Not What It Looks Like

In the last week, I have had several different people ask me about what year I graduated high school. This probably shouldn't be a difficult or stressful question, but for me it is. First of all, I didn't officially graduate from high school, which sounds bad enough. Second, I am nearly two years older than everyone I would have graduated with. There is a whole complicated reason for all of this, which I always feel the need to explain, but then I realized how long it would take to do that, so I don't. Which, in all likelihood, leaves the person with the assumption that I flunked twice and then dropped out. Normally, I don't give a shit what people think about me, but I hate the idea of people thinking I'm stupid.

I don't know how many of you know this, but I was homeschooled as a kid. Back then, there was this rule that required parents to have four more years of education than the kid they were homeschooling. This means that, in order to homeschool the kid all the way through high school, the parent would have had to graduate from college, which neither of mine had. At that point, my parents had no intention of ever sending me to school, so they wanted to make sure that I would never have to. The solution was to make sure that, by the time I got to high school, I would be old enough (16) to drop out and take the GED. So they waited until I was six to officially declare me as being in kindergarten. This combined with the fact that my birthday is in December, meant that by the time I did go to school, I was well over a year older than everyone else in my grade.  

Then when I got to my senior year of high school, I decided it just wasn't worth it and I would rather get a job instead. So the official story is that I was homeschooled again during my senior year. What I really did was get a job at J.C. Penney. At the time I thought that none of this would bother me because I would have a college degree, but I ended up bailing on that as well. Still, it's not because I'm dumb, it's just because I get bored easily. I actually got pretty excellent grades the whole way through, I just couldn't tolerate all the bullshit.

I don't want people to think I'm Kiki or something.