May 2009
I had a dream that there was this group of people from the government who came to people’s houses and abducted kids, and it was illegal to say no. So my family gets a letter in the mail saying they are coming for me. I am really scared because there are millions of rumors about all the awful things they do, but I have no choice. They arrive at my house late at night, and as I walk away I am petrified in fear. But I soon realize we are not walking towards a car or anywhere, but just doing laps around my culdesac. The whole time I am talking to people in this group and it is all very casual and uneventful. After about 50 laps, I ask the guy leading us if I can go home. He says yes and I go home. Then I woke up.
I started my dream journal in spring of 2009. I don’t remember why. I’ve turned most of my life into narrative — that year especially has played a significant role in the stories I’ve told — and yet the beginning of this journal was never a detail I included. Maybe that’s because I retroactively added some old dreams so the beginning date is a vague “2006.” Or maybe it’s just because most of us don’t include our subconscious in what we log as memories.
Nevertheless, I began this journal in May of 2009 and continued it diligently until November of 2009. Then there’s a gap until August 13, 2011. For the decade that followed, I recorded several dreams each month, sometimes multiple in one night. Then, in 2021, I stopped.
I didn’t stop dreaming, I just stopped writing them down. For some reason, my dreams had become consumed with the era that prompted me to start the journal in the first place. The movies that haunted my not-so-resting brain replaced my present circumstances with words like ‘graduation,’ ‘exam,’ ‘childhood home,’ ‘my mom,’ ‘my dad,’ ‘my sister,’ the names of teachers, the names of people I knew as a teenager.
My dreams were trapped in high school. Sometimes this occurred in ways that were innocuous, the usual non-sequiturs of my subconscious in a dated setting — a hot foot fetishist speaks to my 11th grade history class, I have to chase a very fast roomba around my high school track. But sometimes they were darker, more painful, more forgettable yet harder to forget. Often I woke up on the verge of tears or amid greedy gasps for waking air.
I’d long believed in the power of analyzing dreams, but now I felt there was nothing to uncover. In the decade since leaving high school, I’d done enough analyzing. Hell, I’d done enough by the time I escaped. I didn’t know why I was having these dreams and I didn’t care. I stopped jotting them in my notes app to later be transferred to my gargantuan Word doc of a dream journal. Instead, I rolled over and went back to sleep. I tried to forget.
This didn’t work. They didn’t stop. They still haven’t.
I go back to high school with Tirosh. For some reason, I’ve shaved my head. I have to go back because I have something academic left to finish but when I arrive I find out it’s actually something athletic. I’m filled with dread. Suddenly, there’s a lot of commotion because two girls are found dead at the school. It’s very upsetting.
When I started my dream journal, I was in rehearsals for a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This play was the conclusion of — a relief from — the most painful year of my life. The idyllic Grover’s Corners of the play became my own black box utopia of theatre and friendship. A play about people who never escape their small town became the escape I found from my own.
Because of this play I met Tirosh, my only friend from high school and college who I remain close with to this day. I complimented them on their Bob Dylan shirt, they complimented me on my Ingmar Bergman shirt, and our bond was formed. I think of them more as my sibling or my spouse than my friend, the years holding so many different configurations of our relationship. Before Our Town, I was in desperate need of new friends, and, with this need, I placed Tirosh and all of these older theatre kids on a pedestal. I spent the rest of high school stroking the egos of some and acting as an emotional punching bag for others. In return, I was allowed to hang around.
I don’t blame Tirosh or the rest of my theatre friends. I cast myself in this role. When I met these people, I didn’t know how to be a friend or how to receive friendship. My only priority was keeping them around. If they didn’t abandon me, I didn’t care how I was treated.
These patterns continued in college — but not with Tirosh. I followed them to New York and soon we moved in together. Sharing a space forced us to confront our patterns toward one another: my jealousy, their thoughtlessness. Rooftop parties, whiskey shots, sexiled evenings on the couch. This narrative that Tirosh was the star of the show and I was part of the ensemble was a misery of my own making. I knew them well enough to admit they had problems too. We were too close — emotionally and physically — for me to lean on old resentments rather than change my own life and the way I communicated.
Once I learned what I needed from a friend, and, more importantly, learned to ask for it, my relationship with Tirosh was able to change. They became someone I could rely on, because now they knew how to show up for me. I became someone who could support them, because I started supporting myself. Bitterness faded, high school faded. We found a new friendship and a new equality.
One thing that has remained consistent over the years is Tirosh and I have always swapped dreams. Maybe it’s because their mom Lauren is a therapist who uses dreams in her practice. Or maybe we’re just close enough to share in each other’s minutiae.
When I told Tirosh about my recurring high school dreams, they told me to call their mom. I’ve been close with Lauren since I was a teenager. When Tirosh had people over, I’d spend as much time chatting with Lauren about dreams, movies, and life, as I did hanging with my friends. But I didn’t want to talk to Lauren about these dreams. I wanted to ignore them.
Our Town was the conclusion of one painful period, but it was the beginning of another. Even this simplifies the story. My journey toward the escape of theatre actually began that January when I auditioned for a different play called Is There Life After High School? This show had a small cast and I didn’t get a part but it was a turning point all the same. I didn’t see the show but the posters and programs around school filled me with hope in my darkest time. The title, this question, consumed my next three years. Is there life after high school?
I found myself asking this question once again at the start of the pandemic when the dreams began. I didn’t want to call Lauren to talk about these dreams, to talk about high school. It’s been ten years since I graduated, thirteen years since 9th grade. I wanted to grow up. I wanted to have stress dreams about college or the present. I wanted to have nightmares about monsters or mass shootings. It was too embarrassing — in the midst of global catastrophe — to be concerned with something as frivolous as high school.
The months continued, the years continued, my sleep got worse and worse. Until finally, two and a half years after the first dream, I gave Lauren a call.
I keep having this reoccurring dream that I am being forced to be at a fancy dinner party with a bunch of other people my age but for some reason we’re all 8 years old. I always start some sort of commotion and end up running away. The security is after me and I run through all these other fancy parties and outside and around everywhere. I guess I start a revolt because a lot of the other kids get out too and then talk to me like I am some sort of hero who saved them. I feel like I am a very Tom Sawyeresque character. The other kids are 8 year old versions of a group of friends I had a falling out with and rarely talk to anymore.
The second I said the word “trauma” I regretted it.
I explained to Lauren that I’d been having high school dreams that kept touching upon points of trauma I felt I’d evolved beyond. Some were generally about high school, some were about Tirosh and our theatre friends, but a lot were about the friends I had in 9th grade, friends I’d forgiven long before, friends I’d forgiven even by the time I left for college.
“The way a therapist would work through trauma with you would be to have you reflect on it,” Lauren responded. “To have you tell the story from a different perspective. I think that’s what the dream is doing. It’s repeating something in order for you to gain mastery around it.”
I wanted to interrupt with an anecdote about a therapist who referred to uppercase T trauma and lowercase t trauma and to tell her that this was definitely lowercase t trauma. But Lauren continued before I could.
“Dreams can be almost like code. You have to look at the dream that keeps repeating and see what it’s trying to connect you with. I believe that one of the traumas we have—” There was that word again: trauma. “—is that we cut off parts of ourselves, we disown parts of ourselves. When we’re confronting something that’s scary in a dream, I like to think of it as that part of ourselves that we’ve cut off or an aspect of life that we’ve disowned. It’s trying to reconnect with us but because we believe it is scary or unacceptable, it’s going to appear scary and unacceptable. And so we need to start to dialogue with it.”
Now was my chance. I said this was interesting but I wanted to clarify that trauma wasn’t really the right word for my high school experience. I hated high school from beginning to end, and my experiences with these 9th grade friends were especially painful. But this wasn’t like I was having flashback dreams to a decade old assault. This wasn’t “uppercase T trauma.”
As I said this, I knew Lauren wouldn’t approve. “I’m hearing two things going on,” she said. “When you first talked about it, you said this is trauma. Now you’re saying, ah but my trauma isn’t that bad. Look, high school is when we are discovering who we are outside of our home in a way. It’s also a time of sexuality. There is so much going on in regards to self-identity and autonomy and so those difficult times can be so core to who we are.”
I nodded even though I was alone in my room.
“And you’re saying you forgave those people before leaving high school, but I believe this is something that haunts us throughout our entire lives. At least until we can accept these vulnerable parts of ourselves that feel raw, that feel childlike, and not label them inadequate. You need to have compassion for yourself, a deep compassion. Because something is trying to be solved.”
I accepted this assignment. But when she asked what might be bringing these feelings up, these memories up, I was at a loss. Never in my life did I have more stable relationships. I’d found friends who I loved and who loved me, who I cared for and who cared for me. My relationship with Tirosh had become a model rather than an anomaly. If being bad at friendship was a long-held self-narrative, it was one I’d finally let go.
Lauren told me that sometimes when we’re doing well, our minds feel they have the tools to confront things they never could before. She suggested I look back on my dreams, study when they began and how they’ve transformed over the past few years. “Dreams are problem solving,” she said. “What is the challenge you need to solve and how can these dreams be a resource? I don’t think it would repeat if you had it all figured out.”
“Sure,” I laughed.
After we got off the phone, I went back through my dream journal, searching for dreams that related to high school. The entirety of 2019 was consumed with the present, dreams about new friends and new problems.
The first high school dream occurred on March 14, 2020. Three days after I started quarantine.
I’m in my high school auditorium. It’s dark and late at night and I’m really scared. I get a call from someone and it’s really unsettling like a phone call in a slasher movie. Then I realize the person on the phone might be behind the curtain. Part of me knows they probably aren’t and I feel crazy for being scared but I am so scared. I have a thin gold necklace that I know I have to give to someone and I’m worried that in the pandemic I won’t be able to – and I don’t know who I’m supposed to give it to. I decide to check to see if the man on the phone is behind the curtain and no one is there.
I spent the summer after Our Town driving to physical therapy with my mom. In my experience, teenagers are often more concerned with getting invited than inviting others, and my lack of initiative with my new theatre friends doomed me to social solitude.
On these car rides, I talked with my mom about the friends I’d had before. She helped me process how they’d treated me and work toward forgiving them. She helped me understand their motivations and encouraged me to reach out to the ones who hadn’t been as cruel. I listened to her on everything except this last part. I was ready to move on.
This is the first time I convinced myself I was over that time in my life. At fifteen, I didn’t realize my inability to reach out to my new theatre friends was tied to not-so-old wounds. When I got a call from Tirosh asking for my help with some movie trivia, the sounds of a party in the background filled me with sadness. I couldn’t recognize that Tirosh was thinking of me. I couldn’t recognize that if I’d asked to help with the movie trivia in-person, they wouldn’t have excluded me. Even when these friendships solidified, when I was invited to the parties, I still held onto the past.
All my new theatre friends were either one or two years older than me. It was hard to say goodbye to some at the end of my sophomore year, it was harder to listen to the rest run around screaming, “We’re seniors! We’re seniors!”
A year later, as the last of my friends prepared to graduate, I sunk into the scariest depression of my life. It wasn’t the worst — that occurred in 9th grade — but it scared me because at the time it felt random. I didn’t think I had any reason to be depressed. So my friends were all leaving. So I had to do another year of high school alone. So what. It was just a year and the achievement of being one year away from my own freedom should’ve been a balm on that wound.
And yet. Thoughts of suicide surged back. It wasn’t like 9th grade when I’d considered plans, when I’d hold a pocket knife against my wrist every night, because I felt comforted by the control. This was more erratic. More random. More sudden. I had to hold myself back from jumping from high places. I had to fight the urge to turn my steering wheel into a tree or off a cliff.
One night I decided I wouldn’t fight this urge any longer. I had driven into the city alone to meet a bunch of other friends and see Tirosh act in a play. After it was over, I felt alienated from my friends and acquaintances. Everyone stood around chatting with excitement, talking about how great Tirosh was in the play, and about how many more plays they’d be in next year in New York. They were already pulling away, preparing for an adulthood that would elude me for another year. I left early with the urge to hurt myself pulsing through my body.
Just then an acquaintance ran after me and asked if I could give him a ride. This guy was known as the smartest kid in his grade. I could kill myself but not this guy. Everyone expected him to cure cancer. I couldn’t kill the guy who was going to cure cancer. I spent the whole drive gripping the steering wheel.
I don’t have an end to this narrative — for that I’m grateful. My friends graduated and eventually the suicidal ideation subsided. The depression is still with me, but it eased up when I graduated, eased up even more when I transitioned.
I hated high school because I was trans and didn’t know it. I hated high school because my suburban environment was suffocating for a closeted queer kid eager to move to a city and be an artist. But I also hated high school because of the friends who hurt me and the bruise that left on the friendships that followed. I felt like I was on a reality show where the people in my life could eliminate me with any mistake I made — as if the initial cruelty had somehow been my fault. There was a constant instability.
When I got to college, I admitted that my theatre friends did not deserve the pedestal I’d granted them. I accepted that the scars at the beginning of high school had impacted the rest. Then I made friends in college and did it all again. Once more, I insisted I’d moved on. Once more, I insisted I’d change my habits. Once more, I hadn’t.
As Tirosh and I’s relationship evolved to be healthier, more communicative, and truly loving, I excused some of my other friendships by explaining that Tirosh was my best friend. There are different standards with a best friend.
It wasn’t until I transitioned and understood myself better that I was able to adjust what I thought I deserved. Slowly, the people in my life became more like Tirosh — friends who loved me and who I loved. Relationships based in equality and care.
When the pandemic began, I realized the people I turned to and who turned to me had been strangers a year or two prior. That thought haunted me. What if the pandemic had happened a year earlier before I’d officially moved to LA and made my new friends? What if the pandemic had happened two years earlier before I’d made the ones I still had in New York? What if the pandemic had happened eight years earlier when I’d been accepted with a scholarship to a college in New York? What if it had happened when I finally had a way to escape? What if I’d been trapped in high school, at my parents’ house, in my shitty town, for another year? What if it had happened in 9th grade when I had no friends at all?
But it was happening now and that was scary too. What if one year, two years, wasn’t enough to solidify friendships? What if amid the sickness and death and economic disaster, I was also about to lose my new friends? What if there was only room for four in the metaphorical bunker of their hearts and I was number five?
I’m on a walk with a friend of mine just leisurely no big deal and then we arrive at the park near my house. Where we are standing is higher ground so I can see the whole park. I start freaking out because for some reason I feel like the people at the park are all in my backyard. I start crying saying that strangers took over my house and did something to my mom. But then my mom walks by and she asks what’s wrong, and I tell her, and she says “Drew, this is the park, not our backyard” and then it all hits me and I feel stupid. By this point I am drenched in tears and shaking uncontrollably, and we walk home.
Knowing that my high school dreams began in unison with the pandemic clarified their meaning. But that didn’t explain why they persisted past those early months, when my new friendships got stronger instead of weakening, when I managed to make other close friends from afar.
I want feelings to be logical. This desire is rarely fulfilled. Again and again, I told myself I’d healed these old wounds only to watch them re-tear.
Lauren asked me to approach my high school self with compassion, to approach my present self with compassion too. These dreams didn’t have to mean that I was stuck in the past. They didn’t have to mean that I hadn’t evolved at all. My waking life was proof this wasn’t true. These dreams may have started due to the early pandemic anxiety, but maybe they continued because I was doing well, because my friendships strengthened.
“You have the resources where this can now come up and you can meet it differently,” Lauren said. “Even if that’s just to tell your high school self: Look who I’m going to become, look how good life can be.”
Lauren suggested that it might help to re-enter one of these dreams from a waking state. To lie down in a safe place, close my eyes, and place myself back in the dream. Even just to observe.
I scrolled through my dreams from the last few years — the ones I’d written down — searching for the right one. This felt as much a part of the exercise as the exercise itself. All these names of people I hadn’t seen in a decade, all these surreal scenarios. No matter what you believe about dreams, there was a reason I selected July 9, 2021.
Lauren said dreams are like code — I wonder if they’re more like a work of art. They can be analyzed, they can hold meaning, but they can’t be solved. Or, rather, they can be solved with infinite solutions.
The dream I chose involved my 9th grade friends, athletics, death, and compassion. The dream I chose featured my younger self in mourning and those friends indifferent. The dream I chose was filled with embarrassment, embarrassment for feeling feelings.
I thought about Lauren’s call for compassion. Maybe what I needed was to stop judging myself, to return to that time, and to cradle my pain like it was a part of me that I loved.
It was late afternoon, when I decided to try. Hours before I’d lie in this same bed and be haunted by a new dream, I revisited an old one. Deep breath in. I thought of the dream. Deep breath out. I thought of the people. Deep breath in. I thought of the memories. Deep breath out. I thought of the feelings. Breath, thought, breath, thought, breath, thought. Until, finally, I stopped thinking. Finally, I let myself feel.
I have a doctor’s appointment with someone named Dr. Steve. He’s a fairly young guy and he’s just lovely. He helps me and we have a great conversation about movies. Two weeks later I find out he has died from Covid. I’m devastated. I decide to help his widow by cleaning out Stevenson Fitness, the real gym near my childhood home, which apparently in this dream he owned. I’m young like middle school or early high school and when I get friends together to help me clean they’re the ones from that time. I keep saying to them that I can’t believe Dr. Steve died when I just met him. I’m distraught. My friends seem sort of casual about it and I’m embarrassed since I only met him once. I’m trying not to cry but I just feel his death so intensely.
I’ve told the story of my first year of high school many times. There’s the short version: I got injured running and my friends were awful to me. And there are a wide variety of longer versions depending on which details I’m trying to emphasize. Are we discussing sports? Worst Halloweens? The healing power of theatre?
These versions may be different, but they’re more or less the same. They all solidified soon after the events themselves and have remained largely unchanged. It’s hard to find new narratives when the old ones have been told again and again.
But to tell this story honestly, I have to fight my instincts. I have to throw out three-act structure and risk lessening the impact. It cannot be the story of sudden betrayal.
The truth is by the time I started meeting my middle school friends, I already struggled with friendship. I was an easy target for bullying — effeminate, nerdy, stubborn — and faced plenty in elementary school from friends and enemies alike.
Most of these friends didn’t go to my elementary school. I met them playing sports and I couldn’t wait until we’d all be at the same middle school. No more lunch periods killing time in the bathroom like a television cliché. I’d have a proper friend group at my own school.
This came true but it was far from perfect. I’d imagine most middle school friend groups are not. Signs of my high school experience were clear when I think back. There was one leader. He often chose people in our group to exclude and newcomers to reject. When I fought him on this, I faced punishment for my disloyalty. I wasn’t allowed in his group for a class trip. I received more than the usual teasing. It wasn’t beyond what you’d expect from kids — but that’s only because kids are often cruel.
The summer before 9th grade, I joined the cross country team and started training. I’d already run three half marathons and was expected to excel. My friends couldn’t fathom our ten mile practices but I could. I wasn’t the fastest, I wasn’t the strongest, but I knew from experience that I could work the hardest. It’s impossible to separate this from gender. Boys are good at sports. I needed to be good at this sport.
When I first told my coach about my shin pain, he said good. That was part of training, apparently. And so I kept running. And kept hurting. And kept running. Until one day, toward the end of the summer, I collapsed.
In the narrative of my life, this is when I started using a wheelchair. I forget that my first month of high school, I was still walking just in leg braces. I still showed up to cross country practices and meets to cheer on my teammates. My friends teased me and called me Forrest Gump. Maybe that’s why it’s my least favorite movie — not, as I say, because it’s conservative propaganda.
I kept waiting for my shin pain to subside. It didn’t. In the first week of October I went to a specialist and he told me that if I walked another day I might never walk again.
Casts were put on both my legs and I got a wheelchair. People would go on to marvel that I must’ve learned so much about being disabled. But even at that age I knew I had no idea. My injury was always temporary and while I did learn that my school — and the world — was inaccessible, what I mostly learned was that my friends sucked.
I planned a Halloween party because it was easier to be at my own house while I adjusted to the wheelchair. The leader of my middle school friends told everyone the party had changed to someone else’s house. He said this like I’d been part of the plan. But I didn’t know until nobody showed up.
At a New Year’s Eve party, my friends went upstairs even though it took me a long time to crawl up. Once I did, they went back down. They continued this while snickering until I gave up and stayed downstairs by myself.
These are core memories probably because they happened on holidays but the day-to-day wasn’t better. I remember they would sometimes leave me on a steep hill so when I unlocked my brakes I would fall.
The cruelty wasn’t limited to these acts of ableism. It was also verbal, psychological, and it continued months later when I stopped using the wheelchair. Had my inability to play sports ruined my one piece of masculine caché? Or was it just my turn to receive the brunt of their adolescent anxieties? Boys who I’d stood up for, fought to have sit at our lunch table, turned on me. Grateful to no longer be the bullied, they happily stepped into the role of bully. Suddenly, I was the one who was being excluded, teased, told I didn’t belong. To my dismay, I discovered I was better at defending them than I was at defending myself.
This was when my depression really started. I was still in so much physical pain even though I was walking again. Every day, my friends added an emotional pain. The anger built in me and I turned it on myself, scraping, poking, cutting.
I wanted so badly to die.
I also wanted to be a girl.
This is where the story gets complicated. While the boys in my middle school friend group were torturing me like a bug, the girls had abandoned me in a different way — they’d abandoned me for high school. There were older boys to date, older girls to try and impress. My friend group went from co-ed to primarily male. Maybe that’s why the boys turned on the most effeminate among them. Maybe that’s why it hurt so badly.
My dad is taking me and a few friends to a brothel. I really don’t want to go, but I don’t want to seem like a loser, and let my dad down. We walk in and he has to sign a paper giving permission for us since we are underage. He says something like I hope his dad is ok with this while signing in my friend. The lady says that his parents have to give approval. I take this opportunity and say something like I don’t want to do this and I run away. Outside, I’m in a parking lot, and then eventually I am sitting next to this girl I like. We are talking and one thing leads to another and we kiss. She then starts mumbling something about how she actually really likes me but she shouldn’t or something and then she gets up and leaves. I really have to pee so I get up and go to a bathroom in a store nearby. I walk up to the urinal, and start peeing as I’m unzipping my pants and then even when they are unzipped I continue to lack control and the pee is going everywhere, including on this kid’s (who looks about my age) face who happens to be sitting in the bathroom (despite it being for one person). He is working on this new, strange type of musical instrument. He plays it and I compliment him (figuring it’s the least I could do since I peed on him). He smiles.
Most of my 9th grade friends apologized to me. At various times over the next few years, something prompted them to find me and pull me aside. Some even cried.
By the time these apologies started, I’d already forgiven them. When I repeated the story, I would always explain with a sense of pride that I’d reflected on their actions and held no grudges. They were just insecure kids going through puberty, I’d explain with a faux maturity. I’d moved on to my new, better friends and my new, better activity of theatre. Soon I would move on again to a new, better life at college.
But I hadn’t really moved on. And our world hadn’t moved on either. Our world is still ableist, our world is still transphobic. We live in a society run on cruelty where men and others who can mimic the traits of patriarchy hold control. We live in a humanity that got worse when faced with global catastrophe instead of finding solidarity.
My personal fears of abandonment have always been connected to a fear that I’ll just never fit in. Finding a queer community where I do finally fit didn’t immediately make those fears go away. Especially when I still don’t fit in with the world at large. Especially when so many are still suffering.
“Another thing I don’t think we can dismiss,” Lauren said, “is your generation is facing huge issues socially. And when I think about high school that’s the first time where you’re facing challenging social issues. I wonder about that coming up as you’re looking at a society that’s deeply overwhelming.”
We’ll never live in a world where 15-year-olds aren’t mean to each other. But we could live in a world where a trans kid could have the education to know they’re trans, the resources to transition and find community. We could live in that world right now. Except that some people have spent the past few years responding to a pandemic by attacking trans youth.
Every day I think about the trans teenagers of today and all they must be going through. I don’t fixate on how things have improved — I fear for how they need to get better. That same compassion could be extended toward my own teen self. Instead of arguing about what counts as a trauma, I could listen to Lauren, listen to my subconscious, and hold space for that hurt kid.
Even if it’s just to tell my high school self: Look who I’m going to become, look how good life can be.
But they have changed. They’ve become softer. My dream self is frustrated but not in so much pain. I’ve spent the years since 9th grade insisting that I was cured of the past. I’m not going to do that anymore.
Instead I’ll leave you with a dream I had a week after I started working on this essay. It’s not a storybook ending, but real life doesn’t usually have storybook endings. They just have another day, another night, another dream.
July 27, 2022
I’m in high school and I’m driving around with a group of my friends from 9th grade. I don’t really like the people I’m with but I feel trapped. We see a billboard for a new Harry Potter movie written by this cis straight male comedian I know. On the radio he’s talking about how his vision of Harry Potter includes trans people so it’s okay. This annoys me but I don’t say anything. We end up back near my childhood home and I realize this is my opportunity. I say I’m going to go. The people I’m with say they’re going to hang out longer. They start describing their plans for the night and I feel pressured to stay in the car. But then I say, no. I get out of the car. And I walk toward the place I used to call home.
Drew this was so wonderful, thank you for sharing.
It also really spoke to me personally on a couple of levels. Because I also had a painful falling out with a group of highschool friends centered around a sport, and found solace and new friendship in a group of friends centred around theatre.
I’ve also been having some strange dreams lately. But I don’t remember them as well as you. My dreams are always like gossamer, as soon as a I wake up and try to catch hold of them, to look at them and analyze them and remember them, they disappear.
I’m going to try writing them down as soon as I wake up.
Thanks for this
Wonderful essay. High school is the worst. I’m sorry those kids were so mean to you. We have something in common! I have always had very vivid, somewhat odd dreams. I think of dreams is real life events and things that I know being remixed and mashed up, like DJs would do on turntables. Some music is played faster, slower, backward, in scratch noises, that’s what dreams due to our experiences I think
Drew!! This was amazing, beautiful, sad, and your writing is phenomenal. I could feel and picture everything. I am also obsessed with my dreams and like talking about them. I like how dreams are sometimes so subtle and mysterious and sometimes so very, very obvious.
Also, I am a wheelchair user who got bullied by ableist bullies in eighth grade, so…I empathize, I empathize, I empathize! this hit close to home and it made me breathe deeper.
this was extraordinary. what lauren said about how to look at dreams about long-ago stuff is also fascinating. and i am mad at those kids for bullying you
Drew, this is so good. Just thank you.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I have deep friendship wounds caused by similar circumstances of abandonment and cruelty (the leader thing – woof. Such a terrible dynamic) that have stayed with me, that I’ve been hesitant to call trauma, that others have also told me weren’t trauma, but every therapist I’ve had have deemed trauma. This felt validating and healing to read, as do so many of the things you write.