Tag: GED


30 Days of Truth: Day 9

21
April

Wow.  A second day in a row.  I might actually get through a week before disappearing on this meme again.  ;)

So today would be Day 9:

Day 9: Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.

I’m sure there have been plenty of people that this could apply to, but there are a couple who I can think of right off.  I guess I should go with those, since my brain is having its own “Freudian slip” by me thinking about them.

I didn’t want to let go of Marakie.  She was probably my closest friend while I was at A&M, but I haven’t talked to her in over a year now.  She’s from Ethiopia and, after she graduated from A&M (and then Tulane), she went back there.  We stayed in contact while she was there, but after she moved back to the States, she seemed to disappear off my radar.  I guess that maybe real life got to be too much or something.  I don’t know.  I miss her, but I guess that (for now) our friendship is on hiatus.

I’m not as close with other people from my past, as I had been.  I think for a long time the first person who would have popped into my mind is Stephanie.  Oddly, since we reconnected on Facebook, I don’t feel that drifting feeling anymore.  I guess just knowing that she is still there, and that she still exists, gives me some level of hope that I had lost for so long.

The only other person that I can truly think of right off would be John Allen.  He was my lab partner in Chem I during my sophomore year of high school.  I had a crush on him that lasted quite a while.  I would write him notes every day that year.  If I didn’t, he would make some comment about how I hadn’t written him and he would act depressed.  (He told me at one point that he had the notes stored somewhere at home.)  He was also the only guy that I would willingly let copy my homework in the three classes we shared.  (Everyone else ended up copying off of his copy of my homework.)  I finally told him after the end of his Junior year (right after I took the GED & before I started to college) that I’d had a crush on him.  We lost touch after that until we reconnected on Facebook.  He deactivated his account around the time that our mutual friend was (accidentally) killed, and I haven’t heard from him since.  I miss having the ability to just send him a message, and I miss sometimes getting a message from him.  (He was the only person to tell me happy birthday on my 16th birthday and he was the first one to say it to me on Facebook.)  I miss him teasing me about my lack of driving skills.  I even miss him copying my homework.  So, I definitely think he belongs in this post.

And now I feel completely embarrassed at how reliant I’ve become on Facebook for my interpersonal relationships.

Comment » | 30 Days of Truth, Alabama A&M, Confessions, Facebook, Family, Foster Sibling, Friends, Geekery, memes, Pre-College Years, School

Strawberries to the People!

2
October

I know that some of you are new to my blog, and some of you follow me on Tumblr or LiveJournal, but don’t really “know me” or know how long I’ve been blogging. Well, I decided, while looking to see how much of my site got archived over almost 10 years, that I should probably post somethings that may not be known or may have been forgotten. Part of knowing who I am now is knowing who I’ve been.

2002 – My Biography

My name is Janet. I’m an eighteen year old girl from Huntsville, Alabama. I’ve lived here all my life with my mother and father and our various assortment of pets/relatives.

As a child, I was a ballet and tap dancer who longed to be Whitney Houston when she grew up. I worshipped Whitney. She and Michael Jackson were my favorite artists until sometime during middle school. They still are two of my favorites, just not at the very top of my list.

I’m what some would consider to be a ‘teenybopper’. I love *NSYNC. I’ve been to one of their concerts. I’ve also been to concerts for 98 Degrees, Chicago/Doobie Brothers, and Smash Mouth. Of all four, I loved *NSYNC’s the most. They were all good, though. (The 98 Degrees one would’ve been much better if the sound guy had mixed the music properly. He had the bass too high, so it was kinda hard to hear Nick, Drew, and Jeff. You could hear Justin, the drums, and some guitar, though.)

I am a high school drop-out. I dropped out in January 2001, a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday. I am not, by most accounts, an idiot. I was getting all A’s in my Junior year in high school before I got sick. I took my GED test May 14, 2001 and received my letter that I’d passed just a week and a half later. I then enrolled in college at Calhoun Community College.

So why did I drop out? Well, I’m crazy. I’m not joking about this. I seriously am crazy.

I suffered somewhat of a nervous breakdown. I was severely depressed and suicidal. I had panic attacks on a regular basis. I also had some health problems that weren’t psychological–bronchitis, asthma attacks, etc. I couldn’t stay in school and I did what any logical teen would do in this sort of situation…

I dropped out!

How did my parents react? My mother wasn’t too shocked or upset over it. She’d dropped out her Junior year of high school for similar reasons. She understood how I felt and what I was going through. My father, on the other hand, was pretty mad over it, but he knew that he couldn’t stop me. He tried to convince me that what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t believe him, and I’m glad I didn’t.

My teachers weren’t exactly shocked. Many of my teachers from middle school and a few from high school thought that I would do better out of high school than in high school. They said high school wasn’t exactly my “thing”. They said I’d do much better in college.

My “psychiatrist” (he was a physician’s assistant of a psychiatrist) at the time wasn’t very happy over it. He didn’t think it was best for me, but he also thought I was sexually frustrated because I slept all the time. I was sleeping all the time because the idiot had me on 50mg of Paxil, 40mg of Celexa, 5mg Zyprexa, and .5mg Xanax twice a day. He never listened to me, so I never really trusted how he felt about the situation.

So, he got me an appointment with a therapist…the wonderful Lilian. She inspired me to switch psychiatrists and to try to get ahold of my life. (Lilian is truly an angel in my life.)

I switched psychiatrists just in time. My mom thought I needed to be hospitalized at this point in time (May 11, 2001) and she was right. Five days after my first appointment with my latest psychiatrist, I was hospitalized and put on suicide watch. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder at this point in time and my meds got completely switched. The hospital was okay. I didn’t like it much. I had a run-in with a sadomasochistic nurse who liked seeing me in pain from lice treatments that you must put in ALL of the hair on your body. Some of the staff was rude to me because I cried a lot. (Hello! I was depressed–unlike many of the people in there.) My “therapist” at the hospital, Steve, gave me a hard time because of my diagnosis. I was said to have an attitude problem because I was sarcastic and because I screamed and cried whenever I was upset. When I told him that I felt like my father ignored me sometimes, he told me that he didn’t blame him. If he had to live with such a drama queen, he would’ve ignored me, too. That really slashed any self-esteem I had. On May 20, I was released.

I’m very opinionated. I always have been and I always will be. I’m a bit argumentative, and I do have a bad attitude sometimes. That doesn’t really mesh with some people and their original opinions of me. People tend to believe that they can walk all over me, and for the most part, they can. If I get sick of being walked all over, though, I will bite back. I come from two parents who are very outspoken, but not outgoing. This is part of why I’m opinionated and part of why I’m shy. I typically do not initiate conversations and, in a group, I tend to shy away from any attention at all. I try to be nice to everyone, but that doesn’t mean it works.

I’m usually mis-labelled by people, including my friends. According to my friends, I am the “nicest girl in the world” and “very quiet and shy”. According to them, I should “never change.” According to my ‘enemies’, I’m a “cancer” and I “demand too much.” I “exagerrate about everything and have no friends.” They also tend to think that I’m a “fucking psycho”, which I don’t appreciate.

The truth of the matter?

I try to be nice, because I want people to like me. Sometimes I suck up and I suck up too much. Then, I start feeling emotionally torn between loyalty and being true to myself. In the end, I have to live with myself and I don’t have to live with other people, so sometimes my opinions bubble out and offend these people. I am quiet. If a pin were to drop in a quiet room, it would be louder than my voice. I am shy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have tons to say. I am very demanding and I will admit that. I want people to do things my way and I feel hurt when they don’t. My feelings get hurt easily. I do exagerrate some things, but I don’t really lie. I’m very manipulative. I also have lots of friends. I may not always feel close to them and sometimes, I’m too depressed to be near them. Sometimes, I may seem selfish and for the most part, I probably am. I’m also the girl who was crying on Christmas 2001 because she couldn’t give the excess food to the millions of Afghans who are hungry.

No one has really ever understood what it’s like to be me. I cry about too many things, but I don’t always cry at the appropriate times. Sometimes I feel like I’m two different people, because one is outspoken and the other is shy and cowers in the corner. Sometimes my brain races so fast that I can’t think. By the time I grab a thought for my conscious mind, my brain has lost it in a jumble of other thoughts. I hate that I have to take so many medicines to survive, but after you’ve been sick since infancy, you accept it as a fact of life. I hate being so poor that I can’t wear designer clothes, but being considered rich by those who live in the projects–and actually have the designer clothes. I hate the way I look. I’ve been fat since I was a child and have always been ridiculed for it. I hate that. I hate how I have to endure so much crap from people. I hate how I’ve had friends who make fun of other fat people, but then say that I’m so pretty or that they would never make fun of me. I question whether anyone has ever truly been honest with me. I mean, I’ve been lied to so many times that I can’t trust anyone. I hate that my parents don’t trust me because they think I’m gonna go into ‘slice and dice’ mode on my skin. I feel like I walk a very fine line between sanity and insanity (blends of neurosis and psychosis). I never know when I’ll fall back into the insanity, but I know I can never be sane. I can never be free of the demons that hold me in their grip and force me to live a painful existence.

5 comments » | Calhoun, Confessions, Family, Foster Sibling, FPS-Related, Friends, Internet, memes, Pre-College Years, Sickness and Health, So Damn Special, Who I Was - Past

Magic and Excitement

4
March

To preschoolers I bring magic and excitement. We draw out the ‘I can do anything’ spirit. My elementary children get the joy of doing real and big kid things. We believe we can discover the world.

Those were the words on the cover letter that my 8th grade science teacher, Mr. John Crum, sent with his resume when he applied to be a teacher in the Huntsville City Schools. I found this quote in his obituary, which I only found last night.

Mr. Crum was amazing. I hated science, even though it was something I had an aptitude for, and he made it fun for me. He was so brilliant and inspirational. He was one of the few teachers (and this will make me sound horrible) who didn’t make me question the standards for hiring in the school system. He was intelligent, and I didn’t feel like he was out of his league teaching kids. He had the brain of a wise person who’d lived a thousand lives and the spirit of a young person.

He had degrees in zoology, physics, special education, as well as a Masters degree in business administration. He’d worked as a microbiologist, and had this love for taking us to the science lab regularly. Of course, there were labs he ran that I wasn’t a fan of, like when we had to dissect a cow’s eye. He’d been in the Army, and had done medical research while he was in service.

He made our class study guides, even though most people considered his tests to be quite extensive and were harder than some most of us had later in our educational careers. That may have been due to his being used to working with college students, since after he’d gotten out of the military, he’d worked at 3 local colleges.

What I remember most, though, is that he believed in me. Teachers had often liked me, but he was the first who actually seemed to see a lot of potential and took that potential very seriously. He told my parents that I needed to be home-schooled for 2 years, cramming all of my high school courses into those two years. He told them that I was smart enough to handle that much, and that it would get me out of going to high school. He said that high school was not the place for me, and that I should be in an institute for higher education as soon as possible. He said that high school would probably take its toll on me, and would only suppress my ability to learn and to grow. [1]

Mr. Crum was one of those few people that I’ve ever met that I truly felt was heroic. He made everyone feel welcome, no matter what their age, race, gender, education level, etc. He respected all people equally. He was unusual and just awe-inspiring. Even though I haven’t seen him since I spent the last day of 8th grade in his room, while my classmates went to McGucken Park for a picnic[2][3], I feel like I’ve lost someone very important in my life.

[1] Oddly, I only officially made it through 2 full years of high school, because I was never given complete credit for all of my first semester classes in 11th grade, when I dropped out. And, even though I had passed all of the parts of the exit exam in a preliminary test in 10th grade (though it was preliminary, it would have counted as my official exit exam score), I had to get my GED by permission of the superintendent at 17.

[2] In the Winter of 1992, I was officially diagnosed as having an allergy to the sun, which can also be called photosensitivity or solar urticaria. I had previously had sun poisoning and odd sunburns that came on quickly, but weren’t normal sunburns. Instead of the peeling that most people get, I get hives that basically look like a drug allergy, except the “drug” in this case would is the sun. Due to the fact that at any time of the year, I can have a reaction, I have always tried to avoid the sun as much as possible…in any kind of weather. (I have gotten these reactions on cloudy days, in the middle of winter, etc.)

[3] There were fires in Mexico in May of 1998, which led to smoke filling the air of many southern states, including Alabama. Due to my asthma, I was likely to have more trouble breathing because of the smoky air.

Comment » | Friends, General, Pre-College Years, Sickness and Health

Nerves set afire

2
August

Have you ever felt REALLY nervous when you’re about to start to a new school? Well, this is worse than any nervous experience in my whole life…that I can think of. All of my friends keep asking me if I’m excited about going to college, my answer is:

NO!!!!!!!

I’m not excited. I’m nervous! VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY nervous! Not that I’ll fail (well, not very nervous). Not that I’ll be late for classes. I’m nervous about seeing all those people. I mean, there are 8,000 people who go to the 3 campuses of Calhoun. I really don’t want to embarrass myself in front of a fraction of those people.

*sigh*

I also keep telling them that sometimes I wonder if I’m ready for this. Then, they ask if I think I made the wrong decision when I dropped out. I KNOW that I made the right decision. I mean, I feel it in my heart. I know that I couldn’t have stayed one more second. High school was not for me. But there are so many things that I wish I could’ve experienced:

More pep rallies
2 Junior/Senior Proms (I quit a few months before the first one I’d have gone to)
The ability to be nominated for homecoming court (If Coach Val had written down MY name instead of Megan’s, I would’ve been on the nominations list…and it wasn’t that I didn’t get the votes of my homeroom. They voted for Leigh and me, but Coach Val LOVED Megan…:oP)
Senior Skip Day
Graduation
Saying goodbye to all my friends

I’m never going to get those things…I mean, yeah, I’ll graduate and I’ll have the chance to say goodbye to my friends before they go to college, but I won’t get 175 more days to say how much they mean to me. I won’t get all those little things that you don’t realize how much you love until they’re gone.

I have got to quit talking about this stuff, because I’m going to start crying. :*( I cry really easily.

You know, over the past few weeks, people have really only gotten to see the annoyed me. Well, from here on out, I’m going to try to focus more on me and my friends–online and off. :)

Oh, my mom has decided yet AGAIN that I can have a DIFFERENT time to take classes and this time, I’ll get them in Decatur. :o P She doesn’t want me to have to stay at school alone for two hours because she’ll have to drop me off at 2 so she can go to work…So, now I may have to go to school at 8 in the morning. That really doesn’t thrill me, because it’s about an hour from my house to the campus. NO FUN!!!!!

Aw…Xan looks so depressed. I don’t know if he’s really sad or if he just wants attention. (He is SOOOO good at manipulation.)

*yawn*

I slept for a little while longer this more after I took X-boy for his walk.

My butt hurts. I know, you didn’t need to know that, but…who cares? It’s my diary…it’s my butt, it hurts…I share. So…:oP

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I now have “Born to Make You Happy” by Pinky Spears in my head thanks to some stupid tv commercial.

Oh, that reminds me…I updated my AOL profile. It still looks stupid, but it’s mine so that makes sense. :) If you have AOL, just go to get a member profile and type in Jadimo. You’ll see my dorkiness.

Well, I guess I get to go check my faves. I want to thank those of you who’ve left nice notes over the past few weeks, because I don’t feel like I ever thank you guys enough. Nice notes really do touch my heart. :)

Comments Off | Calhoun, General, Sickness and Health

     

↑ Back to top