STEAL MY LIFE by DeAnn Louise Daigle

Steeling away my life began to steal my life away, I recognized when I was sixteen going on seventeen. It was late spring of my junior year in high school and certain ones of about one hundred and eight of us in our graduating high school class were chosen to be coupled boy-girl and photographed for our Senior-Year Year Book.

My best friend Linda was a math whiz and so was chosen with another equally math-whiz person to be Mr. and Miss Slide Rule, and so went the categories; Mr. and Miss Personality; Mr. and Miss Athlete and I was chosen as Miss Shy along with my equally shy partner. It was all too too embarrassing, too too humiliating but there was no way out. We were coupled and posed with one another – and photographed for the year book. What made it even more cruel for me was that I towered above my partner, so we were made to be looking out from behind the auditorium door as if hiding.

How true this was; I had wanted to be invisible up to my senior year in high school. And I probably would have continued that way except that this event so infuriated me that I then and there – after the photo session, resolved never to be called shy again. I had so steeled myself from interaction and life in high school that I all but disappeared. In the lunch line one day in my junior year at Presque Isle High, a couple of girls I was talking with briefly said to me, “You’re the new girl, right?” I had started later after the potato harvest season was over my freshman year, but that meant instead of starting school in late August, I had joined the freshman class in late September and had been there all along. Mom, Dad and I had moved from Soldier Pond to Presque Isle during the harvest break in 1962 when I was thirteen. It had been traumatic, but I was relieved on some level. I wanted to make a new start. No one knew my Dad here; no one knew he drank; I could hold my head up here.

But, Dad had taken part-time jobs first in the shoe store on Main Street, then at the local pool hall, also on Main Street. And some of the kids began to know who he was, and he did drink – even though he wasn’t going to. We really didn’t know he had a disease back then. We thought by will, he could stop his behavior. I became embarrassed again and very shy and withdrawn. Writing was my salvation. I took refuge there, but criticism devastated me and I couldn’t even do that right, it seemed. How I managed to pull off being a B student at the end of four years is a sheer miracle.

I was enrolled in the college prep program. How ever did that happen? I guess, my father’s brother, Uncle Leo, was behind that. He would have wanted me to aim for college and Mom and Dad too, even though we could hardly have afforded it.

More importantly, however, was my realization that I had let those years be stolen from me because I so protected myself from being hurt. Linda was the only one I shared my poems and writings with and she played the piano for me after school. Her Mom always had treats for us after school – a brownie or some kind of sweet and a glass of milk. I preferred water. We would laugh and just enjoy one another, and that saved me. Linda helped me with algebra I and II and then geometry; although I had less difficulty with geometry.

I would remain shy during and after my senior year in high school, but never in the same way. The steel door had been taken down. Life became an adventure and I refused to go back to being paralyzed.

That day, after being photographed, I went to the girls room, whipped out my hair brush just like everybody else and began brushing my hair and fixing my makeup. I had never done this before. I waited until no one was there and then I’d bush my hair and put on my lipstick. I couldn’t pee either when anyone else was in the bathroom. I’d sit in the stall and wait until everyone had left and then I’d pee. I’d been like that for years. That day, I was so furious for having been posed with poor shy Brian, who hardly said two words to me for three full years when we had English class together. And I towered over him and we were both labeled shy – something a shy person never wants. The whole jig is to be invisible; not be brought to light. But the jig was up!

This anger I felt was probably my saving grace. I peed and it felt so good!