I was seventeen when I moved out of my foster home. My foster family was out of the country on vacation, and my Junior year was about to begin. I was left in the care of my older foster sister, who I often felt wanted my downfall and didn’t do much caring for while the parents were away.
With no one to push me to go to school and wanting to spend all my free time with my then-boyfriend, I often found myself skipping school; a habit I picked up at the end of my Sophomore year. It started with leaving the last few periods of the school day, but by the time I reached Junior year, it turned into full-on skipping school to spend the day with him at his house. Young and naïve, the love I felt towards him had turned into a drug I had quickly become addicted to.
So the day he told me he was moving an hour away, my heart had shattered into a million pieces. I couldn’t breathe at the thought of not having the means to see him. Though I had a part-time job at the time, I didn’t know how to drive, and while we spoke about how we would make it work, I couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to see him to the extent I had been.
I don’t recall how it came to be, but eventually, the conversation turned from how we would make it work to me moving with him. In my adolescent head, that made perfect sense. Aside from my brother, I lived with a family that wasn’t my own and felt I didn’t belong.
This was solidified when I approached my foster father about the boyfriend moving, and he asked me if I was going with him. If he cared that I was leaving, he didn’t show it, and so I rationalized that where I belonged was with my boyfriend.
Like most teenagers, I didn’t feel supported by my parents. They didn’t seem to understand me nor care to want to try to understand me. Then, trauma-informed care wasn’t as prevalent as it is now, so they received no training on how to raise children with significant trauma, let alone teenagers.
There was often arguing and bickering to the point where mean things would be said, and the silent treatment was the method of coping. It was an incredibly strict household, having stemmed from the foundational rules set by foster care and my foster father’s beliefs.
Often, I felt judged for not knowing how to do something I had never been taught and was constantly walking on eggshells, afraid to say the wrong thing that would ignite a war in the home. It was purely toxic due to the amount of unprocessed trauma that lived in each member of the household.
The hardest part was leaving my brother, who had gone through everything with me. He was incredibly supportive when we discussed how this was the best decision for me to make anything of myself due to the toxicity within the home.
It’s interesting to look back on now as an adult how I thought that leaving home, dropping out of high school, and moving in with a boy was going to make my life better.
I wasn’t supposed to drop out of high school. I was supposed to transfer to the school where I was moving to, but I needed physicals and records that I wasn’t allowed to get because I wasn’t of age. I was never able to register for the new school and eventually just fell through the cracks, so I started working full-time at the job I was able to transfer to.
In the time I was there, which wasn’t long, I never did anything to better myself. Like a lost puppy, I followed the boyfriend where he went, which ultimately led us to move back to our hometown under the condition that we finished school in some capacity.
I couldn’t bring myself to go back to traditional high school in the year that all my friends were graduating, so I chose to go to night school, where the following year, I would graduate. As ashamed as I was of the route that I had taken, I was incredibly proud that I had managed to obtain my high school diploma.
At this point, I was 19, back to living my life as though I were an adult, just like I had done in my childhood, even though I knew nothing about being an adult.
It’s interesting because until recently, I have always had anxiety-provoking dreams about being thrust back into high school and unable to open my locker. Because I couldn’t open my locker, it hindered me from being able to get the books I needed for the classes I was going to and caused me to have a full-on panic and miss the class.
Most recently, I dreamt that I could finally get into my locker, but I was still skipping classes due to a lack of time management. I have no idea why dreams about high school still haunt me.
Could it be the regret of dropping out? I’ll never know where I would’ve ended up had I just stayed the course. But also, since that road would’ve been different than the one I took, it wouldn’t have led me to where I am or the me I am now.
