A couple days ago I was with my mom and brother and she started talking about how she would check my grades in high school every day to make sure I wasn’t “gaming the system” by only doing enough to get a B in all my AP/honors classes she pushed me toward. As I started to recall all the pressure I was under to succeed for a future I couldn’t comprehend and had no plans of my own for, and the isolation I felt at home because I hadn’t been allowed to get out of the house myself before high school and why would that change, I started dissociating in her kitchen. Then I realized that’s what I would do in high school as well, and recognized the same “human simulator” layered on top of that. Now that I’ve had a decade away from all that to actually figure myself out to some degree I’m realizing I have a whole bunch of repressed stuff from that time that I should probably process. It’s lame.