Hello again.
Happy you have stuck around long enough to hear Pt. 2 of My Story. As I said in the last post, I have found it pretty difficult to write about parts of myself that I have left behind. I still find it important to share, so that’s why I continue to write… Let’s get started.
Where did we leave off? Oh yes, 8th grade right after getting kicked out of Student Council for “questioning” authority.
High school was rough. A lot of people loved high school and they say “it was the best years of their life.” I would politely disagree and then throw up in my purse. I don’t care who you are high school is a difficult time. I was finding out where I fit in, trying to find the right friends, and spent a lot of time trying to be someone I wasn’t.
Let me start by saying GIRLS ARE MEAN IN HIGH SCHOOL and I wasn’t the exception.
I don’t remember a lot about freshman year. I remember homecoming and cheerleading (yes, I was a cheerleader… see picture below for proof). I remember taking a lot of mirror selfies and passing a lot of cheesy notes to my friends. I had good friends my freshman year. All of us were pretty civil with one another but as high school went on friends changed and there was always some sort of drama.
Sophomore year is when things got difficult. Not just in my social life but mentally it was difficult to keep up with all the things going on in my head.
For some reason sophomore year I decided I needed to lose a lot of weight. I didn’t really vocalize this to anyone but I knew I wanted to lose 20 pounds (I specifically remember this number). I didn’t want to stop until I lost the weight. I did what any normal person would do and I stopped eating (for the record this is not normal).
I didn’t eat breakfast all throughout high school so that was pretty normal across the board but during lunch I would buy a Blue Gatorade and MAYBE a bagel. Sometimes I would pack my lunch but even then it was cucumbers and a yogurt. After school I would get a diet coke and cheeseburger from McDonald’s. I thought this was okay to eat since I didn’t eat anything for majority of the day. For dinner most nights I would either skip out or eat way less than I should’ve been eating. I thought I was obese, fat, and gross. I was a sophomore and high school and I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t really have 20 pounds to lose but I went from 150 pounds to 130 in a pretty short time period. I’m not saying I was anorexic but my relationship with food wasn’t a good one.
I remember the exact say I noticed I had lost weight. I was wearing pink running shorts we had gotten from cheer, a blank tank, and Nike socks. I was going outside to run before track and someone looked at me and said “Wow Mack you look so good!” I looked at myself in the mirror and I remember thinking I did actually look good. That didn’t last long. I never really liked what I saw, I never really liked my body, I always thought of myself as the “fat one.”
I look back now and I realize a lot of comments that were made about me probably stuck somewhere in my head and made me over think the body I had. I remember sitting in the gym one day during an all school Mass and I looked back and the guys were laughing at me for how I looked in my Khakis. I was called Kankles by a lot of people, as a joke of course, but I figure somewhere that stuck with me. I fell asleep one day in spanish while we were watching a movie and woke up with everyone laughing at me. My “friend” told me that were laughing at my stomach. My shirt was caught on the desk and my belly was hanging out. The next day I told my “friend” I wanted to lose weight and look like another girl at our school, this other girl looked very fit. I remember this moment perfectly… she looked at me and said “You will NEVER be able to be as skinny as any of those girls, your body just was made to be bigger, you won’t ever be skinny Mackenzie.” I didn’t really think much about it at the time, I actually think I agreed.
I was so young and so wrong and I don’t blame anyone for my negative body image, I just think as women we need to do a better job at educating young women on nutrition and self-love.
My body image issues were bad in high school but when I write my college story we will dig deeper into the issues I faced with gaining weight in college and having obsessive eating habits. Let’s dig a little deeper into relationships I made in high school.
Now I want to focus more on the relationships I made throughout high school and how my “I don’t give a sh*t” attitude made me a person I wasn’t proud of.
I was a pretty mean person. I spoke my mind not thinking of how it would affect others, I gossiped, I started drama, and I made fun of people where it hurt them most. I know how to get under people’s skin and I wasn’t afraid to do so when I was this age. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the only girl like this. My friend group and the cliques in my class, were pretty vicious. I look back and I realize all the hurtful things we said and did to each other. We were all just trying to stay afloat.
I was also in an awful relationship at the time. AWFUL. My friends would tell me 100 million times I was stupid for staying with him. I wish I would’ve listened but I was a young girl thinking I wasn’t good enough for anything else. I got cheated on, yelled at, and taken for granted. I continually went back to him after he would ignore me for weeks. My senior year (yes, I was still with him) he actually went to homecoming with someone else, I was a wreck. I also didn’t think I was good enough for him, pretty enough, skinny enough. I wont act like I wasnt petty in the relationship either, I had my fair share of crazy going on. I was manipulative, jealous, and mean… maybe not always to him but to the girls he cheated on me with (yes more than one). Those girls didn’t really deserve my wrath and neither did their friends but somehow it was always their fault and never his. I think its safe to say how blind I was in that situation. My relationship with him ruined a lot of relationships with other people. Not only did it ruin relationships, but I was also seen as the “crazy girl” and honestly I think a lot of parents didn’t want their kids hanging around me. I really don’t think I deserved that reputation but I won’t sit and tell you I was perfect.
Now let’s talk about my delinquent side….
I was kind of an asshole to teachers. My freshman year I had to copy an entire Martin Luther King Jr. book by hand in history class for asking stupid questions THEN (here’s the kicker…) I got in trouble for calling that same teacher a d*ck in another class. I spent a lot of time in the principles office.
I got caught cheating on a physics test and told my teacher I was actually just updating twitter. I was kicked out of spanish III for giving one of my friends the bird. You know… it might be easier to make this in list form.
- Pulled into the office for skipping St. Joseph’s the Workers Day and getting donuts instead. When I told on another kid the principle said she would pull out my file to compare and that shut me up.
- Told an authority he was f*cking stupid (won’t name the position) I do think this was deserved though… I can explain later.
- I pulled down a fire escape plan and I got told on, sent to the principles, and had to explain why I “wasn’t into fire safety.”
- Made a list of girls I didn’t like and what I didn’t like about them (LOW POINT IN MY LIFE OK).
- I got pulled over the cops at 2 am one night and got busted for curfew (I really wasn’t doing anything bad here just driving to put syrup in someones mailbox).
- Other various times I got pulled into the office and I can’t remember.
I’m not writing this list because I’m proud of any of it, quite the opposite actually. But I do know I have grown up and grown into a person I am proud of and that’s why I feel comfortable writing about it.
I knew I was different in high school. I would say I was dealing with anxiety and depression throughout most of my high school career. I didn’t understand why I thought different from other people, talked back, or got in trouble all of the time. I didn’t even realize I was dealing with anxiety, I thought everyone went through the same emotions and it was just normal for my age. In college I pinpointed the cause of a lot of these issues and it was nice to hear I wasn’t crazy I just had a brain that worked overtime ALL THE TIME.
It scares me everyday that my sisters have to deal with similar things. Not that their experiences will be anything like mine but I know kids are dumb and say hurtful things without thinking. Like I said earlier, high school is rough. You have to find people who help you through and believe in what you are and what you do. I had a couple really great teachers that always believed in me as a person and saw past the attitude and walls I put up. I am grateful for their help, encouragement, and understanding.
I don’t think I would ever go back and do high school over. High school made me who I am today. If I did anything over, it would be to apologize to people I was mean to and relationships I broke. I was stupid and didn’t mean any of it. I am happy that I can look back and say that I have grown as a person since then. High school is a scary place and I made it though and I am proud of myself for that.
Next Monday I will talk about college and bring you to the part of my story I am living now. Thanks for reading and have a great week everyone!
Macksimum Capacity 