My Disappearing Act

High school wasn’t the greatest experience of my life.  Not anywhere close.  I loved my high school church youth group experience.  I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it.  But actual high school…I could take it or leave it.  Mostly leave it.

Bullies.  Gym class.  Acne so bad that only Accutane could tame it.  (Accutane was a burn drug that gave me nose bleeds for a year, including on the night of my senior prom.  White vest and white tie–not such a good idea!).  As if I needed additional reasons to feel smaller throughout middle school and high school, there were also the yearbooks.

But let me back up.

Teenagers long to be included.  That’s sort of the whole theme of all the high school-themed movies ever made.  It was that desperation we had on the first day of each school year when we walked out of the lunch line, our tray in hand, praying we could find a friend of ours to sit at a lunch table with.

Being excluded is a teenage nightmare.  To remain anonymous, unnamed, or misnamed is a brutal experience for an already bruised teenager.

The day my 8th grade yearbook came out was a bad day.  It was almost a great day.  We all received our shiny new yearbooks that morning.  I opened it up, flipped through it to see myself in the 8th grade section and smiled.  I continued flipping.  There was also a picture of our choir I wanted to see.  But before I got there, to my surprise I found me staring right back at myself.  There it was: a big 5×7 picture of me in my choir uniform in my 8th grade yearbook.  Bow tie and bright white oxford.  It was a good picture.  Then I glanced at the caption underneath.   It read, “Eric Davis waits for his chance to sing in the Spring Choral Event.”

It was then I stopped smiling.  I’m not Eric Davis.  Yes, we both had blond hair and square glasses, and, yes we both sang in the same choir.  But Eric Davis and I are two separate people.  I didn’t want to be Eric Davis.  I wanted to be Patrick Ryan.  That caption should say “Patrick Ryan”.  I was misnamed in my yearbook under a huge picture of myself.  And forever it would stay that way.

Fast forward to my junior and senior years in high school.  Yearbook Day came, and although it was a more understated event in high school than it was in middle school, it was still something to be excited about.  I took pictures for both years.  For my senior year, as is the custom, we each took a picture in a fake tuxedo.  That would be the yearbook picture.  Next to our pictures would be a quote, something of our choosing that we somehow thought was worth memorializing and connecting to ourselves forever and ever, amen.

So, yearbook day came for my Junior year, and my picture’s not in the yearbook at all. I was just left out.  No Patrick Ryan in the 1995 Godwin High School yearbook.  My mom threw a fit.  I was upset in a less obvious way.  The principal got involved and everything.

So, yearbook day came for my Senior year.  The biggy.  I flipped to where my picture would be.  I wasn’t there.  Left out again.  My Senior tuxedo picture, my carefully chosen quote.  None of it was in the yearbook.

Whatever my mother’s reaction to my being left out of my Junior year yearbook was, it was amplified by 10.  And after it all, what I got were about 100 sticker overlays with my tuxedo picture and my quotation on it and some other student’s picture and their quotation taken out.  I received these sticker overlays in the mail during the summer after graduation and was somehow supposed to hand them out to people who wanted me in the yearbook to the exclusion of whoever it was who got the boot.

As I recall, I didn’t hand any of those stickers out.  I just didn’t care.  I was glad to be out of high school.  I could just forget about it just like I was forgotten by whoever it was who put together these last two yearbooks and I would never miss a thing about it.

In the age of facebook, I am glad I am able to reconnect with my peers from high school. The rough edges of my high school experience have been sanded down by time, maturity, and perspective.

Through Facebook, I was asked just month’s ago by a high school buddy where I went after our sophomore year.  (He obviously looked through our old yearbooks.)  I told him I didn’t go anywhere.  I told him I was just left out of the last two yearbooks and that I graduated along with everyone else.

I spent a long time living on the edges of my own life.  In high school, I was reluctant to stand out, speak up, and announce myself.  That made me a typical teenager.  Declaring my presence in a crowded high school was far from desirable.  But being left out of experience altogether is not what I had in mind.

Thank God for time.  Thank God for the perspective and the understanding that comes with growing older.

Thank God for healing.