This post is a response to today’s WordPress writing prompt:
Describe something you learned in high school.

Back in high school, I didn’t understand I could find my own way, and decided to bail even though I was a straight A student. It probably doesn’t help that I score 10/10 for adverse childhood experiences (ACE). But that’s another story. Needless to say, I left school and home very young. Instead of going to high school, I traveled the country.

During those teen travel years, I learned hard truths through trial and error. I relied on the kindness of strangers, and realized that not all friends will respect you in the end. Some may even rob you. Or burn your journals and destroy your CD collection. When I was 16, I survived homelessness and found Food Not Bombs, which taught me about affordable vegetarian cooking: something I still use to this day. Back then, I learned that real education comes through experience, through exchanging ideas and putting them into practice. Living outside the system so young taught me more than any school ever could. It was in those moments of discovery on strange city streets; in anarchist, music, and performance art collectives; and in true independence that I found my core self.

I’d pack a few bags, mail all my books and music ahead to my new destination, hop on a Greyhound bus and land somewhere I had a friend, get a dishwashing job or something in food or retail, and search for local likeminded artists, writers, and musicians. I did this from age 15 to 19 and lived in Indianapolis; Portland, Oregon; Tempe, Arizona; North Chicago; St. Louis; and back to Palm Beach County, Florida a few times. It was Portland, Oregon that was my home longer than anywhere else I have lived.

Most people don’t know this about me, but even though I have an A.A., a B.A., an APR, and will soon have an M.A., I didn’t finish high school. I dropped out a few weeks into 10th grade. And I didn’t get my diploma until I was 28 years old, through my original high school’s GED program.

I share this because what I learned in high school was that I didn’t fit into institutionalized education. I still don’t, but I have found my own way in higher ed, and it’s not been easy to go against the grain there, either. My experimental style tends to land best with the more revolutionary minded professors. The rest tend to try and mold me in their image, but it never works out. In turn, I try to remind them difference should be celebrated, including when it comes to academic style. I don’t know if they really ever get the message since they’re so myopic. My unconventional and nonconformist approach to academia and writing is why I am so interested in autotheory.

I didn’t graduate high school in the traditional sense. I graduated from anarcho-punk and experimental avant-garde collectives across the country and connecting with people trying to impel social change with their art. That was my education. And even now, after earning degrees, I carry that lesson: institutional learning wasn’t built for dissenters like me. But just like in high school, I refuse to be reshaped. I refuse to fit a mold never meant for free expression and deeper perspective.

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Like this post? Please check out the rest of the series:

• Witness & Resist: An Open Letter to Assata Shakur, an Ex-Political Prisoner of the U.S. in Exile
• Witness & Resist: Refusing Erasure Under Institutionalized Censorship
• To Bear Witness is To Resist