Hi Shannon,
Sure, I'll bite. I'm not exactly sure how the educational system works down there, but up here, high school happens to you (to put it mildly) between the ages of 13 and 17.
I wouldn't say I was a loser in high school; I did have some friends and wasn't as withdrawn as I was in grade school. Mostly, people (especially the "beautiful people") didn't know what to make of me. So they usually approached me very warily; I rarely approached anyone on my own--it's as though I felt I didn't need anyone really. (Hey, you condition yourself to be alone, it tends to stick with you for quite some years... )
A big difficulty for me (and my little brother went through exactly the same thing--I was fiercely protective of him) is that, in grade school, I never really made any friends, and the few that I had were all anglophones (that's how we usually refer to English speakers up here). I was only 5 or 6 when we moved to Montreal from Ontario, where most people speak English. The result of all this being that, in my first year of high school, I was awash in a sea of francophones. Even though we spoke French also, my little bro and I often took beatings for being "blokes" and "squareheads." Not conducive to the desire to be welcomed into the "in crowd," I swear. So I remained aloof, and I trace my strong stoic streak to those days.
While most around me were preoccupied with the opposite sex, recreational drugs, beer, and tiny, everyday rebellions, I busied myself reading psychiatry textbooks, gazing at the stars (my father had bought me a telescope), criss-crossing the Old Port on solitary walks, drawing and writing, and, oh yeah, crossdressing in secret. Did I fit in? Not on your life! Was I an outcast? No, not that either.
You're right, Shannon, when you say that much of what we go through at that time affects who we are today. The one link I see most clearly is my ability to feel comfortable with, well, with anyone, really. During my last couple of years in high school, and though I rarely approached others, I became the "accepting friend and confidante" of many people, from the popular girls, who felt I wasn't a threat to them and needed to vent their frustration at not being
seen for who they were, to the erstwhile bullies who used to beat me up and were now discovering I wasn't a bad sort after all, never stooled on them, never complained, never let their antics bother me. This "openness without reaching" I exhibited in those years had many people puzzled and ill at ease in my presence. They couldn't peg me--and I didn't care one way or the other.
That still holds true today; I've spent the better part of three hours on a downtown street with "Eddie," a local homeless man (formerly an architect for a Toronto firm), listening to him read the latest chapter from the "novel" he was currently writing in his tattered notebook only to then grab a cab and go meet with the top brass of the company I worked for at the time--and feel entirely relaxed and at my complete ease in both instances. This ability I picked up in high school, and I'm very thankful for it; it's opened many doors and allowed me to discover many different people in my life that I perhaps wouldn't have, otherwise. In other words, high school taught me, not just biology, history, or algebra, but simply that human is human.
Maybe it wasn't so much high school experiences that taught me this as the fact that those were the years in my life where I so much needed someone to love and understand and accept me--so much so that I couldn't even consider wanting those things for myself without being willing to give them back in return. There were many painful experiences in high school (in more ways than one); and I do believe the sages have it right when they say that suffering always has something to teach us about the need to be compassionate and sympathetic to the plight of others. I was always laughed at for trying to defend nerds, wimps, and underdogs (that is, when it wasn't me against six schoolyard thugs, despite my size and bulk). Otherwise, as I've said, I usually remained, well, a bit distant.
So, Shannon, to answer your question (and a good one it is--not mean), no, I don't think I was a loser in high school. Not in my own eyes, anyway. I know that, more than likely, many others did. But why would I have let that bother me? They were all Moes (for those of you familiar with the
Calvin & Hobbes comic strip).
Love,
CJ
in school.... 6 feet tall, 115 lbs, totally straight hair, with a bowl cut..... picked last for every team in gym class.... with the personallity of a boiled stick.... 
, interesting post and would like to add my views. I was a loser in high school mostly because I was a loner and to this day hate the 4 years I put in school 
My bodyguards came in handy on more than one occassion. 
