music school with a partial scholarship.  Music was my savior.  Here was something I could do, a talent that only a couple of the other kids had.  It was something on which I could focus and on which I could attach some ambition and dreams.  It started my journey toward becoming an opera singer, which would be my life’s vocation.  That is a subject of another essay for another time.

High school was no different from elementary school.  My shyness was beginning to lift a little, but not enough, and a lifetime of being cut off from other kids had created habits of isolation that were hard to break.  In addition, life at home with an alcoholic father could be hellish at times.  My friendships with my two friends continued, and so did my singing lessons.  These two things probably saved me from ending up in a mental hospital.  Something happened at the end of my junior year, though, which caused me a lot of hurt, to the point where I switched in my senior year and attended a different high school.

It was a tradition in our school for the outgoing senior class to “will” things to the junior class.  These would not be anything really tangible; they would be nostalgic, funny, or sentimental.  I was the only member of the junior class who was left out.  Nobody “willed” me anything.  I sat in the gymnasium, where the assembly was, waiting to hear my name called.  I waited in vain.  I cried on the bus all the way home, trying to hide my tears from the other riders.

In the high school to which I transferred in my senior year, I was not any more popular, but there were theatrical and musical activities that kept me busy enough.

We often wish we could go back to our younger days, knowing what we know now.  I wish I could show my younger self what I have now become and get her to believe that she was beautiful, valuable, capable, and, yes, likable.