An Open Letter for Back to School…

I get it.

I feel that specific back-to-school dread in my body every year when August rolls around. Some ghosts leave their little fingerprints.

If you’re like me, there is a distinct kind of knot in your stomach this time of year. Or maybe it’s a lump in your throat, an unsettling fluttering in your chest, a general nervousness? For me, it’s that knot, though, and it feels like dread, like fear, like anxiety, like maybe there’s a small voice of hope in there, but mainly it feels like foreboding doom.

The back-to-school time when I was growing up was very different: We did not have long lists of supplies and it certainly didn’t start in July. School started after Labor Day and our supplies were very basic compared to today; I’m pretty sure we didn’t work off an actual list. I just know we bought some pencils, Mead notebooks, binders, glue and not much else. It is a fuzzy cluster of memories but the feeling of dread is something I can remember very distinctly, something I recall viscerally — literally — every year around this time. Vestigial echoes of that dread reemerge when I see the back-to-school displays set up; I have to consciously remind myself that I am safe now but the feeling of doom still bobs around inside me.

Before fifth grade, I actually enjoyed going back to school. I had been a pretty happy, charmed kid up until then. I had friends on my block, in my classrooms and grade. I never worried about finding a table to eat at during lunch or being picked for a team in gym; I always had a bus buddy on field trips. I got along with everyone. That ended in a fairly abrupt fashion in fifth grade. I can’t attribute my loss in status to any single event except, of all things, a lice outbreak, one in which I didn’t even get lice in but that little fact didn’t matter. It could have happened over anything but the lice outbreak was most convenient.

Before the outbreak ever happened, though, it was clear that tectonic plates had started shifting. I could feel it the first day of school when I walked into Mr. Zanheiser’s fifth grade classroom. Things were different. In fifth grade, kids started becoming more self-conscious and aware that middle school was looming, a middle school where my elementary school and a bunch of others would feed into a single building…