When I was in high school we lost my stepfather to lung cancer. He was sick for a full 2 years and passed away right before my sophomore year midterms. That experience is still so vivid in my memory that it overshadows and colors a great deal of my high school experience. It made me awkward and quiet for the first 2 years of high school, a 180 from the boisterous kid I had been. And not an advantage when I switched from public to Catholic school for 9th grade and knew absolutely no one. I disappeared almost entirely into an obsession with movies to avoid thinking about death and my own mortality every single day. Kids were mean. I was withdrawn. Guidance counselors wanted to talk about it, and I found myself inventing feelings about the situation to make them feel better, to give them a problem they could solve to soothe their extremely kind and earnest need to help me process the experience. I felt empathy for them because they so wanted to fix it.

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