I am not inspirational. I am not interesting, nor anything of the sort. I am an average teenager, borderline mediocre. I plan to graduate college and eventually start a family. I'm aware my story will fall into a cluttered file cabinet along with all the others. I light celebratory candles on Oct. 5, and my birth certificate is inscribed with a hospital in Sioux Falls, S.D. The spring after my fourth birthday, without much recognition of the previous years, my family moved to a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa. Johnston was where I would spend the next 12 years of my life.
Generally, I was a happy kid. Always smiling, laughing and like most, I lived in innocence despite the world around me. I was filled with curiosity and a wandering imagination and seemed to have a different mindset than others. I was—and am—short and stocky by heredity. Apparently an easy target for my peers. My awareness of cruelty among my classmates rose along with my grade level. Soon, I wasn't the joyous child my parents had raised through elementary school.
A figurative dark cloud seemed to gradually form over me after the sixth grade. At first, it swirled slowly, and over the years, it drank in my energy. What began as a light drizzle, grew into a raging cyclone.
I dreaded school. The negativity and exclusiveness of a high school hung in the air, thick and dense, suffocating the inhabitants who could not escape it. Cold, sharp looks from the supposedly superior students cut through the hallways and classrooms. Whispers grew into a dull roar of background noise throughout the day, laughter occasionally breaking through before the voices receded again. Far too many of my classmates felt completely alone in a room full of people.
Around November of my freshman year, I scheduled a meeting to talk to my school counselor and principal about transferring schools. I wanted to leave, go anywhere I could to have a new start. I was homesick for somewhere I had never been. I honestly explained to them as well as I could about the way my classmates had been treating each other the past few years, and how hard it had been to ignore day to day. Little did I know that the next few months would bring the regrettable opportunity for the change I had been waiting to see among my peers.
On Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012, one of my close friends committed suicide. The next day, a sophomore also took his own life. These two tragic events had a vast impact on our community and brought us all closer than ever before. Many of us didn’t sleep for days, and we all, for once, put aside our differences and embraced our similarities, telling each other we would always be there for anyone that needed us. The hallways the following Monday were unbearably quiet, a silence that no one has ever heard, and inside each student that passed another, it was becoming quite loud.
Recalling this today, the four-minute passing time between classes builds up to the most disappointing experience I have ever personally witnessed. Once the social network posts of support slowed down and disappeared down the timelines, so did every student’s sympathy and sensitivity towards one another. The same cliques and specific groups of a typical high school were back to normal, and the smiles gradually returned to nearly everyone’s faces. Though devastating enough, the deaths of our students were unsuccessful in changing most students' daily lives.
The summer before my sophomore year, I moved to Spartanburg, S.C. My dad had received a job offer and took the opportunity, along with the chance to move me away from the place I despised most. The same place that taught me that having a house does not make it a home.
In the fall of 2012, I enrolled at Dorman High School. Not knowing where to start on my new journey, I auditioned to be part of the drumline, chorus, dance team and cheerleading squad. After I was told I could only be involved in one, I chose the drumline. I thought I was signing up for a normal extracurricular activity, but I soon found out I had become part of a family.
During the fall, the marching band performs at football games on Friday nights and competes around the state on most Saturdays. We had a camp at the beginning of the summer for one week, and the drumline had almost three weeks at the end of the summer before school starts. These camps are every day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Additionally, we had band as our fourth block class, and the drumline practiced during the school year from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Mondays, and 4 p.m. 6:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the rest of the band. For indoor drumline, in the winter, we had two 12-hour camps throughout the season, and three-hour practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, four-hour sessions on Fridays before competitions, and we would spend entire Saturdays competing. The drumline also traveled to Dayton, Ohio, for WGI World Championships for a week in April. This was absolutely exhausting, and a huge change of pace for me—but I loved every minute of it. For three years, I spent more time at school than I did with my own family.
Being one of few girls, there were now 15 brothers that I marched with. They would come to my house for "family dinner" to eat my mom's spaghetti, swim in my backyard pool or to play video games. They were always there for hugs or advice when I needed them. We truly are a family, and though we may have sometimes fought as one, I am thankful for each and every one of them. I wouldn't trade them for the world.
One of my "brothers," who is a year younger than me, had an older brother who was also in band during my time at Dorman. I will never forget the heart-wrenching flashbacks when I got the call from my mom that the older brother had taken his own life in June 2014. We talk a lot about the drumline being a brotherhood. We are far stronger united than we could ever be divided. There is nothing that will ever be able to exemplify the amount of never ending support we have for each other. At the service, the drumline and its alumni marched in front of the casket to lead it down to the grave site. My parents still talk about how they have seen fewer extraordinary things than the camaraderie they witnessed as we marched over a hill into their sight. Other things may change us, but we will always start and end with family—wherever we may find them.
When I wake up to my alarm each morning, I always have to take a few minutes to think about where I am. Each passing day seems surreal, incredible that I am a graduate of Dorman High School, walking as a student on a college campus I could only dream of, and a resident of a town that four years ago I didn't know existed. A town that had kept me up at night in Johnston, a canvas for my mind to create buildings and houses and people that all combined into an image that seemed just out of my grasp. Too often, my image tried to slip away. It was blurred and smeared by watery eyes, many times being washed away down my cheeks.
Finally, I've caught it. I've clenched it between my fingers until my knuckles turned white. Refusing to let go, I've run with it—and I will never look back.
