By the time I entered high school (if you can call it that), I was no longer who I was.
I should clarify that: I had learned how to pretend to be who I needed to to be in order to fit in long enough to finish my homeschool curriculum and get the hell out. To outside observers in our church, I was the Homeschool Poster Child. While many others among my small peer group would go on to become failures in our homeschooling community--for example, out of my group of friends, three of them would go on to become 1) pregnant at 13, 2) convicted of manslaughter, and 3) a runaway at 16--I was considered a success, in spite of being merely a female. I stayed out of trouble, went to every church service, and avoided all appearances of evil. I raced through the four years of high school curriculum in two years by working through the summers, and my parents, with the assistance of our church, typed up a transcript and pressed a gold seal onto it. To me, it carried about as much significance as a gold star on a chore chart. But it was enough.
My SAT scores were impressive in spite of my inadequate academic background. I know now that I'm simply good at standardized tests. I remember going to a high school in the nearby city on that Saturday morning, terrified and overwhelmed, sitting in a room with hundreds of other teenagers, slogging our way through the verbal and quantitative sections. At 15, I was among the youngest there, and was completely overwhelmed by the crowds and noise and confusing maze of hallways. I somehow managed to pull off scores in the 95th percentile, and soon I had full scholarship offers from two nearby religious colleges. But I knew when I visited the schools that I could not in good conscience accept their offers. One school was a very conservative Baptist college that required chapel attendance, prohibited female students from wearing shorts on campus, and had curfews and restrictions on leaving campus without parental permission. Um, no, I had had enough of that already. The second school was more liberal and I probably could have been happy there, but I was feeling the pull of the large state school just down the highway. I knew I could be a nobody there; I could be lost in the crowds and feel safe in my invisibility.
So to everyone's dismay, I turned down the scholarships and elected instead to attend the local community college with plans to eventually transfer to a four-year university. Back in the Nineties, it was difficult if not impossible to enter a traditional four-year institution with only a homeschooling diploma, so going to a community college first was my only option. Since my parents had not planned on my going to college, they did not contribute to my expenses and refused to complete the necessary financial aid applications that would have allowed me to borrow student loans. I realized I would have to work to put myself through school, and I resolved to do so.
Unfortunately, since I was only 16, I could not move out and live in my own place. I wasn't old enough to sign a lease on an apartment, and my school, like most community colleges, didn't have on-campus housing. So I was stuck still at home, working almost full-time and going to college while just barely old enough to drive by myself. I finally had my first tastes of freedom, though, and it was at once exhilarating and terrifying. When my parents tried to forbid me from taking classes in psychology or philosophy (because humanism and secularism were corrupting influences), I took the classes anyway. I was paying for it, they could no longer tyrannize my life, and I was giddy with each bit of hard-won independence. The terror came later, as I realized that although I was out of the homeschooling and fundamentalist world, I could never be truly free from it.
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