Leaving for boarding school was one of the hardest moments of my life. The unexplainable feeling of leaving everything behind that provided me with the comfort and warmth of home to go somewhere where I had no idea what was ahead of me was very scary. I was going to start from scratch with no friends and nobody to trust. It was going to be a challenge for me, and I realised quickly that I had very ambivalent feelings for going away to school. Although I tried to look positively at the situation by telling myself that it would be exciting and a new experience, as the end of summer was closing in, I began to have less and less confidence and even became frightened at the thought of leaving Hinsdale and losing the identity that my family and friends had given me. Although my anxiety was quickly interrupted as summer came to an abrupt hault, and I said my goodbyes as I left Hinsdale for my first day at Lake Forest Academy.
The first week of school was torture. I had heard that Lake Forest Academy moved at an accelerated pace, but I was having a difficult time in most of my classes. We were studying cell reproduction in biology when I didn’t even understand the basic cell structure. In english we were reading Hamlet and I wasn’t able understand a single word. And even in geometry we had started equations for spheres and I didn’t even know the equation for a circle. In my dorm, I became deathly afraid of my dorm master, Mr. McGee, who was also the weight room supervisor. He was built like an ox. Even the strongest varsity football lineman couldn’t bench press nearly as much as Mr. McGee. When he shook my hand I could feel my bones grinding against eachother under his death grip, and when he knocked on my door to check me in for curfew I waited to see if he would punch a whole through the door. On top of my intimidating dorm master though, I had only made one friend in our dorm of t...