Blog #4 - Acceptance

    When I entered high school, I was struggling in a lot of ways. Socially, I was behind most other kids because of at the time unrealized neurodivergencies, I was struggling with my grades for the same reasons, and I was (and still kind of am) experiencing a gender crisis. I really did not know who I was or what I wanted to be, and going into high school was an opportunity for me to hit the reset button at a new place with new people. 

   It really is hard for me to describe what Arts at the Capitol Theater Magnet High School is like. It's a very unique experience both in terms of curriculum- having all the basic building blocks of education effectively entirely abandoned and replaced with arts that aren't all that well taught either- as well as culturally, transitioning from a school where slurs for queer people were pretty regular and 9 times out of ten you wouldn't know a given student in the hallway, to being in wildly queer dominant space where everyone knew your name and the entire student body was smaller than my own grade in middle school. It absolutely had its issues, and I don't shy away from that when talking about my experiences there. But despite it all, ACT really did make me the person I am today. It allowed me to feel comfortable and exploring and experimenting with my identity in ways that I have never felt free to do before or since, and it helped me to make connections with people that have continued to support me and foster a community of acceptance even post graduation. At no other school, do I think I would be a popular kid. I'm very friendly, and I like to think decently socially adjusted now, but I definitely still struggle sometimes with social cues and the like, and I don't think I have the mental equipment to keep up with neurotypical socialization on as fast-paced a level as I would like. But at ACT, none of that seemed to matter. My freshman year, I was accepted as another weirdo and was welcomed with open arms into a community of people that seemed to get me, and by my senior year, I had grown confident enough that I was considered popular, and I even won both student council president and prom king that year. I don't think there's any other space where that would be possible, and I'm eternally grateful for ACT giving me a community that was willing to take in someone like me and give me that experience. 

    I could spend a very long time gushing about some of the great things ACT did, just as I could spend a long time ranting about all the ways it failed me and a lot of other students (mostly academically), but for better or for worse, I wouldn't trade my experiences and the friends I found there for the world. 

    For my connection this week, I'd weirdly enough like to cite the Percy Jackson books. That feels very out of left field, but if you've read the books and gotten to see the community in them between the members of Camp Half-Blood, it's the closest thing I can equate to my community experience at ACT. I grew up on those books and spent a very long time looking for my own Camp Half-Blood, and was lucky enough to find it in high school. Also, they're very good books and if you're someone who had a lot of trouble with school or social skills or neurodivergency growing up I think you'll find a lot of it fairly cathartic, I highly recommend them.