Yes, I’m quoting a Dixie Chicks song. Because A) I love them and B) trust me, the quote is relevant to my life.
I struggle with my past so much. I struggle with how my experience at the private, all-girls, Catholic high school felt like spending 4 years as a fish out of water, and yet how my high school has defined me and molded me into the person I am today. I felt so different from all the members of the “St. Paul Cult” I was surrounded by, and yet I can’t deny that I’m a member-by-proxy myself.
I didn’t grow up in the St. Paul Catholic school system like so many of my peers, but I was born in St. Paul, I consider myself a St. Paulite, and both sides of my family were raised in the St. Paul Catholic school system. But I still feel so different.
I look at my life, and it doesn’t look so different from the girls I went to high school with. I was married in my mid-20′s, I have a good, stable job, I own a home, have a dog, etc. But somehow my life is different. I am so far from the girl I was in high school. I am so far from the zip code I was born and raised in. I have grown, I have changed, I have moved on.
When I was a sophomore in college, my best friend and I went to a New Year’s Eve party that some boys we went to high school with (at our brother school) were having. It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. These boys were having the same fights they’d been having since they were 16. Nothing had changed. They were hanging out with the same people, dating within the same group of girls, and living in the same neighborhoods. I knew definitively at that moment that I never wanted my life to be like that and that I wanted to keep my past in my past.
Looking through people’s facebook pictures, so many of the girls I went to high school with married their high school boyfriends, hang out with their high school friends, live in their parents zip code. And I scoff at them, grateful that their life isn’t my life.
But really, is my life so different? Sure, I’m a girl who left her past and refused to be defined by high school friendships and relationships, but have I really turned out so different?
Maybe, just maybe, when I ran kicking and screaming from my past, I left a lot of loose ends hanging and so I haven’t really moved on. Maybe it’s all those girls from high school who are still friends with each other and married to their high school boyfriends who were really able to move on. They’re the ones who are comfortable with themselves and with where they came from. They don’t fight the things that define them.
I don’t know, it’s something I don’t have the answer to, but it’s certainly something I think of a lot — especially when I hear the Dixie Chicks.
Thank you for your post – I was searching for the lyrics of the Dixie Chicks’ song you quote and found your blog.
You’re right about all these people who have no changes their whole life and are like frozed in time.
I had a bad experience with my highschool and I don’t want to see any of my classmates actually. But their dislike of me made me understand that I must change to not be like them)